698 



mary objection to this language was that it can be as liberally inter- 

 preted as anyone's imagination could want to allow it to be» 



Mr, President, Senators want to get on with other business, and I 

 want them to. I do not want to belabor a point already made time and 

 time again. But I do want Members of the Senate to understand that 

 bad laws are easily made and very difficult to remove, and I think this 

 subsection of this bill is a bad law which ultimately will prevail, which 

 probably will go to the President and be signed by him, and I can as- 

 sure every Member of this body that that will never be removed from 

 this act once it is placed on there, and there will be all kinds of appli- 

 cations for grants going to the Secretary for the most specious, spu- 

 rious reasons. 



The amendment does not take anything away from what the autliors 

 of the bill intended to cover, but it does take away the right from some 

 inventive, ingenious people to raid the Treasury for purposes totally 

 unrelated to this bill. 



Mr. HoLLiNGS. Mr. President, now we have ingenious people raiding 

 the Federal Treasury. 



These bills were not only reviewed by all the members of the Com- 

 merce Committee on both sides of the aisle, particularly those assidu- 

 ous persons on the other side of the aisle who would be the keepers of 

 the Treasury, but also by some of those on the pjudget Committee, and 

 particularly our colleagues on the Committee on Interior and Insular 

 Affairs who have a respected knowledge in this area. This is a rec- 

 onciliation of the original amendment that we made between the po- 

 sition espoused by the Senator from Louisiana (Mr. Johnston) and 

 that of the Senator from Washington (Mr. Jackson) . It is no dubious 

 raid on any treasury. The guidelines are here, the amounts have been 

 computed, the Secretary of the Treasury has administered this in a 

 most careful fashion, and because of that, the States have acted re- 

 sponsibly. As the Senator from Louisiana says, they are trying to de- 

 velop a coastal zone plan, and they have not had it approved yet, and 

 do not even know whether they want it approved. 



We are back to fundamentals. Under one section, we have the ad- 

 verse impacts resulting from energy facilities and resource develop- 

 ment, and on the other hand, the automatic payments to deal with the 

 impacts of offshore drilling on the adjacent coast. 



We use that example of Cape Charles, Va., in Northampton County, 

 where Brown and Root has a 2,000-acre option, and it is ready to go 

 and start constructing in this iiiral area these offshore platforms for 

 drilling, the rigs, the "manufacture'' — that is exactly the language. 

 The Senator says he is talking about deviousness and raiding the 

 Treasury. So I am reading his amendment . . . that has to do with 

 energy facilities in the coastal zone. 



Now there you are. They could go ahead and drill offshore and liave 

 had this impact, expended all these funds, and still receive nothing for 

 impacts, if they did not hit any oil, if they did not actually receive any 

 grants from the automatic fund or there was not any brought ashore 

 from an adjacent State. 



His amendment just guts the entire energy part of it, and our lan- 

 guage was put in by a unanimous vote from our Commerce Committee, 

 and approved by the chairman of the Committee on Interior and In- 



