Colorado Wilderness Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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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.

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