Don Nickles: “But these are minuscule problems. This is no reason to shut down the Interior Department, national parks, Forest Service…”

“But these are minuscule problems. This is no reason to shut down the Interior Department, national parks, Forest Service and so on, and everything else that is covered by this bill, Indian Health Services--you name it. So, let us try to accommodate. Let us make a couple of concessions. Let us work to resolve some of the problems that are raised in here. It can be done with very few dollars and open up the Interior Department, open up the national parks, open up the Smithsonian, open up the national museums. There is no reason not to. The President should not have vetoed the bill in the first place, but the President is responsible for those parks being closed. Yesterday, or the day before, there was an article in the Post talking about somebody having a concession service adjacent to a park and now they had to let their employees go. Those employees, incidentally, will not be covered by the bill once it passes. They will not be paid. They are not Federal employees; they are contractors. And if they are not contracting with the Federal Government, if they just happen to be doing business adjacent to the Federal Government operation, they are out of luck. Again, I fault President Clinton in this case. I think he made a mistake in vetoing the bill. But for him to say Congress is the reason why those agencies are shut down is not the case, and that is not the case in Interior. It is not the case in other agencies as well.”