Elizabeth Furse: “Today, Mr. Speaker, we have a chance to do something that the people of this country have been asking us to do for…”

“Today, Mr. Speaker, we have a chance to do something that the people of this country have been asking us to do for almost a year. We have a chance to fix the infamous lawless logging rider. We will be offering a bipartisan amendment which will be called the Porter-Yates- Furse-Morella amendment. It will go a long way toward fixing that infamous rider. That rider passed with no hearings, no scientific input, in the middle of the night, stuck on another bill, and no one knew the consequences. But soon the people told us the consequences. We heard from grandmothers, Boy Scouts, fishermen, scientists, and local communities. They said the rider had been a disaster, and they were right. Our amendment, Mr. Speaker, it not antilogging, our amendment is prologging under the law. We have been asked to trust a huge Federal bureaucracy to just do the right thing. Trust us, they say. We say, trust the law. So I hope and we hope that my colleagues will help support this amendment that will fix the lawless logging rider.”