Lincoln Chafee: “Mr. President, what is wrong with the Hutchison amendment, the second-degree amendment? First of all, it maintains the…”

“Mr. President, what is wrong with the Hutchison amendment, the second-degree amendment? First of all, it maintains the moratorium on final decisions to list species through the end of this fiscal year. Now, Mr. President, let us briefly review the bidding. Last March, the Senate approved a 6-month moratorium, a brief time out on listings under the Endangered Species Act. That was 6 months. That was extended another 5 months under the continuing resolution. Now, under this bill, the moratorium would be extended for another 7 months. That means that for a minimum of 18 months no work will be done toward conserving species that warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act, species threatened with extinction or destruction, and a lot of ground can be lost in a year and a half. Now, Mr. President, the second point is that although the Hutchison second-degree amendment would allow emergency listings --the word ``emergency'' is in there--that is not an adequate or practical way to recover a species. Mr. President, you come up with emergency listing when the situation is really desperate. It is sort of a last-ditch effort to save a species, when the species is about to become extinct either through disease, or destruction by man in some fashion, or the last remnant of the habitat has been wiped out. At this point, Mr. President, there is little hope of recovering the species.”