Political Quotes

“Madam Chairman, I yield myself the balance of the time. I have to say, the debate on the underlying bill in this amendment I find rather interesting--no, maybe bizarre is better than that. The issue here is whether we should protect the State's responsibility to write water law or allow the Federal Government to extort from private individuals that water. That is what the issue is all about here. He had bipartisan support when the bill was heard in committee, but then it changed for some reason. Now, we have in front of us the Polis amendment, which would very narrowly put this protection only to ski areas and not to everybody else that has private property rights. The consequences if this were to become law--which it is not going to, I am convinced, with this amendment--but the effect of this would be this: okay. Ski areas are protected this year. Next year, it will be a rancher that is abused, so we will come back, and we will write a law to protect the rancher. Next, it will be a water conservation district someplace that will be affected because of the directive, so we will come back and fix that. Then it will be some municipality someplace that will be affected because they don't have water rights because it was extorted by the Federal Government, so we will have a fix for that. Madam Chairman, there is a better way to do that. Let's just simply respect states' rights to regulate water law and to codify that with this language.…”