T. Gorton

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, with respect to the Robb amendment which would strike section 329 of the bill before the Senate, perhaps the best way to begin my remarks on it is to read that relatively short section. It reads as follows: For fiscal year 2000, the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to lands within the National Forest Service and the Secretary of the Interior with respect to lands under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management, shall use the best available scientific and commercial data in amending or revising resource management plans for offering sales, issuing leases, or otherwise authorizing or undertaking management activities on lands under their respective jurisdictions provided that the Secretaries may at their discretion determine whether any information concerning wildlife resources shall be collected prior to approving any such plan, sale, lease, or other activity and, if so, the type of collection procedures for such information. It seems to me there are fundamentally three subjects involved in section 329. The first is, of course, that it applies only to fiscal year 2000, the year covered by this appropriations bill. The second subject is that the two Secretaries managing these national lands shall use the best available scientific and commercial data in dealing with the plans they have for those lands. I can't imagine that there is any objection on the part of the proponents of this current amendment to that language. The third subject says that the Secretaries may, at their discretion, determine whether any additional information concerning wildlife resources shall be collected prior to approving these plans. In other words, section 329 doesn't require these Secretaries to do anything. It simply grants them the discretion to act in a reasonable fashion. A number of court decisions, pursuant both to the National Forest Management Act and perhaps even more significantly to forest plans already prepared by this Clinton administration and under the supervision of these Secretaries, have stated essentially that before any contract is entered with a private organization for the harvest of timber in national forests or on Bureau of Land Management lands, an extraordinarily expensive wildlife census must be taken, a census at least as detailed as the census of the people of the United States to be taken next year--on reflection, a census much more elaborate than the census of the people of the United States next year, as we are going to be asked to spend about $4 billion to count every person in the United States. The cost of carrying out the activities required by our courts on our national forests, if we go forward, would be somewhere between $5 billion and perhaps $9 billion. These are matters that deal simply with endangered species. We already have injunctions and orders for the Federal Government with respect to protecting endangered species and not allowing them to be harmed by any of these commercial activities. These are, in effect, censuses of everything that exists in the forest, vertebrate and invertebrate, plant and animal species -- the entire works. There are, of course, other decisions on the other side of this issue. Section 329 attempts to deal reasonably with these requirements. The very groups that brought these actions, various environmental groups, have made two arguments over the course of the last 10 or 12 years that perhaps predominate over the balance of their arguments. The first is that we should stop engaging in timber sales in which the Federal Government--either the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management--lose money; that below-cost timber sales are not a wise investment of the resources of the United States of America. At the same time, of course, they advocate positions, and have succeeded in front of some courts with those positions, the net result of which will be that there can never be a timber sale that is not below cost. The cost of any one of these surveys on any public lands will exceed the value of the timber located on the land. That, of course, in turn, is in pursuit of the second goal of many of these environmental organizations, specifically including the Sierra Club, and that goal is that there should be no harvest, no harvest under any circumstances, on any of our public lands of any of our timber resources. That is a formal position of many of the environmental organizations including those that have been plaintiffs in this litigation. The net result of these decisions is the success of that latter policy. The United States of America is not going to spend $9 billion, or $5 billion, engaging in these particular surveys. It is not a provident expenditure of our money. There is no money in this appropriations bill for such elaborate courses of action under any set of circumstances. As a former head of the Forest Service under President Clinton, Jack Ward Thomas said: This whole idea is designed to make this survey and management system unworkable. Scientists are not looking for these creatures in the first place. The Clinton forest plan, which has reduced by about 80 percent harvests on the public lands--in the Pacific Northwest, in any event, it already set aside 84 percent of our national forests essentially as wildlife refuges. The other 16 percent has been considered by this administration for a harvest in the Pacific Northwest of about 1 billion board feet a year. This was the President's forest plan, his promise in his campaign in 1992 to the people of the Northwest, somewhere between one-fifth and one-sixth of what was the historic harvest. The President has not been able to keep that promise, even using his administration's present forest policies. He has not reached that particular goal. The harvest under these decisions will be zero because the cost of preparing the sales will simply be too great. This is not a policy--the policy of the present enjoined forms of wildlife surveys--that comes from an administration that has been hell- bent for leather to harvest trees in the forests either in the Pacific Northwest or in the Southeast, the location of the 11th Circuit, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is this discretion being given to officials in the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior who are bound and determined to cut the last tree. This, I want to repeat, is a 1-year provision--that is to say it will apply only through most of the rest of the Clinton administration--granting discretion to the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Babbitt, and the Secretary of Agriculture, to use their present relatively reasonable systems of determining whether or not some small portions of the 16 percent of the national forests not set aside for wildlife purposes can be the subject of timber harvesting contracts. It does not require the administration to follow exactly the procedures it has been following with the Northwest forest plan and its plans for other forests at all. It simply says if in their discretion they think they have done enough, they can go ahead and meet their own very modest goals of at least providing a modest harvest of our timber in our national forests. That is all. It is neither more nor less than that. It is not a mandate. It is authority to very green, very pro-environmentalist Departments of Agriculture and Interior to engage in activities of this nature. It is very clear the goal of these lawsuits and the goal of the organizations that have brought these lawsuits is not to get these surveys done. The goal is to see to it that the cost of entering into preparing for any contract for the harvest of timber is so high that none of them will be worth doing. But the effects of those lawsuits, and therefore the effects of this amendment, do not apply only to timber harvesting contracts by any stretch of the imagination. They will apply to any new or different use of any portion of our national forests and of our BLM lands. They will apply equally to the building of campsites or the improvement of campsites or other recreational uses of the forest system itself. As a consequence, the effect of these present lawsuits is to make de facto wilderness areas out of all of our national forest areas and to prohibit any improvement for human recreation, other than that allowed of wilderness areas itself, as well as of any timber harvest. It is an extraordinary set of policies that are essentially advocated by the Robb amendment, a set of policies based on the proposition from some national environmental organizations that there should be no productive use, no economically productive use, of our national forest system whatsoever. The section 329, which really should not have been contested at all, is simply to grant this Clinton administration, for 1 year, the right to go ahead with the extremely environmentally sensitive forest plans that it has structured during the course of the last 6 years, not only in the Northwest part of the United States but in the Southeast part of the United States and Texas and in every other place, either BLM lands or Forest Service lands, and allows them to go ahead. If the President does not want them to go ahead, if the policies are those advocated by these organizations in these lawsuits, nothing in this section 329 prohibits them from adopting those policies. But what it does require is that it will require the President to say: Whatever I told the people of the Northwest, whatever I told the people of other parts of the country about a balance, about the proposition that there were certainly some of our national forests that were appropriate for productive use, for the provision of jobs and for the provision of timber resources of the United States, I now have changed my mind. We are not going to do it at all. If he wants that as a policy, it is not barred by section 329. But he will not be able to hide behind a court decision and say he is trying to do something and trying to abide by a court decision that is impossible, that sets conditions that are impossible economically to meet. We are not going to spend the amount of money necessary to conduct these surveys. The surveys are not needed. They are not worth it. We either choose to deal reasonably with these issues and allow this President and this administration to conduct the modest harvests that they have thought were appropriate, or we are saying we are not going to have any harvest at all, and in all probability we aren't going to have any new recreational activities on our national forests as well. Simply stated, that is the issue: Do we trust this administration not to go overboard in the nature of harvesting, do we believe this administration to be environmentally oriented or not? Most of us, and I think I speak for the Presiding Officer as well as myself, do not think these forest plans are appropriately balanced as they are, but they do provide for some economically productive use of our forests, a productive use that is totally barred under these certain court decisions, whether they are correct or not correct, and which we allow the administration to politely and courteously either abide by or say no, we have a better and more balanced way of doing it. I think it is overwhelmingly appropriate to reject this amendment, to trust this administration not to go overboard in timber harvests by any stretch of the imagination, and to allow it to keep the promises it has made for a period of more than 6 years to the people of timber- dependent communities all over the United States of America.

Mr. GORTON. In light of this agreement, I am able to announce for the majority leader that there will be no further votes today but that there will be three votes at 9:30 tomorrow morning and immediately thereafter. I will speak to the Robb amendment.

Mr. GORTON. I believe a cloture motion on the Hutchison amendment will be filed tomorrow to ripen sometime early next week. There will be lots of time for a discussion of that amendment before any vote on cloture takes place. I hope during most of tomorrow, however, we will deal with other amendments that can be completed and dispensed with. By the time we get to a vote on the cloture, we are pretty close to the end of debate on this bill. I don't know if that is true or not. We will have dealt today in whole or in part with 4 of the 66 amendments that are reserved for the Interior appropriations bill. I trust some will go faster than many of those today. I will state the unanimous consent agreement. Then I intend to speak briefly on the Robb amendment. I believe the Presiding Officer and Senator Craig will also speak on that. Unanimous Consent Agreement

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent that immediately following the vote scheduled at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, notwithstanding rule XXII, the Senate resume consideration of the Interior appropriations bill and there be 2 minutes equally divided prior to a vote in relation to the Bond amendment No. 1621; following that vote, there will be 2 minutes equally divided on the pending Robb amendment No. 1583. I ask unanimous consent no amendments be in order prior to these votes.

Mr. GORTON. Second, I have a unanimous consent agreement under which there will be two votes on the Bond amendment and a vote on the Robb amendment tomorrow morning that apparently have been cleared. Before I present that, I say we will be in session long enough this evening for anyone who wishes to do so to speak on the Bond amendment. I believe the Senator from Illinois wishes to speak. The Senator from Missouri (Mr. Bond) may return for that subject. Senator Hutchison wishes to speak again on her amendment. There may be other speeches on that. There are three or four people here to speak on the Robb amendment. I want all of the speeches on each of these subjects to be consolidated into one point in the Record. This unanimous consent agreement is not going to limit anyone's right to talk on any of these subjects this evening as long as they wish.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, it is still the opinion of the managers that this amendment is likely to be accepted by voice vote. We still haven't directly heard from the Senator from Hawaii, however, who may be nearby. I hope when he finishes we can cast such a vote. We have heard, on the other hand, the senior Senator from Illinois wishes to speak against the Lott amendment proposed for him by Senator Bond and will ask for a vote on that. So we will await his presence and his speech on that subject before there is any attempt to bring that amendment to a vote. But for all other Members with the other 64 amendments, now that we have started to deal with two of them, we would certainly appreciate their coming to the floor and showing a willingness to debate. The Democratic manager, Senator Byrd, and I are certainly going to be happy to grant unanimous consent to move off of one amendment and onto another, I am sure, to keep the debate going with the hope of making progress on the bill. With that, however, I yield the floor.

Mr. GORTON. Then I yield the floor and suggest the Senator from Florida seek to be recognized. Mr. GRAHAM addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I believe the matter before the Senate now is the amendment of Senator Robb, and I ask consent of the Senator from California that her presentation, including all of her questions and answers, be included in the Congressional Record immediately after the speeches of Senators Hutchison and Domenici so that the debate on that subject be continuous, and that other speeches during the course of the evening be consolidated in the Record on the Hutchison amendment.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I understand that the Senator from Hawaii, Mr. Inouye, may wish the opportunity to speak, and perhaps more likely will wish the opportunity to put a statement in the Record. I don't believe that affects the proposition that the amendment will be accepted by voice vote. But I ask that we not take that voice vote at this time, until we are apprised of the desires of the Senator from Hawaii. Under the circumstances, the Senator from Missouri being here, I ask unanimous consent that he be recognized and that we set this amendment aside to deal with another.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, debate on the Interior appropriations bill took place on two separate occasions before the August recess. Two significant amendments have already been voted upon. We now have a unanimous consent agreement for listing all of the amendments that are in order, and they are 66 in number. A substantial share, perhaps 20 or more of those amendments, will either be accepted or will be a part of one omnibus managers' amendment at the end of this debate. I suspect several others will not actually be brought up for discussion in the Senate, but it seems apparent to this Senator, as manager of the bill, that as many as a dozen may require some amount of debate and very likely a vote. Up to four of those amendments are amendments that were included as a part of the bill as it was reported by the Subcommittee on Interior appropriations and by the full Appropriations Committee, which fell under the revised rule XVI. One of those is an amendment originally drafted by the Senator from Missouri. He will bring it up at this point. I have asked the Democratic manager, Senator Byrd, to get me a list of amendments that Members of his party wish to bring up. He is in the process of doing that at the moment. But this is an announcement that we are now open and ready for business. It may be that we will, from time to time, set amendments aside so we can hear debate on others. The majority leader may decide to stack votes on some of these amendments. But this is a very short week. We are starting this at 4 o'clock on Wednesday afternoon. We have all day and into the evening tomorrow for these debates. The majority leader has announced, due to the Jewish holiday, that there will be no votes on Friday. I hope we will have made substantial progress on the bill by the end of tomorrow's session of the Senate. That is possible, of course, only if Members on both sides--both Republicans and Democrats--are willing to bring their amendments to the floor. The one other amendment I have discussed seriously at this point is one by the Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Enzi, and the Senator from Florida, Mr. Graham, on gambling. That amendment is ready to be accepted. Now I see two Members on the floor. If the Senator from Florida--who was told he could go first--would like to bring his amendment up now and submit the rest of the various statements on it, I understand the amendment will be accepted in relatively short order. Is my understanding correct?

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, as far as I know, that concludes debate on the Graham-Enzi amendment. As far as I know, Members are willing to accept a voice vote on the amendment. So unless someone else rises, I suggest the President put the question.

Mr. GORTON. I have no objection.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I would like to express my enthusiastic support for the nomination of Judge Marsha J. Pechman to serve on the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. Ms. Pechman was chosen by a selection committee jointly appointed by my colleague, Senator Murray, and myself, and was jointly recommended by the two Senators from the State of Washington to President Clinton. The President has therefore engaged fully in the normal advice and consent process for choosing Federal judges for this vitally important lifetime position. Judge Pechman has significant judicial experience. She has served as a superior court judge in King County, Washington, for a period of 11 years, handling a wide range of cases, taking an active role in improving the administration of justice, and instructing and teaching other judges and lawyers. Before becoming a judge, Marsha Pechman worked as a deputy prosecuting attorney in King County and was later made a partner in a significant, major law firm in the city of Seattle. I ask my colleagues to join with my colleague from the State of Washington and myself in approving a first-rate nomination on the part of the President, Judge Marsha Pechman, to serve as United States District Court Judge for the Western District of Washington.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, what is the business before the Senate?

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I am aware of the Senator's interest in this project and its importance to Nebraska's history and heritage. We were unable to include funding for one of the accounts where this project might be supported. However, I will work with the Senator to see if we can identify funds for this project in the future.

Mr. GORTON. I appreciate the Senator from Wisconsin raising this issue. Leaving the regional office in Milwaukee will save the Forest Service $4.5 million slated for future years spending to build a new facility in Madison. The Committee agrees that using the $300,000 in the fiscal year 2000 budget to improve the HVAC systems at the Forest Products Lab is a far better use of these funds.

Mr. GORTON. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. GORTON. I thank my colleague from Ohio. The Senator is correct. The funding for National Park Service park management will fully fund the implementation of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

Mr. GORTON. I want to thank Senator Kohl for highlighting the vital work of the Forest Products Lab and reiterate the Committee's support for its research program. national park service concession review

Mr. GORTON. It is, indeed, my expectation that the Department will work with the organization in getting started and will provide a progress report after ninety days, and a full report at the end of the fiscal year.

Mr. GORTON. The Senator from Wisconsin is correct.

Mr. GORTON. I thank my friends from Florida for bringing this matter to my attention. I will take a look at the funding levels for the Task Force as we proceed to Conference.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, there do not seem to be any amendments to the bill that are ripe for debate and for disposition at this point. Did the Senator from Virginia have any further comments?

Mr. GORTON. Certainly. I am happy to respond to my colleague from Nebraska.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read the third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.