Rob Bishop: “I appreciate the gentlelady from Wyoming for being with us and talking about the concepts that are going on and what we…”

“I appreciate the gentlelady from Wyoming for being with us and talking about the concepts that are going on and what we can do for our future. If I could, Mr. Speaker, at the turn of the 20th century, the so- called ``progressive era,'' there was a paradigm shift that took place in the United States in which the government decided to basically keep all of the land. It was based on three premises: The first is that the West had to be protected from itself. The second is that only somebody in Washington, D.C., would have the vision to make decisions that could impact the rest of the Nation, and if there were ever a conflict between what local leaders or local officials wanted and what D.C. wanted, D.C. obviously had the better advantage. The result of that is, as you have heard from the people here today, that our forest system is not as healthy as it used to be or ought to be. The communities that relied upon the timber industry to survive and the school systems in those areas that relied upon the timber industry to survive have been decimated, and our solution as a Congress and as an administration is simply to find a temporary payment to these solutions with actually no revenue source to make them permanent.…”