T. Gorton

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, Senator Kempthorne's amendment provides $1.6 million to the Fish and Wildlife Service's Resource Management account in the emergency supplemental appropriations title of this bill. These funds would enable the Fish and Wildlife Service to provide technical assistance on fish and wildlife issues to FEMA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Corps of Engineers and other agencies involved in disaster response. amendment no. 3506 On page 480, line 14, after ``Provided,'' insert ``That of the funds provided, $800,000 shall be used for inhalant abuse treatment programs to treat inhalant abuse and to provide for referrals to specialized treatment facilities in the United States: Provided further,''.

Mr. GORTON. These amendments, Mr. President, have also been cleared on both sides. They consist of a Gorton amendment restoring funds to administrative accounts within the Interior bill and changing the date for availability of Bureau of Indian Affairs funds that otherwise would expire on September 30, 1995; second, a Stevens amendment providing funds for flood damage to Fish and Wildlife Service facilities on the Kenai River; third, a Kempthorne amendment to provide emergency funds that will enable the Fish and Wildlife Service to provide technical assistance to other agencies involved in disaster response; a Daschle amendment providing funds to the Indian Health Service for inhalant abuse treatment; and a Hatfield amendment on an amalgamated mill site. I ask they be adopted en bloc, with each description printed in the Record.

Mr. GORTON. I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, as was the case with the distinguished Senator from Maryland, I simply want this amendment to be considered as proposed, against the unanimous consent that will limit amendments in the future, that I hope fervently soon will be adopted. With that, it having been proposed, I ask unanimous consent it now be laid aside for consideration later.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. That is correct. In providing these funds the committee is aware of the need to initiate construction of the Intermodal Center, and that providing these funds would fulfill the Federal commitment to this cost-shared visitor center project.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Idaho.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, due to the prominent nature of this debate, perhaps the first thing we ought to do is to put in context how much, in the way of our national forests and our timber, we are talking about in the contracts that go beyond pure salvage. As a consequence, I have a picture here. The President's forest plan for the Pacific Northwest involves some 24 million acres in the States of Washington and Oregon. Mr. President, 19 million of those acres, more than three- quarters of them, are protected as statutory wilderness or park areas or set aside as research, old growth, and riparian acres. Ten thousand acres in existing contracts are called for to be harvested in this amendment. I have indicated those 10,000 acres here. Oh, you say, Mr. President, you cannot see it? Maybe this magnifying glass will help. Mr. President, you still cannot see it? That is because what we are talking about is so small that, on a graphic illustration like this, you literally cannot see it. Ten thousand acres of harvest in the Pacific Northwest, already under contract, will be canceled automatically by this amendment should it pass. As Senator Hatfield pointed out, these 10,000 acres are not some permanent forest plan. They are unharvested acres in contracts which the Federal Government offered, received bids for, accepted the bids, and signed the contracts between 1990 and 1995. They are legal and binding contracts. And, of course, the amendment is closed-ended because it applies only to those contracts that were already signed. But, Mr. President, let us say that we have made this a permanent amendment and said that every year the Forest Service had to execute contracts for 10,000 acres, and let us weigh it against this chart. Mr. President, grade school math tells us that it would then take 100 years to get to 1 million acres. It would take 1,000 years to get to less than half of the acres shown here in the President's forest plan. Let me say that again, Mr. President. Out of 24 million acres, in 100 years, if this were permanent, we would get to 1 million acres; in 1,000 years we would get almost to half of these acres being harvested once. But, of course, this is not a permanent provision. It just says the Government made a deal, it entered into a set of contracts. It ought to keep those contracts. That is talking about acres here, Mr. President. Let us talk about board feet. This is the almost 400 billion board feet of timber on those acres. This is the almost 300 billion board feet that are in those protected areas. This is the less than 100 billion board feet left. This is what we are talking about, 650 million board feet, somewhat less than one-tenth of the amount of growth each year. Mr. President, you say you cannot see this line? I cannot see this line, standing as close to it as I am, because the number is so small. The number is so small. What did the President of the United States say when he signed this bill, barely 6 months ago? President William Jefferson Clinton said, ``The final bill does contain changes in language that preserve our ability to implement the current forest plans and their standards and to protect other resources such as clean water and fisheries.'' That is what the President said in July of last year about this proposal. Mr. President, this is presented as some kind of modest change, moving toward balance. In fact, of course, this amendment would not only cancel the contracts that have already been let that create legal obligations on the part of the Government, that are the subject of the charts that I have just shown, it would also cancel all of the provisions relating to salvage timber, the actual dead and dying timber, and all of the provisions relating to option 9. Senator Murray, in her comments, spoke about the President's timber summit. At the President's timber summit after he was elected, his statement of balance ended up being what is now called option 9, which called for a harvest of about 1 billion board feet a year in these forests. In the nonprotected lands, that would take almost a century to work through. But, as Senator Murray has admitted, almost none of that was actually harvested, even though that summit took place in 1993. Why? Because of the endless opportunities the law gave for appeals and for delay. It is almost impossible to find a single harvesting contract that was not subject to such an appeal. The Forest Service, President Clinton's Forest Service, tells us that in 1994 and in 1995, 92 percent of all of these appeals were turned down. They were frivolous. But an appeal in connection with salvage timber is as good as a cancellation. That timber is dead. It falls to the forest floor. It rots. If you go through one season stopped by these appeals, for all practical purposes the value of the salvage timber is gone. If you go through two seasons, it is absolutely and totally and completely worthless. So the timber rider in the rescissions bill included three parts. One part said: Mr. President, you have offered the people of the Pacific Northwest option 9. The timber communities do not think it is adequate. It is a harvest of 20 percent, one-fifth of what the normal harvest is. But it was something, it was some offer. You have not been able to keep your promise. We are going to allow you to keep your promise. We are not going to change any of the environmental laws at all. No, you still abide by them. That is why the President was able to make this statement. But once you have determined that a particular offering is valid under option 9, you can go ahead and do it and you cannot be stopped by this frivolous appeal. Second, for the whole country with respect to salvage timber, we said the same thing. Mr. President, once your very green administration, your very environmentally sensitive administration says that a salvage sale ought to go forward, we are going to allow it to go forward. We will not allow it to be stopped by a frivolous appeal until the salvage timber has rotted out and become worthless. But, Mr. President, nothing in either one of these provisions, option 9 or the salvage timber provisions, requires the administration to execute a single contract under option 9 or across the country for salvage timber. It is forced to do nothing that it does not want to do, and yet Senator Murray would cancel its ability to do something if it wants to do something. The only mandate in the rescissions bill was this 650 million board feet, this tiny amount of existing contracts that the Federal Government signed, followed all the rules that were in effect at the time it signed them and for which it is liable if it cancels them. Senator Murray's proposal will cancel all of those contracts, will allow the suspension by appeal of all of the contracts under option 9 or under salvage timber while those appeals are pending, will, in effect, result over the next few months in this season in no harvest at all in the Pacific Northwest and will create both a loss of revenue to the Federal Government, which it now expects from these sales, and very large liabilities on the part of the Federal Government to people who hold valid contracts. Mr. President, how does she pay for it? She does not add to our deficit directly. She takes it out of general administration of the Department of Agriculture's Forest Service and out of forest research, interestingly enough, the very research which the amendment says is so vitally important. That is for the loss of income, the money that would go into those accounts. For the loss of judgments to people who have valid contracts, she says, interestingly enough, the Secretary concerned can take it from any money appropriated to them. Mr. President, did you know that? Did you know that the Secretary could take that money from the account for Rocky Mountain National Park? Do my colleagues know that it can be taken out of agricultural research in South Carolina? No appropriation, no direction from the Congress at all, just wherever an imperial Secretary wants to take the money, no matter what it was appropriated for--to the Department of the Interior or the Department of Agriculture--the Secretary literally can take that money from anywhere. I listened to the eloquent maiden speech of the new Senator from Oregon who wishes for a balanced and a thoughtful approach, and I wholeheartedly join him in that desire. I believe, as Senator Hatfield, dealing with the administration both back in July and at the present time on this has provided exactly that. Senator Hatfield's original work resulted in this statement by the President. That statement is: No problem, no problem at all, we can do everything for the environment we wish consistently with this rider. But over and beyond that, this bill, the bill we have before us, allows buyouts as long as they are agreed to by both contracting parties, allows transfers, as long as they are agreed to by both contracting parties, allows all of the flexibility necessary. The President of the United States promised balance. All of us want that balance. The President of the United States now, in supporting this proposition, says, ``No, this is a tough year and it is an election year. There has been a furor over this.'' There have been all kinds of misstatements. No one in the world would understand from what we have seen how little we are actually talking about: ``You must cancel the whole thing. You must allow appeals to stop any harvest of salvage timber, any harvest under option 9, cancel all of the sales under section 2001(k)'' and, besides that, another 200 million board feet of sales that there has been no controversy about whatsoever. Almost half again as much as we told the President to execute is canceled by this amendment about which there has not been any controversy, but it will be canceled if this amendment is adopted. Mr. President, this is not balance. It is not a fair approach. The definition of what is allowed in salvage in here is so tight that there will be no salvage. You cannot salvage in any area without roads. You cannot salvage in any wilderness area. You cannot salvage in any lake or recreational area. You cannot salvage in any conservation area. That is what the whole forest system was created for. There is no money in the salvage account, because it is all used for something else. If that is not enough, if you get around that and find one or two, it can be stopped by an appeal. Mr. President, this amendment is a prescription for an end to all harvesting of timber in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest and, therefore, should be defeated.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I yield such time as the Senator from Montana uses.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I yield 7 minutes to the Senator from Idaho.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, a brief history. One year ago, right now, 2 years after President Clinton had proposed his very, very modest timber plan for the Pacific Northwest, less than half of what the President had stated was in his plan for a harvest was actually being carried out, frustrated by endless litigation. This proposal was passed, two-thirds of which simply enabled the President to carry out his own promises, to keep his own commitments. One portion of it authorized the harvesting of certain contracts that had long since been executed by the Federal Government, and, Mr. President, which represent this much of the national forests in the Pacific Northwest--this being the entire forest, this being what is already cut off. You, Mr. President, cannot see the number of acres we are talking about. I do not think you can see it when I put this magnifying glass on it. That was the true compromise. What did the President say about it? The President said that compromise contained language that preserved the ability to implement the current forest plans and their standards to protect fisheries and the like. Then the President changed his mind, and the senior Senator from Oregon offered him a further compromise, which is included in this proposal. Now we have an amendment which would cancel not only everything that was done last year, but would cancel more than everything that was done last year--canceling contracts that were never so much as controversial, establishing a new definition of salvage, much more restrictive than that of Clinton's own Forest Service, and a definition of salvage which will result, not in a compromise, not in authorizing salvage timber, but, in effect, prohibiting any salvage whatsoever. Even helicopter logging will be prohibited in roadless areas. There are so many restricted areas and so little money that there will be no salvage timber, not just in the Pacific Northwest, but in your State, in States all up and down the east coast, in the intermountain West--there will be nothing left. How is this to be paid for? Because now we have to pay for these things. How is it to be paid for? It is to the credit of the junior Senator from my State that she does not just say, ``put it on the cuff, add it to the deficit.'' She takes $130 million out of the appropriation for the Forest Service. Earlier today this was only $110 million. We checked with some people in the Forest Service who, understandably enough, do not want to be identified. That $110 million cut will cause the RIF of 1,400 employees of the Forest Service, all across the United States. So I say to the Senator from Vermont, the Senator from Alabama, the Senator from North Dakota, your forests will suffer, too. One thousand RIF's in the field of reforestation, stand improvement, recreation maintenance, watershed improvement, supposedly the very goals of this amendment, will be undercut by the RIF's of the people who would carry them out, and 400 or 500 more in the field of forest research. So, we will devastate our national forest planning, we will devastate the very goals of a healthy forest that we are talking about, by passing this amendment. An amendment to do what? An amendment to do what? An amendment to cancel that many acres of timber harvest contracts. Can you see it? You cannot. You cannot see it. It represents a one-time harvest of one-tenth of the number of board feet that regenerate automatically in these national forests every year; one- tenth of 1 year's growth. I am simply saying the United States of America, when it signs a contract, ought to keep its word, it ought to carry that contract out. And when the President makes a commitment--this President, this environmentalist President--we ought to empower him to carry out that commitment. The amendment will make a mockery of the President's commitments. It will invalidate valid contracts. It will result in the loss of thousands of jobs in our forest, private sector jobs, and probably 1,500 jobs in the Forest Service itself, helping our forests to grow and to regenerate. Mr. President, how many minutes does the Senator from Idaho need?

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, as Senator Hatfield knows, Cowlitz County has been digging out, literally and figuratively, from the effects of Mt. St. Helens ever since 1980. These last two floods have exacerbated the movement of sediment in the Toutle, Cowlitz and Columbia Rivers creating both flooding and navigation concerns. Will the current Senate bill provide funding so the Corps of Engineers can use authorities available to them to review and correct these newly created problems?

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. For almost a year, this Senator has suggested that within the frame of reference of the amount of money available to use for the Department of the Interior and related agencies, if the administration wanted to shift priorities, then we would be happy, seriously, to consider those shifts. None have been proposed.

Mr. GORTON. Well, you do not. I must say, I found particularly striking the analogy of the Senator from Missouri to a 2- or 3-year-old child who simply says, ``More.'' In this case, what we have is an administration that only says, ``More. We want more spending, we do not want any setoffs, but we want to send the bill to somebody else, to our children and our grandchildren. We really do not want a serious proposal that will lead us to a balanced budget, except maybe after the end of the next Presidential term. We will think about binding someone in the future, but we don't want to bind ourselves.'' So we have now in front of us the proposition that $164 billion is not enough money to spend, and the President will veto a bill that only spends $164 billion, of which $5 billion is fenced, as it were. ``We've got to have $166 billion to spend the way we want without any conditions imposed on that spending.'' Again, I think the Senator from Oregon was too polite to say so, but I believe that if that is the proposition with which we are faced, it is pointless to spend a week or so of this body's time debating the details of a proposal which will be vetoed in any event. Regrettably, we will perhaps have to approach the President with another of these notorious continuing resolutions; that is to say, short-term appropriations bills, which--and I think I can speak for my colleagues on this side of the aisle--when I say they will be for smaller amounts of money, they will be markedly smaller amounts of money in authorizations for the administration than is the bill that was arrived at working with both Republicans and Democrats in an attempt to reach a common ground somewhere between the last set of appropriations proposed by this body and those originally asked for by the President. It is too bad, but here we are with a veto threat over the proposition that we are not going to spend $166 billion in exactly the way the President wishes but only $164 billion, with $5 billion of it contingent upon the President agreeing to a balanced budget at some reasonable future time. Mr. SIMPSON addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON. He will.

Mr. GORTON. It seems to me that is the most apt comment on the subject.

Mr. GORTON. I believe he was specific about it. Perhaps a few hundred million were in the field of the Senator from Missouri. Others were in social and health services. My own responsibility for the Department of Interior and related agencies, where we are willing to spend $12.5 billion, is maybe $200 million more than he wants to spend over and above $12.5 billion; in other words, 1 or 2 percent more money than we are authorizing for him, and yet he threatens to veto this entire bill because he cannot spend every dime that he wishes to spend.

Mr. GORTON. I will yield.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I hope that my distinguished friend from Missouri and my friend from Montana will attend my remarks for just a moment, and perhaps comment on them, just as they have on one another's with respect to the bill that they have been so eloquently attempting to move to passage. Just a few moments ago, the distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Hatfield, appeared on the floor with the extraordinary news that the administration had expressed its unwavering intention to veto the omnibus appropriations bill that was reported by the Senate Appropriations Committee just yesterday. The Senator from Oregon pointed out that appropriations, the spending authorization for the spending of money, is the prerogative of Congress. That is perhaps the most fundamental of all the prerogatives of Congress, that no President of the United States has ever been able to or can now or will be able to in the future force the Congress to pass an appropriation at a level that the President wishes. But my distinguished chairman and friend from Oregon, I do not think, reached the true depths of the arrogance of this veto threat. So while he was speaking, I got out our publication, our committee report, on the subject. I discovered that the total amount of money that we proposed to allow the President of the United States to spend during the current fiscal year in that bill, for five different agencies, is $164 billion, approximately $164 billion, approximately $164 billion, of which a little less than $5 billion is restricted and cannot be spent unless the President reaches an agreement with Congress on a balanced budget at some time in the future. The President of the United States has said that he will veto this bill unless we allow him to spend $166 billion instead of $164 billion without any restrictions, without any commitment on his part, without any agreement with the Congress with respect to a balanced budget in the future. I must say that I find this to be absolutely extraordinary and without precedent, that a President of the United States should, once again, threaten to close down five major units of our Government because we propose to allow him to spend $164 billion and he wants to spend $166 billion. I know that each of my colleagues here on the floor is a chairman of a subcommittee on the Appropriations Committee, as am I. The Senator from Missouri and I are chairmen of subcommittees whose bills are a part of this overall bill. But I just wonder whether they agree with me or not that it is practically beyond belief that a President of the United States should threaten this whole range of programs in all of our areas on which we are willing to spend $164 billion just as he is willing to commit himself at some point or another to a balanced budget, and the great bulk of that, $159 billion anyway, whether he agrees or not, just because we will not spend $2 billion more than he wants.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, last weekend 170 employees of the Mayr Bros. sawmill in Hoquim, WA, were notified that they were about to be laid off. One-hundred and seventy individual workers is not a particularly large number in connection with all of the layoffs that have taken place across the Nation during the course of the last year. But this is almost the last 170 workers for this particular mill. They are in addition to several thousand others in the area who have lost their jobs during the course of the last 4 or 5 years. Hoquim, WA, the location of the mill, is a small city of about 9,000 people. The Mayr Bros. mill is one of the few that remain in that city. It has been a mainstay of this community for 63 years at this point in its history. Hoquim, Mr. President, to put it mildly, is not a destination tourist resort by any stretch of the imagination. It is a working-class community that has provided wood and fiber and paper products for the people of the United States for the entire length and breadth of the 20th century. These layoffs, however, are from a different cause than simply the dynamics of a constantly changing economy. They are taking place because of deliberate policies imposed by the Congress and by the administration with respect to the harvest of timber in our national forests and on the lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management of the United States. It is particularly ironic in the light of these layoffs that the junior Senator from the State of Washington the day before yesterday introduced a bill that would effectively cancel all of the harvest on Federal lands all across the country that were authorized by a rescissions bill signed as recently as last July by the President of the United States, after extensive negotiations involving his office, my office, and that of the distinguished Senator from Oregon [Mr. Hatfield]. The owner and operator of Mayr Bros. mill, Tom Mayr, has left four Federal timber sales. They are commonly referred to as section 318 sales, named after that section of the fiscal year 1990 Interior Appropriations Act sponsored by then Senator Adams and Senator Hatfield to provide some interim relief while we determined the future management of our national forests. But even those sales specifically authorized by a fairly recent statute here have been held up for more than 5 years just while a study respecting the marbled murrelet has gone on in the timber area. Now, Tom Mayr is not the only person who is affected by those provisions or by the Rescission Act provisions. Roughly 600 million board feet of Federal timber contracts have been held up by the Government. In each case they have one feature in common. They represent contracts which were signed by the Federal Government authorizing the harvest about which the Federal Government had second thoughts at some later period of time. As a consequence, if they are not carried out, the Federal Government will have very considerable contractual liabilities, at least $100 million--perhaps more than that. Included in the Rescissions Act was language directing that the administration release these timber sales unless one of these marbled murrelets was known actually to be nested in the area. So they are sales in which there is no known nesting habitat for that particular species. When President Clinton signed the bill, sale owners began to see some light at the end of a very long tunnel but then the administration changed its mind. Despite the fact that the language in the provision was very clear and was discussed with representatives of the White House before it was passed and signed, it has literally taken court orders to get the Clinton administration to implement the provision. As a consequence, fewer than one-half of the sales covered by the provision have been released and only those as a result of a court order. Much has been made of these so-called salvage timber provisions in the rescissions bill, so an outline of precisely what they contain should be included in the Record at this point. First, the only one of the three areas covered by the rescissions bill language on timber harvesting contracts is section 2001(k). Two other provisions, one on timber salvage and one on the administration's own option 9 provisions, were designed simply to help the administration carry out its own promises. They required the administration to do nothing at all. If it wished to repudiate its promises with respect to salvage timber or with respect to the option 9 commitments of the President of the United States to the people of the Pacific Northwest, it is entirely free to do so unaffected by the provisions of the rescissions bill. The areas that are covered by the bill on a mandatory basis involve less than 10,000 acres out of the 30 million acres of Federal forestland in Oregon and Washington, fewer than 1 acre out of 3,000. Let us put it in a slightly different fashion. If this provision were a permanent provision ordering this amount of harvest every year rather than a one-time provision to honor past contracts, in 1,000 years fewer than half of the acres in the national forests in these two States would have been harvested once. In 1,000 years, fewer than half of the acres would have been harvested one time. The 600 million board feet represents one-tenth of the historic harvest level in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and far, far less than the natural regeneration rate of those forests. We are talking about a tiny degree of relief, a very modest degree of relief both for the people of timber country and for that matter in connection with the demand of the people of the United States for forest products for paper production, for fiber production, for wood for the building of houses, and the like. Even so, when the administration began to have second thoughts about this provision, Senator Hatfield and I listened quite carefully to its views, and in the bill passed by the Appropriations Committee yesterday to gather together all of the remaining appropriations bills in one omnibus proposal we have proposed two changes. We have made it much easier for the administration to exchange particular sale areas that it thinks are especially sensitive for others that are less sensitive assuming that the contractor goes along. We have also made it possible for the administration to buy out certain sales if it can gain the consent of the contracting party, and it can. We know of areas, including Mr. Mayr's areas, in which it can do so. But it is required to use the money already appropriated to it and not simply to do as the administration wishes, to come up with another $100 million unaccounted for, to be added to the deficit to be sent as a bill to our children and grandchildren. If it can find other ways in which to come up with presently appropriated money to purchase these sales or can find other areas in which to make exchanges of such sales, it can do so. I think it would be especially ironic if the legislation to repeal the rescissions bill were to pass in the immediate aftermath of this most recent set of layoffs. It shows a tremendous indifference to the faith of hard-working people who have paid their taxes and built their communities over the better part of this century. There are those who claim to be offended by this law, so offended that they call for its repeal. I am offended; I am offended by their complete and total lack of compassion that this proposal shows to these hard-working people and to the American economy and to the countless others before them who have lost their timber-related jobs as a result of similar policies. I am offended by the total indifference to the cost of the repudiation of legal contracts entered into by the Government, shrugging them off on the proposition that someone else can pay for them sometime in the future and that we will simply add another bill to the taxpayers of the United States. Mr. President, we will be debating this issue during the course of the next several days. I will have some charts demonstrating graphically the statistics I have outlined, that we are talking about an extremely modest proposal. We are speaking of far less harvest than the President's own promises as recently as 2 years ago to the people of the Pacific Northwest. We are simply enabling the President to keep the promises that he made, that he now, in an election year, desires to ignore.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I will object to the further consideration of this bill at this time.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I understand there is a bill due for its second reading.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I yield the floor.

Mr. GORTON. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Gorton pertaining to the introduction of S. 1589 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')