Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes. This bill is actually extremely poorly drafted. It assumes basic things. But if, for instance, as we said, the royalties don't show up as we are anticipating, we don't have that $1 billion to buy more land. How do you solve that? Do you prorate that money? Do you take it from other sources? Do you put this mandatory spending above other mandatory spending, like Social Security? CRS said those are good questions, and they don't know because this bill is silent on all those questions. It says the President is supposed to come up with $900 million of projects. What if he only comes up with $800 million? Who gets that extra $100 million? Does that go to the Department of the Interior? Is that a slush fund? Once again, CRS said, Good questions, and no one knows because this bill is silent on those types of questions. BLM has no idea of how much money they have spent on this program or where the land is. The State portion is actually--they are okay because they are a percentage. But this is talking about a dollar figure. So you are going to hear a lot of platitudes, but somebody, at some time, has got to say how this money is going to actually be funded. To help us with that, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry), a longtime member of this legislature, who can address those things.”