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“ECONOMIC STIMULUS AND SENSIBLE FOREST MANAGEMENT AND LAND USE” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H4862-H4868 on June 3, 2003.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ECONOMIC STIMULUS AND SENSIBLE FOREST MANAGEMENT AND LAND USE
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Burgess). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. McINNIS. Mr. Speaker, I have been waiting now for about an hour, an hour and a half, reading back there and waiting for my turn, and have been witness to this constant pounding by the Democratic side of the aisle, taking cheap shot after cheap shot about the tax cut that, by the way, some of the Democrats supported; but even their leader came over here to take some cheap shots on this tax bill.
I am telling the Members, we have an economy that needs some stimulation. We have got to go out to the people that earn that money. The government does not earn this money. Contrary to what the Democratic leadership would like us to believe, we are not automatically entitled to the workers' monies in this country. This is not a Communist-type of country; this is not a socialistic-type of country, where we take money from people and make sure that no matter who works the hardest, it is of no consequence.
It is distribution of the money that is of consequence in a socialistic country. In other words, everybody is treated absolutely equal. There is no incentive for people to go out and work hard.
It is amazing to me that Democrat after Democrat has been up here at this microphone, and of course there is no time allowed for rebuttal until I now have the microphone. But for the last hour and a half, Democrat after Democrat has stood up here and said, gee, this tax cut did not go far enough. We need to include this group of people, even though they did not pay taxes. We do not want to exactly call it a welfare program, which is what it is. That may be appropriate under certain circumstances.
But all they want to do, they are saying, well, we need to expand it to this particular group of people. And then, mark my word, we may see even yet this evening or tomorrow, we will see them out here talking on the floor being exactly contradictory to that, speaking in a hypothetical-type of approach saying, gosh, look at what the Republicans have done to the deficit. Look at what the Republicans have done to the deficit.
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The fact is the Democratic Party in general has never seen a tax cut that they support. The Democratic Party here as witnessed in the last hour, and I am not attempting here to get up here and engage in a partisan debate, but somebody has to stand up and speak for the other side. Somebody has got to stand up and speak for the moderates and the conservatives for the middle-income families in this country for the people out there that are working.
Remember when you distribute money, when this government takes money and especially when this government takes money and gives that money to people who are not working, that money is simply a transfer. The government does not create wealth. Governments do not create wealth. All they are is an agent of transfer. So when the government gives money, under the Democratic plan gives money to people who are not working, they are taking that money from people who are working.
Now, I know most working people, in fact, almost every working person I have every talked to, they said they think at certain levels it is appropriate to take money from people who are working and give it to people who are not working, for example, I think, for somebody who is physically and mentally disabled to the extent that they cannot be in the workforce. Nobody disagrees that those people should not receive help from society. That is what society is about. That is what team work is about. But that is not what the leadership of the Democratic Party is about.
They constantly want to expand the welfare programs. They constantly want to expand the government programs. And their response to the needs of our society is let the government handle it. When it comes to health care, it is the Democratic leadership that calls about socialized medicine. When it comes to the situation on the international basis, it is the Democratic leadership that talks about a world order. It is the Democratic leadership that talks about giving up our sovereignty to the United Nations. Let the United Nations determine what is best for the United States.
There is clearly a distinction between the Democratic and the Republican parties. A lot of young people that come to me and they ask because they are at that point in their lives because they want to decide, gosh, should I be a Republican or should I be a Democrat. I say, let me explain because there are some clear differences. And the last hour and a half of listening to the Democrats bash these tax reductions as if the people who pay the taxes are not entitled to keep their money, that money is not government money. You can talk to the Democratic leadership until you are blue in the face, and they never get the message. That money did not originate on this House floor. That money originated with an iron worker or a taxi cab worker or a banker or a teacher or somebody in the military. Those are the people that made that money. We did not make that money here. We got the easiest jobs in the world in government. All we do is reach in that pocket and make that decision to transfer the money here. Someone else works for the money. That iron worker out there, for example, makes $25 an hour maybe on a very risky job; and the government reaches into his pocket and takes money out of that pocket and redistributes a portion of that money that that man or woman makes as an iron worker.
Now, we have all agreed in this country that there are certain needs that as a group, as a team, as a United States there are certain needs we should pool our money for and we should redistribute to help some of these, highways, for example, a justice department, a strong military, good schools, a welfare system for those people who really cannot work. Unemployment, not unemployment that last forever, but unemployment as a temporary, temporary assistance for people between jobs to help them get back on their feet.
The easiest way to describe to these young people the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is an example somebody told me once, and they said, with the Democrats when somebody is hungry what they do is the Democrats provide them, and I am focusing on the Democratic leadership, their idea is to give the hungry person fish. And whenever the hungry person is hungry, you give them more fish and give them more fish. Our philosophy on the Republican side is give them some fish at first so they are not hungry, but at the same time give them a fishing pole and say, look, you have got to help catch the fish. You cannot just depend on us showing up and constantly giving you fish and giving you fish.
Now, in the last hour and a half we have heard the Democrats one after another take cheap shots about that tax bill. Let me tell you that tax bill was as a result of a lot of compromise between a lot of moderate people. What you have heard from in the last hour and a half is not what I would say is the mainstream of the Democratic Party. What you have heard from in the last hour and a half is the extreme left. That is what we hear from on the environmental issues. That is what we hear from on the antimilitary issues. That is what we hear from on the pro-United Nations, pro-world order issues. That is what we hear from on the anti-tax cut issues.
We are worried about this economy. We need to stimulate this economy. I say to people, it is like a battery in a car. We got a car we have to climb a hill and the engine went off. We have discovered we have a dead battery. We need to use jumper cables. The Democrats, if you listen to them, they would put, the leadership especially, they would put the jumper cables on the bumper. They would put them on the door handles. And what I say with all due respect to my Democratic colleagues is it does not do us any good to get us moving to put jumper cables on the door handle. It does not do us any good to put jumper cables on the bumper. We need to put these jumper cables on the battery terminals.
I know that the battery is only a small part of the car. This tax cut is a very focused tax cut. What we want to do, and the reason we are saying to the Democrats put the jumper cables on the battery terminals, we are promising the Democrats that if you do that, just go along with us, which, of course, they will not do because they have a Presidential election coming up here in 2 years. That is what the last hour and a half has all been about. It has been about politics. We have asked them put the politics aside and help us. Let us put the jumper cables on the battery terminals. You know what happens if we charge the battery? The whole car will receive the benefit of that charged battery because when the battery is going, the car moves as a unit. The whole car will move up the hill.
We have an economy that is holding its own and I think is going to improve. I am optimistic about it. But it seems to me listening in the last hour and a half that the Democratic leadership will do whatever they can do to make sure that car or that economy does not get moving because they want this economy to be sour for one reason. They want to win the Presidential election in a year and a half from now. That is their whole purpose in this last hour and a half is Presidential politics. It will be their whole purpose for the rest of this session and, unfortunately, for next year's session. Do whatever you can even if it costs the American worker their jobs, even if it costs the American society their economy. Do whatever you can to obstruct George W. Bush. Do whatever you can to blame whatever is going wrong on George W. Bush, because it is all about politics.
I go back every week to my district in Colorado and I make it a point, I do not go down to my district offices. I go out on the road and I go out and talk to people, those people who, frankly, whose money we are taking to finance this government. You know what they want? They are sick of some of this last hour and a half of political cheap shots. They want for you to help us move this economy. Whether you like it or not, the President of the United States happens to be a Republican. But the fact that George W. Bush is a Republican should not stop you, based on that alone, from at least trying to work with us, from trying to help us as a team move this economy forward. There are a lot of people out there whose jobs are dependent on a good economy.
There are a lot of people who you consider rich people. And by the way, time after time after time in the last hour and a half you hear the Democrats talking about the rich people. You know what the leadership of the Democratic Party considers the so-called rich people? That would be even a couple that earns 35, 40, $50,000 a year. There are a lot of couples that work out there, and all the more power to them. That is our society. If you can go out and improve your life, go out and do it. Yet you criticize success and you call rich somebody making 50 or $60,000 a year. That is not rich. Making 50 or $60,000 and a year you go out and buy a car, $25,000, that is a half a year's salary.
What we are trying to do is get an economy that will allow these people to continue to make that kind of money, that will allow these people to reinvest this money. Do you know if you take a look at capital gains, take a look at the economic history which the Democratic leadership is completely ignoring, intentionally, and completely ignoring the economic history of capital gains because they know every time in history without exception, every time in history the government has reduced the capital gains taxation, the economy has received a boost, the economy has seen an uptick.
The last thing the Democratic leadership wants is an uptick in the economy because they want to beat George W. Bush a year from now.
The last thing, and I say this very honestly, the last thing that a lot of Democratic leadership wanted to do was to support President Bush's policies in Iraq and in Afghanistan because they are afraid that he is going to look too good; that, in fact, he is the leader who he is and they want to beat him in a Presidential election a year and a half from now.
It is amazing to me. Every night, night after night after night we do not have some of my colleagues talking about how we can help the economy, how we can work as a team to work with the economy. All we see is night after night after night trying to attack George W. Bush and blame him for everything they can possibly blame him for in hopes of defeating him a year and a half from now.
You know what you ought to do? We all win if the minority leader would come across the aisle and work with us. We all win when the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership work as a team. Where we do not win is where we have gotten a tax cut we put through. It is already in place. It is law. So get over that and try and help us get this economy moving on the Republican side. And, frankly, to the Democratic leadership, I hate to tell you this, but a lot of your Democratic Members happen to agree with the Republicans and that is we want this economy to grow. We are tired of the class warfare argument. We are tired of the political argument that you have continued to throw out, which you have for the last hour and a half.
To the minority leader, there are members of your party who want this economy to improve. There are members of your party, to the minority leader, who want George W. Bush to succeed in his foreign policy. There are people of your party, minority leader, who want George W. Bush to succeed in his economic policies. Why? Because if you jump the battery on the car and you get the battery started, the whole car benefits, the whole car moves forwards.
Sure, you may feel better by putting your jumper cables, minority leader, on the bumper of the car and saying we want to distribute electricity. We want to jump the whole car, make the whole car feel good, distribute it across the whole car. The fact is we are trying to target because we want everybody in that car to benefit. We want it to move forward.
So I plead with the Democratic leadership, get over this, help us come to a better solution, help us move forward. If we have a better economy, we get better schools. If we have a better economy, we get better jobs. If we have a better economy, we get a better life-style. If we have a better economy, we get more people covered with health insurance. I mean, the pluses of a better economy are tremendous. So quit trying to obstruct us every step of the way, simply for the fact that you want to defeat George W. Bush, you want to pull his numbers down in the polls in hopes of defeating him in a Presidential election in a year from now. That is all this last hour and a half has been about, and we deserve better; the American people deserve better.
There is an excellent article today, and I want to talk about this in regards to this economic question that has arisen in the last hour and a half. It is an editorial out of the Wall Street Journal. The new tax bill exempts another 3 million-plus low-income workers from any Federal tax liability whatsoever. Exempt. The new tax bill exempts another 3 million people.
So in the last week when we voted for this tax bill, we exempted an additional 3 million people, the very people that some of my colleagues were talking about, what they say are the working poor or the nonworking people that are not earning money. This exempts 3 million in addition to what we have already exempted from income tax, 3 million low-income workers from any Federal tax liability whatsoever.
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So you would think that the class warfare, the class lawyers would now be pleased, but instead we are all now being treated to their outrage because the law does not go further and cut income taxes for those people that do not pay income taxes.
This is the essence of the uproar over the shape of the child care tax credit. The tax bill the President signed last week increases the per child Federal income tax to $1,000, up from the partially refundable $600 credit passed in the 2001 tax bill.
Let me say to the Democrats, most of the Democrats did not support increasing the child tax care credit for those people who do pay taxes. Instead, today, the leadership appears here on this House floor and supports increasing the child tax credit for the people that do not pay taxes, but they voted against the very bill a week and a half ago that increased it for the people that do pay the taxes. So they are saying, okay, thank you to the working Americans out there, regardless of your income, thank you for working but we are going to vote against an increase so that you can have increased child credit, but by the way, if you did not pay any Federal income tax you may choose not to work, you do not make enough, you do not pay any tax, we are going to let you increase your child credit, and by the way, how would you increase the credit? They do not pay any tax. They do not need the credit. The Democrats include the word ``refundable'' so you actually send tax money to people that did not pay any taxes. They make it refundable, and of course, the only place you can get that money is to take it from the people that do pay the taxes.
Let me skip from here and jump through some of this, but among tax cut opponents it is a political spinning opportunity, and that is exactly what we have seen. It is spin in its purest form in the last 2 hours. Let me go on here and just say, more broadly, that critics, there are lots of things it talks about in the bill, good things like the $10 billion earmarked for Medicaid, the State/Federal health insurance program for the poor.
Look at the money we put in that bill for the States to help the States try and get out of a hole that they have dug themselves into. That bill was a good bill, and yet in a very hypocritical fashion, we have people here talking about, look, the people that ought to benefit from a tax cut bill are the people that are not paying taxes. That is the spin that is going on around here.
More broadly, the critics want everyone to forget how steeply progressive the Tax Code already is. These are very important numbers. These are facts. These are not the kind of facts that the minority leader wants you to hear, but these are facts. These are not made up by the Republican Conference. They are not put together by the Democratic Conference. These are statistical facts.
The IRS data released last year, so they are recent, this is recent data, the top 1 percent of the earners in this country paid 37.4 percent of all Federal income taxes in 2000. The more important number here is, the top 5 percent paid 56 percent. So the top 5 percent of income earners in this country pay 56 percent of the taxes.
I do not have a problem with the progressive tax system. I think this is fine, but let us give credit where credit is due.
The most important thing that I can say right here, and listen to this statistic, the top half of all earners, of all the people, all the earners in America, the top half, the top 50 percent pay 96.1 percent of the tax. We are talking about Federal income taxes, not payroll tax, not State. We are talking about Federal income taxes. The top 50 percent of earners paid 96 percent of the bill. The lower 50 percent, the lower half, it is obviously half, but 50 percent of the income earners in this country paid 3.9 percent of the tax.
I am not going out there and saying, guys, we ought to shift more burden to that lower 50 percent. That is not what I am saying, but what I am saying is, the Democratic leadership that continues time after time to talk about class warfare, it is a socialistic type of approach. It is not important what your capabilities are, that is what they say in socialism. It does not matter how much money you earn because what we do is redistribute it so that everybody is equal. So if the iron worker gets out there and has to walk on a beam this wide and takes substantial risk high on a building, high in the sky, and gets $25 an hour, it does not matter what that person's talent is or that person's skill is or the risk or the danger of their job because under the Democratic leadership approach, this money should be shared equally. It is a transfer. It is called class warfare.
That is exactly what the spin is about, not because they can justify it under a democratic system. Under our democratic capitalistic system, you cannot justify that, but the reason you can justify it and the reason they have hit so hard this evening is because they are looking ahead to next year's Presidential election. That is what all of this spin is about, and if there is any obstruction or roadblocks in the pathway, it is being put there for one reason, in my opinion, not because there is a legitimate dispute as to whether or not the policy will work, but there is a concern, a deep concern that it will work and that the beneficiary will be George W. Bush; and the number one goal of the minority leader is to beat George W. Bush. The number one goal is not to improve the economy. The number one goal is not to improve the number of jobs and cut down the unemployment. The number one goal is to spin it in a way that you can beat George W. Bush.
In my discussion this evening, I wanted to focus not on this part. I really did not come over here this evening to talk about the tax bill and talk about the need for a strong economy and the jobs out there and the opportunity to let people in this country succeed. If you can invent a better mousetrap, why should you be penalized? That was not my approach until I heard the spin put on by the Democratic leadership and going unrebutted for over an hour and a half. Nobody stood up to them. They went unrebutted time after time doing this class warfare spin.
So I had to rebut that. That is what the purpose of that is, but I do want to spend the remaining part of my time talking about our Nation's forests, and I think it is very important. This, of course, goes across both party lines.
I can tell you that in the last 2 weeks, about a week and a half ago my bill, the healthy forest bill, and I have got to give a lot of credit to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden) for his great work on this. Also to the chairman, the gentleman from California (Mr. Pombo), and the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte), who did a tremendous job, and all the others, as well as the Committee on the Judiciary.
We had a lot of help on that bill, but that was my bill, the McInnis and Walden bill, and that bill recognizes the fact that we have got to take care of our forests, but I think it is kind of a preparedness. I want to do just some brief remarks on what got us to this point, why our forests today have become managed, believe it or not, managed by the United States Congress instead of being managed by what we call the
``green hats,'' those people, those forest rangers, those people that dreamed about being a forest ranger, those people that dreamed about working for the U.S. Forest Service, many of whom grew up in the forests.
Almost all of them are educated in forest management. They all work in the forest day-to-day-to-day-to-day. They know the forest like we know the back of our hand, and yet over the last 20 years or 30 years there has been a shift, taking management away from the U.S. Forest Service and like agencies and putting it right here on this House floor, to the extent that we actually have debates on this House floor. We have in the committee that I chair, which oversees the Nation's forests, we actually have Members of that that want the U.S. Congress to determine what the diameter of a tree should be out in, for example, the White River National Forest, what size it should be, dictated out of Washington, D.C., off this House floor, the size of tree that our forest rangers and managers out there should be doing.
I will explain a little history, but the first concept we have to think about is public lands. There is a little history to public lands in this country. What are public lands? Public lands are, as described, lands owned by the government, and in the East really, relatively speaking, you do not have a lot of public lands owned by the Federal Government. You have got the Shenandoah and Everglades down in Florida and you have a little here and there, but where the real public lands are, as far as real meeting, the vast holdings of public lands are in the West; and my poster here to the left kinds of gives you an idea.
The colored spots on the map of the United States indicate public lands, and you can see where the big public lands are. They are not out here in the East. In fact, a lot of States have very, very little public lands, but in the West, we have huge amounts of Federal lands, huge, hundreds of millions of acres of Federal public land or government-held land.
Here is the State of Alaska, if you can see, right down here to the left. Look at the State of Alaska. That is how much land in Alaska is owned by the government. So the land policies, just by the sake of ownership, are different than the land policies you find out in the East where you have private property.
The reason we got into this circumstance was when the country was settled by our forefathers they needed to figure out a way to get the people out of the comfort of their homes on the East Coast and give them incentive to go West. The West, frankly, was even deep into Virginia, and it was a challenge.
It was a lot of risk to leave the comfort of your homes and go to the West, disease, accidents, death by childbirth because a lot of women died in childbirth. Men typically died in their 20s of accidents. They would fall off a cliff or get bitten by an animal or infection by a rusted nail. It was high-risk.
So the government decided, how do we give people incentive to go to the West, and they decided to use the same tool they used in the war against the British. They tried to bribe the soldiers to defect, to leave the army of the Queen and come over to the United States, and we would give them an award of private property land they could own, and here we knew that from our settlers that one of the fundamental foundations of this country was to have your own little castle, to have your own little piece of property, private property. It is a very sacred part of our government, a very sacred part of this country.
So the government decided, well, let us call it the Homestead Act and let us offer people, say, 160 acres or 320 acres if they go out, settle on the land and work the land for a certain period of time. Then they can keep the land and it is theirs. They own it. And that worked very well. You get out into the fertile fields of Missouri or Kansas or even eastern Colorado or Nebraska, and a family that had 160 acres could survive. It made sense. It was the right number of acres to give to support that family and be enough encouragement for that family to stay there, hopefully generation after generation after generation.
Then what happened is it worked pretty well until they hit the Rocky Mountains. When they hit the mountains, they found that in many places you could not feed one sheep on an acre. You had to feed a sheep with four acres out here. In a lot of places you could put lots of sheep on an acre, not mountains. You go up much higher in elevation, in fact, the mean elevation of my district is the highest place in the North American continent on an average. I mean, there are a lot of different things when you get into the high mountain country, and you cannot raise a family on 160 acres from a farm.
So what they decided to do was they came back and said, look, the people are not settling in the West, and back then the only way you really were able to claim the land, and our forefathers wanted to expand the United States, we made things like the Louisiana Purchase. How do we get out there, how do we claim the land as ours?
Today, when you purchase land, you get a title. You do not have to be on the land. You do not have to live on the land. You do not have to be there 24 hours a day. You have title. In fact, you can live in New York City and own land in San Francisco. All you need is a title.
In the early days of this country, that did not work. In the early days of the country, in fact, the paper did not mean a lot. What meant a lot is if you were in possession, that is where the saying
``Possession is nine-tenths of the law,'' that is where that originated from; and what you needed back then is a six-shooter strapped on your side, and you needed to be plotted down right on that piece of ground.
What happened is, people were not settling in the West because the conditions were severe. So they went back to Washington and they said, okay, now what do we do about this? How do we encourage them to stay? Somebody said, let us give them a proportion of amount of acres. If it takes 160 acres in Kansas, it takes 3,000 acres in the Colorado Rockies or Wyoming plains, maybe that is what it takes, and they decided, because they had just come under a lot of political pressure because they gave too much land to the railroad barons to build the railroads, that maybe they could not give that kind of land away.
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So what they decided to do was to go ahead and keep this land in the government's name, but allow people to use it. And that is called the concept of multiple use. Lands of many uses. People my age grew up under the concept. When you went into a national forest, there was always a sign at the entrance to the national forest that said, for example, ``Welcome to the White River National Forest, a land of many uses.''
Now today, we have seen some fairly radical environmental organizations, Earth First, Greenpeace, the national Sierra Club, some of these other groups; and their number one target is to eliminate the concept of multiple use. They, in essence, want people off public lands. They want agriculture off public lands.
Out here in the West we have to use public lands. My family, my wife's family are fifth-generation family ranchers on the same ranch, but they have to use public lands. They have their own holdings, but they need public lands. These organizations want them off public lands, and they take some very radical approaches to push us in the West off those lands.
So keep in mind that in some of these States, for example in Kansas, when you have a disagreement with regard to a land use policy, you go down to the local courthouse and you talk with the county commissioners and you talk with your planning and zoning commission. Here, on government lands, because it is under public ownership, you end up having to come to Washington, D.C. Our planning and zoning office is located in Washington, D.C. So that is one element we need to think about when we talk about forest management.
What else do we need to talk about with regard to forest management? We need to talk about where the water is situated in the country. Here in Washington I think we have had 28 straight days of rain. In the East, a lot of times your big problem is getting rid of water. Seventy-
three percent of the water or moisture in this country falls in the East. So your problem is getting rid of it. In the West, we have exactly the opposite problem; we are very arid.
Take a look at this entire section, which includes the Rocky Mountains, the State of California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Oklahoma. Take a look at this big chunk in red. That entire chunk, which is almost twice the size of what I would call the East, let us just call this the East, where the 73 number is, this gets 14 percent of the water. That means that the forests out here in the West have a different moisture content than the forests in the East. Fire is a much bigger hazard out here in the West because of the simple fact we do not get near the moisture that the country receives in the East.
Now, because of the moisture in the East, on a lot of occasions the bigger problem here is insect infestation. So we wanted to put a bill together that addressed not just the problems of the West. And by the way, very bipartisan. We had Democratic leadership against us but we had a lot of Democrats, Main Street Democrats that live out here in the rural areas. The majority of the rural Democrats supported us strongly on this bill. So we wanted to put a bill that addressed the infestation by bugs in the East, and of course we have a lot of that in the West as well but probably not to the extent that you do in the East, and we wanted to address the fire issues that we see in the West.
Remember, we have two elements: one, public lands; and, two, the water content. In the West, we have a lot of water problems because we do not have that moisture.
Now let me talk about the third element, and that is management of these public lands. We created Federal agencies to run these lands. One of the agencies that we created was the U.S. Forest Service. And we said to the U.S. Forest Service, we want you people in those green uniforms and green hats to become experts on the management of the forests. Now, the jobs in the U.S. Forest Service do not pay a lot of money. Those people that work for our U.S. Forest Service or any of these land agencies, they do it because they love it. They love the land. They are so, so dedicated to their jobs. The same with the Bureau of Land Management, and the same with U.S. Fish and Wildlife. But tonight I am talking about the Forest Service. These men and women out there in the Forest Service are proud to wear that green hat and that green uniform.
What has happened is that these people grow up loving the forest, they go to school and get educated on the forest, they work in the forest every working day, and, in fact, a lot of them go into the forest when they are not working. A lot of them live in the forest. They know that forest. They know what is good for that forest. They love that forest. They care about that forest. But you know what has happened? In the 1970s, some of the groups, like Earth First, the Sierra Club, the Greenpeace-type of people, they decided they wanted to end this concept of multiple use.
Now, remember what I talked about, the tool of multiple use. They wanted to end this concept of multiple use. But they knew that every time they got in an argument or a debate or a discussion of the issues with forest rangers, they lost. Every time. Why? Because the Forest Service, based on their experience, based on their education, based on the science would beat them. Greenpeace and Earth First could never succeed in their arguments because the Forest Service was not managing these forests based on emotion; they managed based on science. So that would defeat the purpose of the Sierra Club and Earth First and Greenpeace from getting rid of multiple use.
So somehow, somehow they had to shift the management of forests from science to get management determined by emotion. Well, they knew that the Forest Service was not going to manage these forests based on emotion. But what is the greatest body in the country that manages its business, in large part, by emotion? It is the United States Congress. So in the 1970s, they were very successful, and in the 1980s, Greenpeace and Earth First and those other groups, at moving management away from the Forest Service and putting management into the hands of the United States Congress. They were very successful over this period of time of moving the argument to emotion.
Now, I can tell you that when you talk about forest management, you can win the emotional argument on a 15- second ad. All you need to do is park a bulldozer in front of a grove of Aspen trees and put a fawn or a deer out there and say that we are destroying our forests, and you have won the argument. Because people love our forests. People love our wildlife. I love the wildlife. I grew up in the forest. This is my kind of life. Washington is a workstation for me. My home is in the Colorado mountains. So they could win on that.
So what happened is, gradually over this period of time we found the United States Congress managing these forests. And I would venture to say to my colleagues that not one of us on this floor, I would guess not one of us on this floor probably has a degree in forest management. We have degrees in political science. I am a lawyer. I have a degree in business. My background is really more business than anything else. I am not a forest ranger. Even though I chair the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, I am not a forest expert.
So what am I doing with the day-to-day management of our forests when we have very qualified men and women out there in the field that have been educated in the area, that love their jobs, that do know how to manage those forests? And what has the result been? The result has been that last year we suffered huge bug infestations. If you care about the old growth trees, if you care about the wildlife, if you care about the endangered species, if you care much about the forests, then I will tell you something, you probably sat up in your chair last year when you saw those horrible fires and what they did.
This is the result of fire. This is all stuff that burned, fell to the ground and washed down. Do you know what this sits in right here? There is a boat, and right here is all this waste, this forest refuge. There used to be trees; there used to be wildlife. It was very fertile wildlife territory. It was absolutely beautiful scenery. It was, to an extent, a forest that had some health to it. The biggest killer of endangered species in this Nation are wild fires. Now, we had the fire because that forest was not allowed to be properly managed. That is now sitting in the water supply. That is sitting in the water supply. Colorado's Hayman Fire dumped loads of mud and soot into Denver's largest supply of drinking water.
That is what one of Denver's water supplies looks like right now. This water behind it looks like a chocolate malt, and it will cost the citizens of Denver tens of millions of dollars to clean up their water supply. So it destroys wildlife, fire does, as does bug infestation. It destroys watersheds. It destroys the timber. I mean there is nothing good about wildfires.
Now, controlled fires are an element of helping manage a forest. So there are situations where fire, properly managed, is good. But these kinds of fires, they were not managed. They are horrible. We lost 20-
some firefighters last year fighting these very kinds of fires. Good forest management does not mean we will avoid those fires, but it means we will mitigate them. Good forest management cannot stop lightning. We will have lightning, and we will have careless campfires.
By the way, most of these fires were not started by humans, but by lightning. But the fact is we can control those fires through good forest management. And the bill I drafted, as I said earlier, with the assistance of the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden), who I thank, the bill we drafted was called the Forest Health Bill; and that bill was a long time coming. We negotiated on both sides of the aisle. We had lots of help from some Democrats. We had lots of help from some of the Republicans. We put together, with the chairmen of the subcommittees, we put together an outstanding bill.
This bill allows the management of our forests to go back to the Forest Service; and it allows the Forest Service, for example, to start thinning. Right now we have killed our forests with love. We have babied them. We have spoiled these forests. We have eliminated, in the State of Colorado, for example, because of the emotional argument, we have virtually eliminated all timber companies out of Colorado. We have a couple mom and pop shops. We have a matchstick company down in Cortez which, I think, employs 40 or 50 people; but we really do not have much timber in Colorado.
So what happens to that wood? It grows and it grows, like rabbits, and lots and lots of rabbit, and more and more rabbits. We have acres of public land that historically we supported and would have on a typical acre 60 trees. They now have 600 trees on those acres. But because the U.S. Congress and because our society has allowed our forest management to be taken away from the Forest Service and to be given to politicians like myself, to the U.S. Congress, these forests now are in more danger than they have ever been in the history of this country.
The great sequoias, those sequoias are at a higher risk than they have ever been in recorded history. Our wildlife risk is higher than it has ever been because of wildfire and bug infestation. Our wildlife habitat is in the greatest amount of danger in our history because of the fact that we are not allowing our Forest Service to go in and manage these lands.
My bill allows them to an extent, in a demonstration project of 20-
some million acres, it allows the Forest Service to begin to do what they wanted to do all along, and that is manage the forest with a balanced perspective that is good for all of us; to manage those forests in such a way that our wildlife actually is better off, not just that there is a mitigation but an improvement, an addition to the wildlife habitat out there.
You know, people are not an excluded species out there. In the West, we have a right to live out there, and people need to be thought of. In properly managed forests, we do not see watersheds that look like chocolate malts; we do not see the devastation of flooding because the forest burnt down. Our forest management can be improved. I am very optimistic about the future, but only, only if we allow my bill to go forward, which allows the Forest Service to get their hands back on the product they know best.
Now, let me show you what happens when we allow the Forest Service to go in. And let me step back a second and show you what Greenpeace and Earth First and the Sierra Club and national parties did, these national organizations, or world organizations, did when they took the management from the Forest Service. The Forest Service would try and thin out an area. For example, they would go into an area that has like 600 trees to an acre and cut those trees down, different sizes, because different sizes are healthy for the forest, different ages, different sizes, et cetera. What they tried to do was to put some of that out there. And time after time after time they were met with paralysis. Paralysis from litigation and the courts and, frankly, paralysis by analysis with the U.S. Congress trying to manage these forests.
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Mr. Speaker, so what my bill does is it protects, it enhances and protects public input on the management of these forests. But it says you are not going to be able to use the courts in an abusive fashion to continue to delay these projects year after year until the beetles come and start an infestation. By the way, after they eat the dead trees, they move to the live trees.
My bill also says you are not going to accomplish your goal, Greenpeace, of kicking people off public lands by forcing paralysis by analysis by letting the U.S. Congress manage these forests by emotion.
That is why my bill passed with strong bipartisan support. Republicans and Democrats voted for the bill.
Let me show Members an example of what happens when we allow the Forest Service to do their job. This burned-out area, the Forest Service was not allowed to go in there and treat it for one reason or another, an environmental injunction, lawsuit, paralysis by the court, or because Congress has tied the forest rangers up. Here they were allowed to treat the area.
Do Members know where that fire stopped? It stopped on a line no wider than a yard, exactly where it stopped is where the forest was treated and the treated forest met the untreated forest. And the fire came up and, boom, that is where it stopped. That is pretty good science.
Let me give another example. This is down in the Four Corners, Mesa Verde National Park, the ``green table'' they call it down in Four Corners. Right here, this area, they were allowed to treat that area, the park management, U.S. Park Service, and they are doing a tremendous job with our parks. They were allowed to treat this area. The area they were not allowed to treat is all of the burned-out area.
Last year at the Mesa Verde National Park we had a horrific fire. Guess what happened. The treated area was saved; the untreated area burned, and it burned so hot that it did not fertilize the ground, it sterilized the ground. So the possibility of new growth will not be seen for generations. There will be grass and things, but juniper trees and pinion trees and those types of things, we are not going to see that in my lifetime. My grandchildren will not see it in their lifetime, probably, and yet 2 years ago, we had it. We had it to pass on to other generations. This area was there; it would not take 200 years to replace it. Those 300-year-old trees were there, but we were not allowed to go in and treat them. What happened, we lost it all. We lost all of the untreated area.
So, in conclusion, let me add one other thing about my bill. This is an urban area. Take a look at this poster. This does not just apply to those who live out in the country, out in the sticks, some might say. It does not apply to just us, this applies to those in communities. This is bugs that killed these trees. Go down I-70 in Colorado by Vail, there is beetle kill all along the highway. Once a beetle lands on a tree, it is like malignant cancer. It is gone. It is over.
Do you think the Sierra Club or Greenpeace or Earth First would cooperate one iota for us to go out there and get ahold of this and manage these forests? It does not happen. My bill talks about urban interface and watersheds and bug infestation. My bill talks about wildlife habitat.
My bill protects public input, and says, let us manage our forests. They are a diamond, a wonderful asset of the people of this country. Those public lands should be protected, but we do not protect them by ignoring them, any more than you protect your child by not managing your child. Some people might say, give your child whatever they want, spoil them, do not discipline them, do not manage them, do not reach any kind of balance, what time they have to come in at night. What product do you get? Usually a pretty rotten person as a result of that kind of management.
We are saying we can reach a balance. Let the Forest Service, let the parks, let the BLM do what they are best at doing. Congress does not need to manage day to day these public lands. Of course, we have oversight on public policy, but we should not be having the courts run those forests, and we should not let the United States Congress run the forests. We should let the forest rangers, the BLM agents, the range riders, let them manage those assets for us.
We are so narrow-minded on some of these things, and we have been persuaded through emotion, not through science, but through emotion to change these management techniques, and have we ever paid the price. This was a very expensive lesson last year with all of those fires, and those many fire fighters' lives we lost.
It is a very expensive lesson not to cut down a tree with beetles in it and stop the infestation. We talk about it, and in the first paragraph of a Greenpeace press release or an Earth First or Sierra Club, they always talk about clear-cutting and timber companies. They figure out every negative word they can to stop us from managing it.
This is not about timber, this is about preserving wildlife and watersheds, protecting urban interface. This is about letting the Forest Service manage forest property. All of us, all of us win. Do you know how big winners all of us would have been if we would have allowed the Park Service to go ahead and treat this area?
Tell me one loser by not protecting this area. Had we protected this area, I do not care if you are a member of Greenpeace or the other radical organizations, Earth First and so on, you would have benefited had we been able to preserve these 300-500-year-old pinion trees for many generations. They will not be replaced for 300 years, and it is because of the fact that we took management away from the people who know what to do with it; and we have consolidated it in the radical environmental organizations and, frankly, in the halls of the United States Congress.
I hope that the Senate sees what we saw in that bill, that is, the Senate, as we did, on a bipartisan basis passes the Healthy Forest Initiative. That is my bill. I know about it. I had lots of Democratic support. I had Democratic cosponsors. This is not a Republican bill being shoved down somebody's throat or a Democratic bill being shoved down somebody's throat. This is a team effort to manage those forests, and I hope the Senate sees as we did and passes that legislation before the fire season and the bug season gets too much further down the road.
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