Political Quotes

“We had the Secretary of the Interior up in Montana. In the upper Missouri, which was designated as a national monument, I tell my good friend from Illinois, we asked the Secretary, No. 1, to find the gas well and then find the pipeline that carried the gas from the wellhead into the main pipeline. He could not find it. He could not find either one of them--he tried by air and by land--until we showed him where they were. What I am saying is we should consider the new technologies and how we regard our lands, especially the big open lands. I am not talking about a monument such as The Mall; I am talking about land that is in bigger country that is very seldom ever walked upon by the people who probably own the grazing lease. We still allow grazing in national monuments. Very seldom are those lands ever walked on by anybody else. We have an area in Montana that is going to demand some more attention in the next 2 or 3 years because it is along the Missouri River and that was the route of Louis and Clark. Of course, this will be the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, and the trek of Louis and Clark will draw a little more attention to that area. But tell me why we would completely close out the possibility, even under emergency conditions, in areas where we could develop that energy--and especially natural gas, which is the cleanest of all energy that is coming from the fossil fuels we take from the Earth--why we would close out that possibility.”