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INTRODUCTION 



On May 9, 1996, I suggested the following scenario to the 

 Republican Round Tahle in Reno, Nevada: The Drafters of our 

 Constitution were uncommonly wise men. They suffered 

 mightily through the stifling heat of Philadelphia, denying 

 to themselves the comfort of homes and families. If a 

 person could have persuaded them that, under the very 

 document they were fashioning, by 1996 we United States 

 citizens would work from January 1 to May 7 of each calendar 

 year just to support the cost of government, they would have 

 packed their belongings and gone home without completing the 

 document which is the basis for what has been called the 

 "genius" of American politics. I also suggested, however, 

 that more than likely a warning of such unlimited spread of 

 taxation would have gone unheeded because the Drafters would 

 have refused to believe that such uncontrolled federal 

 government spending and taxation was possible under the 

 document they were drafting. 



The men who participated in the "Miracle at Philadelphia" 

 sacrificed in order to develop a document which would 

 provide to a central government only those limited powers wh 

 necessary for protection against foreign powers and 

 necessary for commercial intercourse. They made sure that 

 the main body of the Constitution specifically limited the 

 powers of the central government. Then, the Ninth and Tenth 

 Amendments were added as the final security for that 

 limitation. I sincerely believe that the Drafters would 

 have preferred a union of individually powerful states to an 

 unlimited central government. 



I now voice to you the same scenario as to the process of 

 Ecosystem Planning which this Committee has been 

 considering. If the Drafters could have been persuaded that 

 by 1996 a team of federal employees of the executive 

 department, acting outside the scope of Congressional 

 authority, would be putting together a plan for land use 

 control for an entire state of the Union, with every 

 intention of spreading that control through other states, 

 they would have packed and gone home. They were in 

 Philadelphia to draft a docviment which would forever prevent 

 such central control . 



But, this Committee is now considering the life expectancy 

 of the Eastside and Upper Columbia River Basin Ecosystem 

 Projects which accomplish such federal land control over an 

 area stretching from the Cascade Mountains east to Montana, 



from Canada south to Nevada with all of Idaho encompassed. 



The EIS which they propose spreads a spidery web of federal 

 land planning never before condoned by a Congress of the 

 United States. They are undoubtedly an integral part of a 

 projected land use control which envisions control over 



