Political Quotes

“I join with my friend from Idaho as a cosponsor to this bill on endangered species. He and I and others have worked on this for a good long time. Both of us have been on the Committee on Environment and Public Works. We are no longer there, but we started working there. We certainly are excited about the opportunity to bring to the floor some ideas that would deal with this whole notion of endangered species. As the Senator has mentioned, all of us support the idea of continuing to have a program to protect endangered species. That concept is a good one. All of us support that. What we are talking about is a program that would be modernized and reorganized to be able to do that in a more efficient way. We have good evidence that the program as it is, is not working. In a very simple way, what we have had is nearly 1,500 species listed. We have had less than a dozen delisted or put back where we want them. The emphasis has been on the listing, the emphasis has been on lawsuits, and the emphasis has been on disagreements. We should do what we can do to bring together the people who are interested. Whether they are environmentalists, whether they are landowners, whether they are naturalists, whatever, we all have the notion that we want to continue to make this program work, and we believe we have some ways to make it work better. As was mentioned, the law is about 30 years old, so it is time to be updated.…”