21st Century Endangered Species Transparency Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Chairman, I do appreciate the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee yielding me this time.
You know, it is amazing when you even mention dealing with reforming the Endangered Species Act how people all of a sudden think--and it is just a matter of putting some controls or limiting it--that you are antispecies, you are terrible on the environment. Really what we are talking about here is just basically like all of the things in life that are updated from time to time, this is something that needs to be updated. I have been pleased to work in this working group, together with the chairman and others, to bring about some sensible reforms.
The reason we do this, farmers, ranchers, folks back home, my Farm Bureau, have been hit by lawsuits. And I appreciate what the gentleman just said. It is lawsuits, not science, that seems to be pressuring some of this along. In fact, in 2011, the WildEarth Guardians and Center for Biological Diversity entered into an agreement with Fish and Wildlife that added 1,000 species. Now, the only problem with that is that no one in the ag community and others who were affected were allowed to participate. Now, I have another bill called Sue and Settle that would have taken care of that when we passed it out of this House.
It was said earlier that, when you take the ESA, you don't take a meat cleaver approach. Well, I think the problem is not a meat cleaver approach here. It is the fact that many don't want to take an approach at all. They want to just leave it alone. They don't even want to take up having reasonable caps on attorneys' fees. Instead of putting money into lawyers' pockets at a cap of just $125 an hour, they would rather go on--which, by the way, in that same 2011 case, the attorneys' fees went over $300,000 in this situation.
You see, the problem here is not wanting to deal with ESA. The problem is wanting to continue an ideological bent that says leave it alone even at the expense of jobs, even at the expense of saying that maybe we messed up, even at the expense of saying maybe we can find a different point of view, maybe we can have valid science, or maybe just addressing it.
For those of us in northeast Georgia, we want good, clean water, clean air, and protection of our wildlife. But also, we understand that taxpayer dollars spent on this needs to happen. We need to do this reform.
By the way, Mr. Chairman, I still have no takers on my bat.
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