Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I have come down to the floor today to talk about the package of public lands measures included in the House-passed Defense bill. I am told we are likely to vote on that bill as early as tomorrow in the Senate.

Within the lands package is a measure we worked on called the Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act.

The watershed, which is pictured here, is a beautiful parcel of national forest land up the road from Durango in the southwest corner of Colorado.

I will say at the outset that our office may have introduced the bill in the Senate, but it was really the people I represent in southwest Colorado who wrote every bit of this piece of legislation.

Over 6 years ago, a diverse group of local citizens, mountain bikers, anglers, outfitters, local officials, and many others all got together to talk about the future of the land. Everyone involved liked to visit the area for recreation or to do business there. Their discussion was to developing a plan to manage the area so everyone could enjoy it and benefit from the multiple uses well into the future.

Over the Memorial Day weekend in 2011, the Hermosa workgroup invited my family and me for a hike through the watershed and to join the discussion, and we took them up on that offer.

We loaded up the van, drove to Durango, and met the working group at the Hermosa Creek trailhead.

My youngest daughter Anne, who was then probably about 8, made a hiking stick out of a nearby fallen branch, and we started up the trail with 40 or so others from the local community.

The Presiding Officer knows this area well. As we climbed higher and higher, we were overcome by the beauty around us and the forests and valleys and crystal-clear streams and unspoiled views in almost every direction.

After about an hour, the group pulled off the forest service trail into a meadow, and as Anne, Halina, and Caroline Bennet, my three daughters, made me a dandelion necklace out of the dandelions that were there, we started a discussion about what this area meant to the people who were on this trip.

The sportsmen came to fish for native Colorado cutthroat trout and for back-country elk hunting. The mountain bikers came to enjoy single-track riding trails known throughout the country and throughout the world. The local water districts love Hermosa because it provides clean water for the city of Durango, and workers in the timber and mining industry stress that some of the watershed could contribute to extractive development in the future.

The upshot of the discussion we had in the meadow that afternoon was an agreement to work together on a bill, a balanced bill that managed the watershed so it would contribute to the local economy long into the future. More than just working on this bill, I think

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the people in that meadow set out to prove that people in this country can still work together and set an example for the U.S. Congress.
After nearly 3 1/2 years of negotiations since that hike, we are on the verge of passing that bill and sending it to the President for his signature. The Hermosa Creek Watershed Protection Act governs the entire watershed. It includes provisions to allow for multiple uses, such as timber harvesting for forest health, continued access for Colorado's snowmobilers--a critical provision to allow Silverton's winter economy to continue to prosper.

The bill enhances opportunities for back-country fishing made possible by the great work of Trout Unlimited and Colorado Parks and Wildlife to reintroduce native cutthroat trout to the watershed.

The bill also adds--importantly--nearly 40,000 acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System, lands that provide unique and important opportunities for solitude and reflection, lands that will remain undeveloped forever so that they will always have clear streams to fish and lush forests for local outfitters to take clients into the forest on horseback.

I am proud to report that the bill has the unanimous bipartisan backing of the two county commissions involved, the San Juan County Commission and the La Plata County Commission. I thank those commissioners for their leadership, collaboration, and their vision, and the two local towns, Durango and Silverton. It has the support of the Hermosa Creek Workgroup, ranging from hardrock miners to environmental groups. These are the people we say can never get along and can never get anything done because everybody has to get only their position and disregard the position that the other has, and we have proven that is not true, as I said, ranging from hardrock miners to environmental groups such as the San Juan Citizens Alliance, Conservation Colorado, and The Wilderness Society.

It has the support of sportsmen, Trout Unlimited, and the back-country hunters and anglers.

The Hermosa bill is also supported by the local water district, the Southwestern Water Conservation District.

The outdoor recreation community--including the Colorado Snowmobile Association, Colorado Off-Highway Vehicle Coalition, and the Trails 2000 mountain bike group--supports the measure. And support for Hermosa is especially strong from the local business community. Companies as diverse as fly shops, car dealerships, the Durango Chamber, and Mercury Payment Systems, one of the area's largest employers, all agree that protected public lands add to the region's quality of life and help them attract topnotch talent to the region.

This bill grew from the grassroots up. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents worked together to cement a long-term plan for their community's future.

I thank Senator Udall, a long-time champion for Colorado's public lands and wilderness, for joining me as a cosponsor of the bill.

I also wish to thank Congressman Scott Tipton, our partner in the House, for supporting this bill and demonstrating that bipartisanship still exists in some corners of the Capitol. He has been outstanding to work with, as has his staff, and I look forward to collaborating on other conservation measures in the future.

To close and bring this back to the

beginning--I see my colleague is here--I don't have to convince most people that Colorado is a special place. Many people from all over the United States have been to our State to ski our mountains, run our rivers, or climb a 14er.

The Hermosa Creek watershed represents some of the best Colorado has to offer. It deserves to be protected, and that is what this bill does.

However, in some respects, I wish Hermosa didn't have to pass this way. This lands package is a great achievement. It came through a robust bipartisan and bicameral process, and that work is something truly to be commended.

At the same time, I think the Hermosa Creek bill could have passed by unanimous consent years ago as a stand-alone bill, or as part of another smaller, bipartisan, bicameral package that didn't have to wait almost 6 years while local communities all across the country have been left in limbo. People there don't work on the same time that people here work, and their expectations are that we are going to move things along. No one should object to bipartisan, commonsense measures that are widely supported. But instead of regular order, we are left voting on large packages of lands bills every number of years.

In fact, save one wilderness bill that passed earlier this session, Congress has not passed a wilderness bill since 2009. Congress has not passed one wilderness bill since 2009--I suppose we passed one.

Last Congress was the first time a session of Congress hadn't passed a wilderness bill in the 50-year history of the Wilderness Act. That had never happened before, whether the Senate was Democratic or the Senate was Republican, whether the House was Democratic or Republican, or whether the President was a Democrat or a Republican. It never happened before. This Congress--provided the vote goes well tomorrow--will have waited until the eleventh hour.

The 2009 bill, which was one of the very first ones I voted on as a Senator, created 2 million acres of new wilderness.

The package we will vote on tomorrow contains several hundred thousand acres more, including nearly 40,000 new wilderness acres, as I mentioned in the Hermosa bill. While that is great progress, and it truly is, I wish we were doing more.

Despite dozens of other widely supported conservation proposals that have been introduced this session, there are only four other wilderness bills included in this package. Once again, I am strongly supportive of the package, and I urge my colleagues to vote yes. But in the new Congress we ought to hit the reset button and truly honor the intent of the Wilderness Act--which President Johnson signed into law 50 years ago--by passing more wilderness bills. I can't think of a better anniversary present for the landmark law than for the 114th Congress to return and pass more of these bills.

Let's defy expectations about what the change in the majority means here. Let's lift up the bipartisan work that is happening around here and pass more of these bills.

Historically conservation has been a bipartisan issue going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt, and I hope we might return to the cooperation we have seen in the decades since then and get some more wilderness and conservation done for the American people.

This is a glorious and beautiful country that we all represent. We ought to save some of it for our kids and grandkids by passing this package and coming together on some others.

I urge yes on the bill.

I thank the Presiding Officer for all of his work to make sure we could bring this lands bill together with the NDAA bill.

I urge a ``yes'' vote.

I thank the Presiding Officer, and I thank my colleague from Alaska for allowing me to go ahead with my remarks.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to thank the Senator from Alaska for her tireless efforts on the lands bill and the NDAA bill and the bipartisan spirit she brought to all of these negotiations over a long period of time. She is to be commended for it. I don't think we would be anywhere close to where we are without her work. I thank her for that.

I am here to speak briefly about the Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's interrogation methods. I support the committee's decision to release the report. As a country, it shows we have the courage to face the truth no matter how ugly that truth may be. Coloradans need to know the truth. The American people deserve to know the truth. Our willingness to face this difficult truth reminds us that we live and we are lucky to live in the most open and transparent democracy the world has ever known. Unlike the acts brought to light by the Intelligence Committee report, the willingness for self-examination is something to be celebrated about America.

The report will be the subject of significant debate over the coming weeks and months and maybe even years, as it should be. Nobody should be cavalier about the risks that are associated with the release of this information, but this is a discussion our country needs to have.

Although I am still reviewing the report, a couple of things are pretty clear at the outset.

First, the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques failed to secure accurate information or cooperation from detainees. The very first finding of the report says:

While being subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques and afterwards, multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence. Detainees provided fabricated information on critical intelligence issues, including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities.

Not only has torture not made the country safer, it may have made us less safe--at least according to this report.

Second, the report reveals that the CIA withheld information from the FBI, the State Department, and the Director of the Office of National Intelligence. It denied access to detainees and provided inaccurate information about the interrogation tactics. Information was withheld from former Secretary of State Colin Powell out of concern he would ``blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what's been going on.'' The CIA repeatedly misled Congress and impeded oversight by its own inspector general.

The report rebuts any notion that these brutal tactics led to actionable intelligence that made our country safer. It highlights the lengths to which people systematically misled other agencies, the Congress, and for years the American people. But most significantly, this report--and I thank the Presiding Officer for his service on the Intelligence Committee. It is a committee that by definition people can't learn very much about, and I know it takes a lot of time and an awful lot of work that can go underappreciated. But this week we are learning why the work on that committee is so important.

Most significantly, as I was saying, this report has reminded us that the use of torture is completely at war with who we are as a country and the ideals we hold. Throughout our country's history, our American values--the notion that all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable, sustainable rights--have sustained us through our most difficult times. They helped us triumph in World War II and eventually led to the fall of communism during the Cold War. They have attracted millions of immigrants to our shores. They inspired generations of Americans to rectify the inequality that exists in their own time to create a more perfect union. In fact, the values of democracy and human dignity are what brought my mother and her family to the United States after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland. It was a place that they called beautiful America, as much an idea as it was a place to them. Torture is repugnant to these fundamental American ideals.

It is often said that the strength of our democratic institutions is tested during times of crisis. Understanding what happened and ensuring we won't use torture again will help our democratic institutions persevere in the future and serve future generations as well as the generations that were here before. It will demonstrate that we are better and we are stronger than our enemies. It will ensure that our uniquely American values will continue to inspire people like my mother and her parents all across the globe.

I yield the floor.

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