On the recordFebruary 16, 2011
In December, I voted for that historic agreement between President Obama and Congress to keep American taxes low and to extend unemployment benefits. Now we are here to debate how to pay for that, and I have an idea about how to help pay for that. My amendment, No. 193, would strike the remaining funding for this 6 months in this year totaling $35 million from the budgets of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the BLM and the Forest Service for the purpose of buying new Federal land. There are many alternatives to buying land with cash that would allow them to continue using Yankee ingenuity, and those include land exchanges. In my own State, we have over half a million acres that have been designated for disposal by Federal agencies because these lands don't fit into good land management, yet there are other lands that these same Federal agencies would like to acquire. They can do exchanges. They can do sales of this land that is designated for disposal and purchase other lands that work better for the fragmented land ownership patterns that we sometimes experience in the West.
