Tom Coburn: “There are a ton of good things in this bill, especially for Western States. I support those things. But this bill steps…”

“There are a ton of good things in this bill, especially for Western States. I support those things. But this bill steps on property rights as much as anything in the 4 years that I have been here. We cannot continue in Washington to decide that we are going to take private property rights away from people, that we are just going to unilaterally do it. Let me give a couple of examples in this bill. We are going to create an American Discovery Trail across the Nation, probably a pretty good idea, and right now it says it is going to be voluntary, or government land. What is going to happen next year, when the voluntary land and the government land is there, and one of my farmers is right in the middle, or one of the farmers in Kansas is right in the middle? What is going to happen? We are going to take their land away from them. It is going to go away, for us to complete the trail. Two-thirds of that land is going to come from private property owners.”