Political Quotes

“I would like to spend time this afternoon talking about something I continue to hear about in Wyoming. I heard about it a lot over the past week. I heard about it last night in Sundance, WY. It is the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act became law in 1973. That was 45 years ago. It was a bipartisan vote. The law has resulted in a lot of great work to save species from extinction. We have seen species such as the bald eagle come back from the brink of being almost completely wiped out. That is a great example of what this law was intended to do--to identify species in danger and to help them recover. The problem is that there aren't enough examples like the bald eagle to point to because the goal of the law was to help species get to the point where they no longer needed the protection of the Endangered Species Act. We would put them on the list, they would recover, and then they would come off the list. That was the goal of the bipartisan legislation. That is how it was supposed to work. Let's look at what has actually happened. Since the law was put on the books, Washington has put 2,424 different species of plants and animals on the list. Only 54 have ever come off the list because they actually recovered. That is just 54 species in 45 years. That is less than 3 percent. I am a doctor.…”