Greg Walden: “It absolutely is one of those issues. When Republicans were in control of this assembly, and I am sorry to sound…”

“It absolutely is one of those issues. When Republicans were in control of this assembly, and I am sorry to sound partisan on this, but it is just the way it is in the clash of philosophies on this particular issue, while we had some bipartisan help, I chaired the Forestry Subcommittee in the House Resources Committee. We held hearing after hearing after hearing on these issues. We marked up and passed legislation, some of which made it all the way into law, some of which was bipartisan and passed this assembly. But unfortunately, today, the Speaker of the House, the majority leader of the House, the Democratic caucus chair, the Natural Resources Committee chair and the Rules Committee chairwoman all voted against, for example, the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, which did become law, which allowed some thinning of our forest, not as much as I would like to see but helped streamline it. The whole leadership of this Democrat Congress voted against that in the House. So it makes it almost impossible to go to the next step to help stop these wild fires from ravaging our forests, to get to commonsense management of our timber. I want to show an example here of a fire that occurred in my district. This is the example of the Eggley fire. The Eggley fire burned about 140,000 acres of America's grasslands and forest lands out in Harney County, 140,000 acres. Do you see the devastation?”