Rob Bishop

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Indiana (Mrs. Walorski).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. 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.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hurd).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fitzpatrick).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. McHenry).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Zeldin).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Kevin Hern).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, the Dingell Act, 2 years ago, was bipartisan. If this were bipartisan, we would not be here. But to illustrate that, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock), one of the ranking members on the committee, who has spent a lot of time on our committee and understands these issues.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We have talked about several of the problems with this particular bill. With this particular bill, we have talked about how the poor reckoning of its sources there do not say what is going to happen if this money does not develop. I think Mr. Graves would be good to talk about where this money is coming and how it is being used at the same time. And we don't necessarily know what will happen with the lowering of the royalties that we are experiencing this year from next year. There is one other consideration I hope that people will understand, especially for all those who are speaking about it who come from the eastern coast. There was a conforming amendment put in the Senate in this particular bill, a conforming amendment. In the good old days, we used to call them earmarks, but it is a conforming amendment. The original bill said that on Forest Service land that would be bought, 15 percent of that had to come from west of the 100th meridian and 85 percent had to come from east of the 100th meridian. That was taken out, quietly and surely taken out. The end result of that means that there is a siphoning of billions of dollars that should be and could be going to Eastern States. I mention that because one of the Democrat speakers did speak about the need for urban recreation opportunities. That was what was supposed to happen, and with this conforming amendment, that is what is taken out of the bill. In the 1960s, as this bill was being discussed, Orville Freeman was the Secretary of Agriculture for Kennedy. He said at that time that the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission pointed out that the greatest need for recreation opportunities lies in the areas adjacent to the metropolitan centers in the Eastern States. It would be our purpose under this bill to expand about 84 percent of what would be available under it for acquisition in the eastern national forest acquired under the Weeks Act. In fact, that commission went on to say that outdoor opportunities are most urgently needed near metropolitan areas. Much of the West and virtually all of Alaska are of little use to most Americans looking for a place in the Sun for their families on a weekend when the demand is overwhelming. At regional and State levels, most of the land is where people are not. One-sixth is in the sparsely populated Alaska. Seventy-two percent of the remainder is in the West, where only 15 percent of the people live. The Northeast, where one-quarter of the people live, only 4 percent of the acreage is there. But that language was not put in there by happenstance. There was a reason for it. In one iteration of this particular act that we introduced a long time ago, there was the idea of putting a specific percentage that would go to urban recreation so there would be those urban recreation concepts, as was originally designed in the bill. That has been taken out. What that will mean is that for you who live east of the 100th meridian, basically east of Denver, there will be $1.19 billion less dedicated to you than there would have been if this amendment had not been put in there. That works out to an average of $32 million per congressional district of those living east of Denver. I am glad that all those who are for this, on whatever side, will have a good time to explain to their constituents why they are in favor of giving their area $32 million less in recreation opportunity simply because you are going to confirm a conforming amendment that was slipped into the Senate version of this bill that really hurts this process and is not necessarily positive. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Graves).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time I actually have left here.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. We have heard all sorts of platitudes about this bill today. Whether it passes or not is actually irrelevant. It is not bipartisan, and it has all sorts of flaws. There are questions about the future source of funding. We have heard speaker after speaker come up and say: We are not talking about taxpayers' money. This is only royalties that are off there. One of the problems we have to face is that all the royalties that come from offshore development and onshore development from energy and gas, those royalties are placed in the general fund. In fact, the second largest source of funds that go into the general fund is from these royalties, second only to the IRS taxes that go in there. If these revenues weren't deposited in LWCF, they would be deposited in the general fund of the U.S. Treasury. If that is not taxpayer money, I don't know what is. We have talked about the need for, actually, urban recreation areas. We would like to do it, but unfortunately, this bill diminishes that opportunity and puts it in limbo, which is not good. I have heard speaker after speaker come up here with pretty pictures about our national parks, reservation lands, BLM land, resource lands, all these things that need to be helped. A lot of them talked about all the wonderful programs that are on State lands, that are parks, roads, picnic areas, and all those things which we are already doing. When we permanently reauthorized the LWCF last Congress, that is when we put more money into those types of things everyone says is wonderful. What we didn't put more money into is buying Federal land, buying more land to put into the Federal estate. As everyone talks about how important it is actually to now start putting money into park maintenance, into maintenance of the backlog, what this bill does is put that at the very lowest rung on priorities of where this royalty money is spent. You will spend it first on GOMESA. You will send it to the States. It will go to historic preservation. You will spend it on buying up more land before you ever come to anything that helps the parks and helps the public lands. That is because we have disproportionately done this. This bill is not about funding our public lands. This bill is about circumventing the limitations that we put in in the last Congress on buying more land. The only thing this bill is about is how we can find another way to buy more property. We can't even afford the property we already have. There is a $20 billion maintenance backlog. But what this is attempting to do is find a way to put more money into buying more land so we can exacerbate that problem. Now, you can say all you want to about how wonderful it is, how good it is, and, I am sorry, most of those platitudes were misstated. They were talking about things that either already exist or are actually being de-emphasized by this particular bill. What this bill is about is: Are you going to put more money into buying more land before you put more money into actually maintaining the land we already have? That is really the only issue of this bill, and that is why we are fighting this strongly about it. Last year, when we did the Dingell Act, that was bipartisan. We had worked together to come up with a lot of bipartisan stuff. This was not a bipartisan bill. Mr. Kilmer, I appreciated his work with me on the parks. That was bipartisan. This is not bipartisan. It is still about how do we buy more land. That is the goal of this piece of legislation. Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This is a problem that has been vexing representatives from our territory of Guam for many years now. I appreciate the gentleman from Guam, who has adequately explained what he is attempting to do and what this bill actually does. I congratulate him on this bill, which is finally going to recognize and compensate a very small group but a significant group of people who literally sacrificed for this country. This is the right thing to do. This House has done this before. This passed out of our committee on a voice vote. It has passed on the floor on a voice vote. It then went to the Senate, where the Senate felt compelled to make changes, as is their wont to do. And in lightning speed, the Senate, in only 8 months, was able to strike the 22 lines and return this bill to us. So, lest we vex them even further and ask them to do something else, I would urge everyone in here to give this another ``yes'' vote and send this on to the President's desk immediately from this floor. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chair, I appreciate having the ability to speak after Mr. Grijalva, my good friend from Arizona, so I can bring some balance to the rhetoric that we are doing because somebody has to realize that the ideas of conservation, recreation, and economic development in the vast territories we have in the West are not mutually exclusive. They never have been. They never need to be. But the bill we have in front of us today is very unbalanced. It is pretty ideological, and as Yogi Berra used to say: ``It's deja vu all over again.'' This puts 1.5 million acres, as has been said, in new wilderness designations and over 800 miles of wild and scenic rivers, which destroys or shuts down all forest management activity in those particular areas, including things like fuel reduction and wildfire mitigation. To put this in perspective for some of you, especially those in the East, in the last 10 years, 7.3 million acres of our most restricted public lands have been burned out. That is like burning the entire State of Massachusetts, all of which was set in this kind of restrictive area. Now, what the majority wants to do, what the Democrats want to do, is add more to that potential problem. It is unbalanced simply because there is not a single Republican who has cosponsored any of these bills in this package, including the two Colorado Republicans who are most directly impacted by this package. This puts critical military-readiness training at risk. This has concerns for private property that have never been resolved in elements of this package. It doesn't even address the local consensus. This is a bill that the Senate will not pass, that the President has already said he is going to reject. Earlier in this session, as we began, we had a lands package that came through. It was a consensus between Democrats and Republicans both here and in the Senate. Many of these bills were not part of that consensus land package, and for justifiable reasons, because they haven't reached that consensus status. It hasn't happened before, which means--you know, Earl Weaver once came out and got thrown out of a game because he looked at the umpire and said: Are you going to get better, or is this as good as it gets? We are looking at the other side and saying: Are you going to get better, or is this simply as good as it gets? What we should be doing is realizing, instead of creating more problem areas, we should be trying to solve the problem of the land we already own. I am specifically talking about H.R. 1225, the Restore Our Parks Act. We have a maintenance backlog in our parks that is huge and a solution to it that actually works. Why are we not bringing that bill to the floor instead of this bill, which is destined to fail? We all talk a big game about how much we revere our national parks, yet when we had the opportunity to do something about it with a bill that has 330 sponsors and cosponsors, we have the chance of doing it, we don't. For some reason, the Democrats don't decide to bring that up on the floor so it can move along. Instead, they bring packages up here that create more wilderness, more problems, and more costs without having solved any of the underlying problems with these packages, which is why they weren't in the consensus bill we had at the beginning of the session in the first place. We can do better. We need to do better. We are wasting our time with messaging bills that have no future when we have the opportunity to do stuff that works. I am calling on my friends on the other side: Put that bill on the floor so we can vote for something that solves our problems and saves our parks instead of these simply messaging bills that are dedicated to having special interest groups being able to check off the box that you did something for them. It is about time we did something that works.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall No. 689.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Stephen L. Sanetti for his decades of dedicated service upon his retirement as Chief Executive Officer of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Steve is a fierce defender and ardent supporter of our constitutional right to keep and bear arms, but is first and foremost an American patriot. A member of Virginia Military Institute's Class of 1971, Steve graduated with honors before earning his Juris Doctor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. While attending VMI, Steve was a member of the Executive Committee, Battalion Operations, president of the Rifle and Pistol Club, and four-year member of the Rifle Team. I venture to say that Steve is a pretty great shot. From 1975 to 1978, Steve proudly wore the uniform of the United States Army in the First Cavalry Division Staff Judge Advocate at Ft. Hood, Texas, attaining the rank of Captain. Steve continues to live by the Army core values of Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage to this day and holds true his oath to support the Constitution of the United States. Following a two-year stint as Litigation Counsel at Marsh, Day & Calhoun in Connecticut, Steve was hired by Bill Ruger in 1980 as the first general counsel for one of the nation's leading firearm manufacturing companies. For nearly three decades, Steve rose through the ranks to President and has devoted his life to Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. Without question, this prepared him well for taking over the helm as President and CEO of the National Shooting Sports Foundation--the trade association for America's firearms and ammunition industry--and the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute. In his nearly 12 years at NSSF, Steve has guided the foundation through times of both turbulence and growth. Under Steve's leadership, NSSF's firearms safety and education program, Project ChildSafe, has seen tremendous success and new partnerships have been established with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Department of Veterans Affairs to address suicide and with ATF to prevent firearms from landing in the wrong hands. Because of Steve's unwavering commitment to both developing genuine solutions that make for safer communities and respecting the rights of law- abiding citizens, NSSF continues to be a leading voice in the national conversation to promote firearm safety and responsibility. Steve can certainly take pride in his work at NSSF and in helping to ensure that future generations have opportunities to enjoy the great pastimes of hunting and the shooting sports. I thank Steve for his service and love of country. As Steve begins the next chapter of his life, spending more time with family--in particular his grandchildren--and growing the next generation of sportsmen, I congratulate him and wish him, his wife Carole, their children and grandchildren all the best

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Chair, as we approach this particular piece of legislation, there are other issues that seem to be floating around at this time of year that seem to have sucked all the air out of Congress. Everyone seems to be talking about impeachment instead of this stuff. But I realize it is important for the majority party to try and give the illusion that we are actually doing something, and, therefore, we have this bill before us. If this bill is indeed the vision that the majority party wants to say is their way of helping climate control or helping the costs and the betterment of our seas and oceans, if this is their philosophy, if this is their vision, and if this is their new, really big and giant kind of really cool thing that they are going to bring out here as their statement of what is going to happen, then they ought to be embarrassed in some way. This bill is like getting that Christmas package, and once you tear off all the pretty wrapping paper and the satin bows, Madam Chair, you will realize, and Americans will realize, this piece of legislation is an empty box. There is nothing there. There are 10 bills that we have here. Three would actually qualify to go as suspensions. We have no qualms with those. But it is certainly not groundbreaking new ideas that are coming up here. In fact, one of those bills is the one from Mr. Kilmer. He has a great bill. It has one small problem with it that could create a problem in the future, and there was a Democrat amendment that was proposed to the Rules Committee which would be a perfect solution. Unfortunately, of all the 29-plus amendments the Rules Committee decided to make in order, the one that actually fixes something that we would support, they decided not to make that in order. It is great. It is marvelous. We will try to fix it over in the Senate side. Of the other bills, four of them do absolutely nothing. In fact, the testimony we had in committee on those bills was they are presently being done by the status quo. The agency said in their testimony that they have the power and the authority to do this already. The only thing you are going to add by combining these extra bills, Madam Chair, is simply a $1.4 billion cost increase to it. There are four of these bills that have no Senate counterpart, which means we can pass them over here, but they are going nowhere in the Senate. So, once again, this is simply a lost opportunity to do something when we have so many significant issues. In fact, in the Rules Committee last night, they mentioned some of the things we need to do before next Friday, like the NDAA, which should have been done in September; or the USMCA, which was ready to go in August; or the funding bill that we need to do, which we should have had done by June; or even the backlog maintenance bill that Mr. Kilmer and I have, which has 330 sponsors and cosponsors and still has yet to have a vote on this floor. Those actually solve problems. They do something. But we are not scheduling that stuff. So we are sitting here with this illusion of coming up with something. Some of these bills will make amendments to the Coastal Zone Management Act, an act that was signed into law by Richard Nixon, which gives the Democrats kind of an ironic sense of humor in actually doing that kind of amendment in the atmosphere of this particular time period. Then we also have a whole bunch of amendments that were made in order. Four of those 29 amendments are actually bills that other people have proposed. Since nothing is really being done in the legislative process here, this seems to be like the only game in town, so why not add your bill on to it? We saw the same thing happening on the NDAA when we did several things that were in the purview of our committee that were added to that bill having nothing to do with the military, but it was the only thing going in town, so add your bill on top of it. Of those bills, three of them had absolutely no hearings whatsoever; they are just new. They have been added on here, and we are going to try and do this and bypass the entire system which is supposed to be the way you actually do legislating in this body. One of them did have a hearing. Unfortunately, it was last Congress when we were in charge. I guess that is close enough for government work here. But the problem that we do simply have is that there are so many potential problems with this bill. Now, two of these bills that have been added to this have some specific issues which we will talk about in the course of the discussion that we have around the bill: one of them dealing with, once again, whether a city is the same thing as a State for coastal management planning; one of them will be dealing with some of the programs that are going to be mandatory under this particular folderol of legislation that has been kind of cobbled together as if this were a good, bright, and comprehensive approach to try and solve problems in America. Madam Chair, I don't want to be too critical because I realize one of these bills in here is yours. At the same time, this package of bills is not a great idea; it is not grand philosophy; and it doesn't solve anything. In fact, for the majority of it, you already have the power to do it. You don't need this stuff in here. There are better ways of doing it, and this is certainly not one of those ways. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Chair, I yield 4 minutes to gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Gosar).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Chair, even though this is another wonderful program that already has three different agencies that do the same thing and they have the authority to do it, in the Christmas spirit--maybe the gentleman from Michigan will find the error of his ways--in the Christmas spirit, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Chair, even though it has been said, you have already read it in some reports from the chairs of the committee of jurisdiction as well as the committee that could have sequential referral of this, that they approve adding some of the amendments we are going to be talking about later into this package. I think the same thing is actually having a hearing and allowing members of those committees to have their will and say something. The process is not to allow the chairman to determine what bills will or will not be added--what bills will or will not be. It is to allow the members of the committee to have that kind of input, and this process is eliminating that kind of input. Madam Chair, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock). He knows more about this issue than the rest of us on the floor combined.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Chair, I appreciate the gentleman from Maryland. He has got a good bill. It should be a suspension. We wouldn't even ask for a vote for it. There is nothing wrong that. Mr. Kilmer's H.R. 729 is a good, decent bill. What is so sad is the Democrats have decided to take these two decent bills that should be suspensions and hold them as hostage to tack a whole bunch of other really crappy stuff on with them as well, and that is the sad part of this. Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Madam Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Kevin Hern) so he can once again explain how there are three good bills in this package and a whole lot of other bad ones.