Rob Bishop

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I continue to reserve.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Speaker, this Frankenstein bill that we have before us has a whole lot of good stuff in it. It also has a whole lot of bad stuff in there, things that could be cataclysmic consequences to this particular country. One of the things that is so sad is the process in which we are involved. I realize it's regular order, but it's still a sad process. We have germaneness rules that are very loose. The Senate has germaneness rules that are even looser. Former Senator Gene McCarthy said, The Senate has rules, but no one knows what they are so it doesn't really matter. Bringing a bill in this pattern with these many provisions over here is something that would never be allowed in most legislative bodies within our States. One of the things we should learn as a body is sometimes it is best if we actually deal with bills on an individual basis in a timely manner. I realize part of this problem cannot be laid at the hands of the chairman of our committee because it's actually dealing with the other body on the other side, which decided to lump everything together as a big glob and just throw it at us. At the same time, it should be a lesson for us to learn that if we really want to reform the system so that we have actual input on bills in a timely fashion and timely manner, we should have one issue, one bill, one vote, and plumping everything together is simply poor parts of legislation. For all the good that is in this bill, and there is much good, as well as the bad, and there is some bad, it still is the wrong process that we should be engaged. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit for the Record portions of an article from the Tucson Weekly that was published on February 15, 2007. Following the Amnesty Trail Leo W. Banks follows one of Arizona's most popular illegal alien crossing routes and finds piles of garbage trampled public lands, angry residents and the suspected presence of a vicious gang. In the coming weeks, as President Bush and the Democrat- controlled Congress take up immigration reform, and the political talk turns to amnesty, everyone living along border smuggling routes will hunker down to wait for the worst. They know their lives will get miserable in a hurry. The word amnesty possesses remarkable power on the Mexican side of the line. It has the same effect as a starter's pistol. Bang! Let the land rush begin. It happened after Jan. 7. 2004. when Bush floated his idea for a temporary worker program. The idea was broadly viewed in Mexico as amnesty, and the Border Patrol's own survey proved it. In the weeks following the proposal, the agency quietly questioned crossers apprehended at the southern border and found the president's plan had caused a big spike in illegal crossings. Forty-five percent said they'd entered our country ``to get Bush's amnesty.'' Nowhere will the coming stampede be more evident than on the smuggling routes that begin at the border at Sasabe, 65 miles southwest of Tucson, curl up through the Altar Valley and continue all the way to the Ironwood Forest National Monument, a full 75 miles north of the border. The 129,000-acre Ironwood, located west of Marana and south of Eloy, is a desert paradise of giant saguaros and spooky black-rock peaks worthy of a gothic novel. President Bill Clinton declared it a Federal monument in June 2000. But the smugglers have turned this signature Arizona landscape into a criminals' playground. The land here is crisscrossed with trails so packed from use, they shine white under the sun. Another Monument resident, Cindy Coping, uses Google Earth to zoom in on the Amnesty Trail, which comes up clear as a bell on her monitor. What's it like to live here? If you're out on the land a lot, expect to find the corpses of those who've made the terrible decision to cross this desert. Including the three murders last week, seven bodies were found on the Ironwood in the three months prior to this writing. One photo, taken sometime in 2000 by my anonymous photographer, shows the skull of a presumed illegal, with other human bones in the foreground. Next to the skull, not pictured, stands a saguaro-rib cross, probably built by companions after the deceased went down. For those trying to keep cattle on their land, the smugglers have made living in the Ironwood a nightmare. At this writing, rancher Emilio Figueroa says he has 18 head of cattle, valued at $800 each, on Tohono O'odham land immediately west of the monument. They got out when coyotes cut his fence. Now the tribe is refusing to let him onto Indian land to retrieve them. He's out $14,000. For Cindy's husband, Bob, a 58-year-old retired Raytheon engineer, one of the defining aspects of life on the Ironwood is a particular sound he can hear, literally, a mile away. ``I'll be out working and I'll hear, `wappa-wappa-wappa', and I know it's a load-out truck coming down the road with a flat tire,'' he says. The smugglers keep driving on the flat until the rubber flies off. Even then, they don't stop. They keep driving on the tire's rim until that, too, falls off or disintegrates. Sometimes the drive train falls out first. These smuggler vehicles, most stolen from Phoenix, often travel at night without headlights, with tape over the brake lights, and they've been clocked tearing through the monument's dirt roads at 89 mph. This endangers the lives of residents and visitors alike. It also ensures that many of these load vehicles--such as the tan truck pictured--never make it out of the monument. They smash into trees and saguaros, or run into ditches. The BLM has towed 300 vehicles a year out of the monument since 2000. These load-outs, as well as the constant foot traffic, destroy habitat and threaten cultural sites and endangered species. The trash left behind requires pickup crews to have biohazard training and armed guards watching them as they work. Even worse, Vic Brown says that MS-13, the notoriously vicious Salvadoran gang, might be operating on the monument, based on suspicious tattoos law enforcement has seen on smugglers arrested there. The Border Patrol's public information office in Tucson wouldn't return a call to talk about MS-13 in the monument. Says Vic Brown: ``We're trying to maintain some semblance of a national monument out there, and to be quite honest, we're not able to do it, because undocumented immigrants have targeted the area. I've watched it degrade from when I got there in 1992, and in the last 5 years, it has gotten progressively worse.'' The Copings bought their land here in 1995, and since then, they've been eyewitnesses to the explosion of the smuggling trade. In the mid-'90s. it was mainly small family groups that crossed at Sasabe and walked the 75 miles north to the monument, then an additional 18-20 miles to their pickup at Eloy. They rarely used coyotes. In 2000, the Copings began seeing vehicles, often Ford F- 150 pickups, parked at the side of the road. They usually had dark windows, no license plates and the keys resting on a tire. The illegals would drive themselves out to I-10, then Phoenix. The abandoned-truck phase gave way in about 2003 to the huge load-out phase. The Copings began seeing SUVs with five to eight illegals sitting on the roof, as Bob says, ``like wasted college students,'' or on the hood, forming a narrow tunnel through which the driver can see. Some of these illegals have told the Copings they already had jobs lined up in places such as North Carolina, and curried plane tickets out of Sky Harbor in Phoenix. Cell phones revolutionized the smuggling racket, allowing illegals to call ahead to arrange a pickup in the Ironwood, often eliminating the longer walk to Eloy. Independent walkers are gone now. ``Everybody we see now is somebody's customer,'' says Bob. The business has become sophisticated, commercial and very dangerous. Cindy, 50, a former engineer at Hughes, used to check fences alone on horseback, but she quit, afraid of what she might encounter. ``Sometimes I'll be at the house alone, and 20 illegals will walk down the road,'' she says. ``It's intimidating. They sound like an army marching.'' Bob says the number of load-outs in the Ironwood increased last spring before and after demonstrators took to the streets in Tucson and elsewhere to demand a rewrite of American law to accommodate illegal aliens and their corporate partners. The atmosphere, including talk of amnesty, created an explosion in traffic. In April, the Copings counted eight load-outs in one day. When the National Guard was sent to the border, the free- for-all ended abruptly, if briefly. ``We saw helicopters overhead, military-type aircraft, and we didn't a see a load- out for two weeks,'' Bob says. ``The traffic probably dropped 90 percent.'' But the numbers have risen again significantly, and in recent e-mails, the Copings have told me the big load-outs have returned with a vengeance. Cindy's e-mails have the tension and immediacy of dispatches written from a war zone-- because, in fact, she and Bob live in one. Last Thursday, three illegals were murdered in the Ironwood. Cindy and Bob learned of the trouble when a male illegal came to their house, his thigh covered in blood, evidently splatter from someone else's wound. In rapid Spanish, he repeated words like, ``Pow! Pow!'' and ``911'' and ``muerta'' and ``mujer,'' while gesturing of blood pouring from someone's chest. Cindy grubbed her medical kit, and she and Bob and this man jumped into a pickup and raced to the scene. Here is what she wrote next: ``I called 911 and attended to the woman, who was shot in the shoulder with a bullet wound coming out that soft spot at the bottom of her throat. The 911 dispatcher was simultaneously responding to a similar call from the Asarco Silverbell Mine, which is about a 10-mile drive south. As soon as I could see the woman was in stable condition. I crossed the street and assessed the motionless man on the other side. ``I felt no pulse on his still-warm throat. His eyes were closed. I grubbed his wrist, and it cold. Then I saw the back of his head was shot open. He was gone. There was no bleeding at the scene, so I assume this shooting took place earlier, and these four people were unloaded. ``The woman, Sebastiana, whom I later found out is 24 years old, began shivering in the morning's chill. I found no signs of continued bleeding. Her wound had been hurriedly dressed with someone's cotton coat stuffed up under her shirt. It was a gaping 2-inch-wide gash between the two bullet holes, but it had stopped bleeding. She was alert and breathing, even able to talk. She had a smaller wound to her abdomen. I elevated her feet, and Bob made two trips back to the house for wool blankets to keep her warm. ``A younger (undocumented) woman, Linda, at the scene had blood covering her cheek and circling one eye. She indicated no pain, so this was perhaps someone else's blood. She indicated that something had grazed her face, possibly a bullet. In the dark, it appeared she'd been punched in the eye, but after it got light. I could see it was just dried blood on her face. The first official to arrive on scene was a Pima County deputy who told us that someone had walked into Asarco with four fingers shot off.'' The e-maiI goes on. It ends with Cindy and Bob retreating to their house and locking the gate, another case of Arizona citizens sealing themselves off from the horrors this invasion has brought to our state. But heartrending encounters are not unusual in the Ironwood. In November, a man in his mid-50s showed up at the Copings' corrals and said he'd been drinking his urine for four days. Cindy made him macaroni and cheese and watched him gobble it down. As he ate, he broke down in retching sobs. The man said he owned a small farm with 70 pigs in Colima, Mexico, and had seven sons living in Phoenix. Breaking her rule of not allowing strays to use the phone, Cindy allowed him to call them to pick him up. He waited and waited, but no one in his family came for him. That night, he slept in the bed of one of the pickups. In the morning, he gave Cindy several necklaces--depicting Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe and other images--then left, and Cindy isn't sure in which direction he went. She never called the Border Patrol to pick him up. ``They usually don't come if it's one or two strays,'' she says. ``But mostly I didn't have the heart. I couldn't do it after all he'd been through.'' Cindy figures she and Bob have made six such ``rescues'' over the years, She has no choice. ``If I don't help them, they'll die,'' she says. ``We're 75 miles from the border, No one gets here without walking, at least three days, and it's another 20-mile walk out.'' But living in the Ironwood presents other tough choices. In 1997, as a precaution, Cindy got shots to immunize her from contact with hepatitis A. At the time, she was working with Pima County Search and Rescue, and that agency recommended that its personnel get immunized for the more worrisome, and potentially fatal, hepatitis B. It is spread through contact with the blood of an infected person, and Cindy has had contact with bleeding Third World people. She hasn't gotten the second shot yet. ``If I were taking the best care of myself. I'd get the B shot, too,'' says Cindy. ``I probably still will.'' It's easy to understand her anxiety, and her belief that she is on her own against this invasion--because, in spite of what she calls the dedicated Border Patrol agents on the ground, Cindy knows that the American government has neither the will nor desire to control this border. The same year she got the shots, a Border Patrol agent told Cindy that while traveling in Guatemala, he walked by a travel agency in Guatemala City and saw in its front window a map showing the 1,800-mile route to the United States--with her little house in the Ironwood as a landmark. But Cindy just shrugged at that disturbing news. After so many years of living on the Amnesty Trail, she's no longer capable of surprise.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I wish to claim the time in opposition although, as some others have said here, I may not necessarily be in opposition to this amendment.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Smith).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I am pleased to yield 4 minutes to a member of the committee, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. If the gentleman from Arizona would like to reclaim his time, I realize he has just had one of his speakers come in here, and we can keep the order going, which would be fine with me.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. At this time, I am happy to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I offer the Member 1 more minute.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 3 minutes. Mr. Chairman, we have heard several things about this particular piece of legislation. This new entity, the National Land Conservation System, not to be confused with the National League Championship Series, which is a much better concept, this entity was not created by congressional action. It was created as the dream child of a former Secretary of Interior less than 10 years ago. When asked in a hearing of the Bureau of Land Management if they were incompetent to manage these lands before this new entity was established, the simple answer was no. One would then ask the question, why was there a need 10 years ago for this new entity, because this new entity still does not administer anything, they don't manage anything, they don't regulate anything, nor will they, as has been carefully delineated by the sponsor of this legislation. The first question still should be asked, what do they really do, other than to provide some vague philosophy of recognition and enhancement and anything else? If we really simply wanted to just create this system statutorily, a one-sentence piece of legislation would do: ``There is established a National Land Conservation System.'' Is there a threat to any lands that are currently under the auspices of the Bureau of Land Management, as has been indicated by certain speakers? The answer is no. The sponsor just admitted there is no threat to that. All we are talking about is some vague new entity, and the issue of concern with this vague new entity is the language now says this new entity has certain values that it is supposed to uphold. These values are vague. Nowhere does it specifically say what these values are. Is this a threat to private property? No more than the present system. But that is where the issue comes in. We already have threats to the private property within this system, and this piece of legislation, rather than solving that issue, exacerbates that issue altogether. Is there a border security issue? Yes, presently, and this piece of legislation does not help that issue. It exacerbates the issue, if anything else. It is the vagueness of the language in this bill that puts into statutory language an entity that really doesn't do anything right now. That is a problem for the future, if at some stage or some point in time Congress wants or even the entity itself wants to make it do something proactively. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, in closing, the gentleman from Florida just gave a wonderful speech, and I think he illustrated some of the problems with this particular bill. The territory to which he was speaking is National Park Service land, not BLM land. This bill only deals with BLM land, and that is precisely the problem that we have with this particular bill. It is very simple one. We have parks and national monuments, some administered by the Bureau of Land Management, some administered by the National Park Service. They are different. Each one of them has a different value. In the Park Service, the organic act that created it said what the values for this land would be. It is established in statute and in regulation. The Bureau of Land Management does not have that same value system, because they are different lands for a different purpose, which is why the language in this bill is so troubling, because it is simply a vague statement that simply says they will have values, and it has never, never been defined. When the Department of Interior told me personally that they were in favor of this, it was because they could maintain the Bureau of Land Management parks and monuments with multiple use as the significant value. It would be protected, they said. Which is why I am so chagrined, that when we attempted to clarify in this legislation by amendment in the committee and once again before the Rules Committee that that is specifically the difference between the Park park and the BLM park, it was rejected. Now, multiple use is the difference between national parks in the Park Service system and national parks in the BLM system, and that language, that language has to be maintained, because that is indeed the only value that makes a difference. These lands are not threatened if the BLM has them. They are not threatened if we don't make this system, which is redundant at best and expensive at best, codified. But we do do something dangerous if we pass this legislation and now give a vague term of values on to a system that is defined nowhere. It opens us up to litigation problems, it causes problems in administration, and it does change the system. That is why there is so much danger, unless you are willing to do what our side has been saying all along, which is define what those vague terms actually mean. That, Mr. Chairman, is why we oppose this piece of legislation. It opens up a door that has no definition as to what room we actually enter, and that is wrong. It is simply wrong. The problem with that is it is going to hurt people, people who use this BLM land now to recreate, people who use it to graze, people who use it for their economy, people who have private property in-holdings in this area. They are put at risk because our language is simply too vague to allow them to understand what our intent is. That is why this bill has to be defeated. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, this amendment deals with one of the other issues that we are talking about as far as potential development of energy on these lands that are currently under the control of the Bureau of Land Management and may or may not actually change with the formalizing of this new entity. With skyrocketing energy prices, the last thing that Congress should do is lock up more lands that could provide a solution. The NLCS lands include potentially billions of barrels of oil, vast quantities of natural gas and coal, and unlimited potential for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. The energy development on NLCS lands is vital to the economies of western States, and to the Nation. We should be looking at ways to keep the $400 billion that we spend to buy energy overseas here at home. We are only just beginning to understand what potential there is on NLCS lands for renewable energy sources. This amendment would ensure that those options remain open. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. You know, there was a time when Pete Rose was trying out to make a baseball team, and the scouting report said that ``Rose can't make a double play, he can't throw, he can't hit left-handed and he can't run.'' The first time Fred Astaire tried to make a movie preview, the report coming back on Fred Astaire was, ``he can't act, he's slightly bald, and he can dance a little bit.'' The Boston Red Sox were reviewing a new outfielder, and the scouting report came back saying, ``he's not the Red Sox type.'' The guy they were actually scouting was Willie Mays. Which simply means, in life, sometimes what we see and sometimes what we're told is not necessarily the reality of situations. As groups and individual Members of Congress are starting to see this bill for what the details are is one of the reasons why we see some of those groups peeling off on their support. Why, some of the issues we raised in committee, it was said they're not really issues, now there are amendments that have been proposed by the majority party to deal with those so-called ``nonissues.'' It is said all we're trying to do here is codify and make permanent an institution that's already in existence, but it is much, much more than that. My freshman year, the goal of the freshman class was to try to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in government. Sometimes I wish we were still doing this because today we have reached the mother lode of waste, fraud and abuse. This is an entity, the National Landscape Conservation System, which spends money, but it does not hire anyone, it does not fire anyone, it does not write regulations, it does not repeal regulations, it doesn't administer any land, it doesn't manage any land. For the life of me, we have been trying to figure out what this thing does other than spend $50 million a year to encourage and to bring attention to certain particular areas. We are told that this bill would not change any of that. This bill apparently does nothing to an entity that does nothing. But I'm going to portend to you that the reason this entity has been so successful so far is simply because it's been under the auspices of the Secretary of the Interior. But if, indeed, we codify this and put this into statute, an entity right now which sticks out on a flowchart like a sore thumb that doesn't really do anything will change, it will change significantly, and all of a sudden it will start to do something. And that's where the danger arises. Because when we wrote down the values of this supposed new system, they are extremely vague, which means, first of all, it opens us up to lawsuits right and left. If the amendment that will be offered later does not pass to try and limit the impact of those lawsuits, we are offering this Nation a great deal of harm and potential peril. We have spent $50 million every year on what can best be called a redundant organization, but it actually should be changed. And the question obviously is, will we be spending more in this society? Now, once again, the proponents say nothing will change, it's not going to cost more, CBO says it's not going to cost more, there will be no regulations. The chairman of the subcommittee that sponsored this bill was asked once again at one point in time, will this create more cost, more regulation, and the answer was simply this: Well, you go in to establish the system, and then you go to step two. What that step two is is the fear that happens to be here. The values that have never been identified in this legislation dealing these parts of land deal with such issues as recreation. Amendments to actually define that were not allowed to be discussed. It deals with border security. Amendments to define that were not allowed to be discussed. We will have another border security amendment which, in my estimation, does anything more than establish the status quo as our policy when the status quo is not sufficient. We will have discussions over grazing issues and energy issues. We should have had discussions over private end holding issues. All of those should be defined as part of the values that we are talking about here. The Department of Interior has been very positive about this. They said they support this concept because it allows them to do what has always been done that is the difference between BLM monuments and parks versus national park monuments and parks, and that is, the value of multiple use. But in committee, when we tried to amend the language so that multiple use was a value to be maintained, it was defeated on a party line vote. And when we went to the Rules Committee and tried to make sure that we had a chance to discuss this, to put in multiple use as the value that is significant, it was again denied the ability even to discuss that on the floor. And that is the sum and substance that is different. Now, we are dealing with a system that impacts people and their lives. It was said by Sir Henry Maine, ``Nobody is at liberty to attack civil property and say at the same time they value civilization because the history of two can never be disentangled.'' And that is where we're at. Unless this bill is significantly modified, this bill will do harm to people. Unless this bill is changed and this system is moved back, it will do significant harm to people. We have problems within this entity right now. Rather than solve any of these problems, it provides vague and fluffy language that will make the situation worse. It does not solve the problems, but it does create a permanent statutory entity without any solutions and, indeed, goes the other direction and makes permanent solutions to our problems more difficult actually to accomplish. This simply is a bill whose time is not now. This is a bill that does not tell us exactly what to expect. It opens up the Federal Government to all sorts of potential lawsuits, and doesn't actually come up with a value that makes BLM land different than Park Service land, which is multiple use. That phrase has to be in that bill if this bill has any chance of having any some rationality of purpose. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Idaho, a member of the committee (Mr. Sali).

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I have another amendment made in order under the rule.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman from Arizona's comments. His initial sentence was that I am attempting to strike the very purpose of this act. I don't really think that is accurate because there is no purpose. If there was a purpose, it would have been written down as to what the purpose is. This simply says there will be values; and there is no definition of what those values are. I would remind all of my colleagues in this room, this is the language that the department said they do not want. This is the language BLM says does harm to them. This is the language they said was too vague and should be fixed, and it has not been fixed. That is why it should be eliminated. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I can be painfully brief on this amendment. In two places in this bill you have the same problem we have been talking over and over about, about the vague notion of simply ``values.'' The last amendment took the very superfluous language in the preamble, which has the potential of creating problems, as it has in other sections. But also in section 3(c)(2), we once again find this vague, nefarious language. It says that the Secretary shall manage the system in a manner that protects the values for which the components of this system were designated. Once again, by simply saying ``values'' without any kind of definition, nor is there any regulatory definition, you have simply opened this up to a vague, contentious opportunity. If you are going to establish this system and give them something to do, for heaven's sake, tell them what they are going to do and make it simple and make it succinct. That is why this section should be eliminated. Until we are ready to define these values, you don't put this in statute. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, the language that is put in here is part of the BLM mandate. They are to conserve, protect, restore cultural, ecological and scientific values for the benefit of current and future generations. The issue at hand, though, is that this is not the only part of the BLM's management authority and management purpose. By refusing to expand this to the other areas to which BLM is supposed to do, the work they are supposed to do on this land, we are in danger of actually going the other way and trying to impose that this is the only way, especially when this language has been used in the Park Service to mandate specific management practices and hurt that process. If you go on with this particular section, when you go to (b), it lists the kind of areas designated in this new land system. Each one was established with a certain land management plan. They are there. But the fact that we don't put them in here opens up the possibility of litigation to problems that are there. It is important so we know that the Department of the Interior said they don't mind creating this system by statute, but they were opposed to this language. They said this language is harmful to their mission statement. I wish to actually try and convince every Member on the floor, all three of us here, that this is indeed not what the department needs. It is not what the bureau needs. It is not the kind of language that you want to put in statute if you want to make sure what we are doing is specifically defined. This opens up more problems than we would otherwise have. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, let me make this clear. I have no intention of opposing or voting against the language from the gentleman from Arizona. I am appreciative that the gentleman from Arizona and the majority party has finally taken the initiative of bringing issues up here. My objection is that the language that was proposed to the Rules Committee in other amendments dealing with this issue was far broader and would have been better in the future. When we talk about language right now that nothing of us actually impede, we were talking in other pieces of legislation about not hindering border security, not hindering illegal immigration for Homeland Security or other law enforcement agencies. The amendments we tried to propose would have been far broader, far more inclusive and would have dealt with issues into future as opposed to this. But having said that, this is at least a good step in the right direction. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Mr. Chairman, I am assured and comforted. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Now there is one other part that should have been part of this discussion and was not allowed by my friends on the Rules Committee. It was briefly addressed by the gentleman from Florida, but he missed the point, I think, that the gentleman from Alaska was trying to make dealing with personal property. Supposedly this issue does not deal with personal property because we are only dealing with BLM property. The difference, though, is with all of those entities within the Bureau of Land Management proposal, there are private inholdings. They have been a constant source of problem and contentions. Unless you specify the significant value of how you are going to treat these inholdings, you make the situation of those private property holders much more difficult. You raise the specter of trying to change access restrictions because, indeed, if you are now going to run this land like the park service land, that will be a problem. Not only do you create another level of bureaucracy to make those trying to solve their problems much more difficult to get equity, you also create all sorts of different solutions to be there that should have been specified in the legislation. Protecting the private property holders' inholdings in those properties right now is one of the values that BLM lands should be doing, and it should be specified. It is not in this bill. The fact that we cannot add that to this bill, because of a ruling on a partisan vote by Rules Committee, is devastatingly wrong. It will take us down a path where who knows what will be the end result. But, it is an end result that will have the high likelihood of harming individual people, individual people who use this land right now, either for recreation purposes, for sporting purposes, for hunting purposes, or for their own land value purposes, will be harmed unless those issues are clearly specified in this language, and the amendments to do that were not made in order. Several good amendments were made in order, not nearly enough because this bill, as written, is flawed; and this bill, as amended, would still be flawed because it doesn't address those particular issues.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Thank you very much, but please don't try and save myself from anything in the future.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. Put all of my amendments on the floor, and then, then you've got a good argument that is there. Indeed, one of these amendments, specifically the amendment on multiple use, was discussed in committee and was defeated on a partisan voice vote. That issue still is one that is relevant and needs to be part of this bill. If it is not, you have taken the core values between BLM and National Parks and blurred the lines into nonexistence. You can't do that. That has to be one of the values that is here. The second issue I am talking about is private property rights. As I recall, I did not present that in the committee so but it is still very relevant and should be here, and is one of the problems that we are developing if we continue to go on with this. I do have to say to the gentleman from Florida, no, I did not have the privilege of going before your committee and testifying last night. Gosh, I wish I could have done that, and I know you guys really wanted me to be there to continue the testimony and elongate the meeting last night.

Mr. BISHOP of Utah. I thank you if I can answer that question, and as much as I would have loved to, I must say in reality Delta Airlines made the decision for me.