Rob Bishop: “I appreciate very much the gentleman from Arizona. I do enjoy working with him on the subcommittee. And I have to admit…”

“I appreciate very much the gentleman from Arizona. I do enjoy working with him on the subcommittee. And I have to admit, at this stage of the game, I am a little bit perplexed about the amendment. The gentleman purports that the idea of transparency and keeping a database is not a bad idea. He just objects to the enforcement mechanism we put in there. If that were the case, I would wonder why he didn't just strike the enforcement mechanism out or come up with a substitute enforcement mechanism. I am not bound to this particular one. Had there been a date certain or some other ideas, I may even have accepted that as a friendly approach to try to help this particular title. But, instead, the amendment strikes everything. It strikes the very essence of forcing them to actually come up with a database that is there. During the Clinton administration--and that has been a while ago--the Interior Department did come up with a database of lands that were available for disposal, that were needless, that were useless for the government. We have the data. The only problem is it is almost impossible to get to the data. The data is found in books in over 150 different local offices. It would take a huge road trip to try to come up with just the information. This is now 2014. The idea that the BLM cannot actually put this data on a Web site that is available to everybody is, quite frankly, not acceptable. That they are too busy to do this is simply not acceptable.…”