GOP Blocks Bill for more land access for hunters...

[JesseR]

http://news.yahoo.com/gop-blocks-bill-hunters-more-land-access-010500663.html

I support them for watching the budget, however it would be nice to have the EPA off our backs about lead bullets....

WASHINGTON (AP) — A wide-ranging bill to give hunters and fishermen more access to public lands stalled in the Senate Monday after Republicans said it spends too much money.
Republicans supported opening lands for outdoorsmen and many other provisions in the bill sponsored by Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, but GOP senators blocked the legislation on principle Monday evening in a mostly party-line procedural vote after Senate Budget Committee's top Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, objected to spending on conservation programs included in the bill.
The sportsmen's bill would increase land access and allow hunters to bring home as trophies 41 polar bears killed in Canada before the government started protecting polar bears as a threatened species. The legislation would also exclude ammunition and tackle from federal environmental laws that regulate lead, allow bow hunters to cross federal land where hunting isn't allowed, encourage federal land agencies to help states maintain shooting ranges, boost fish populations and protect animal habitat.
Sessions said he supported the overall bill but objected to spending on conservation programs that he said violated budget rules. Democrats argued that the bill also raised money for those provisions.
The bill also faced some objections from environmental groups over the polar bear imports and exclusions from lead standards.
The lead provision threatens public health and the measures "could set back wildlife conservation efforts," said California Sen. Barbara Boxer, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, while acknowledging she supported other provisions in the bill. Boxer was the only Democrat to vote against moving the bill forward Monday.
Ammunition and tackle that contain lead are now unregulated under federal toxic substance laws, and the EPA has so far declined to regulate them. The bill would make it law that the Environmental Protection Agency could not regulate ammunition and tackle, leaving those decisions to states. Environmental groups opposing the exemption say that birds on land and water are killed by lead poisoning after eating the spent ammunition and fishing tackle.
The polar bear provision would allow the hunters — two from Tester's home state of Montana — who killed polar bears in Canada just before a 2008 ban on polar bear trophy imports took effect — to bring the bears' bodies across the border. The hunters involved were not able to bring the trophies home before the Fish and Wildlife Service listed them as a threatened species.
Some animal welfare groups, including of The Humane Society of the United States, say that allowing the polar bears bodies across the border could set a bad precedent and embolden other hunters to try and circumvent threatened or endangered species laws.

 

[Lurker66]

Partisan politics.

 

[dennishoddy]

I stand to be corrected, but I'm thinking the main objection is the lead in bullets by a noted anti gun politition by the name of barbera boxer from comiefornika.

Polar bears are not in decline as has been reported by the "Green idots", but are at record highs as far as numbers of bears are concerned. Pictures of them on ice floe's are how they actually live, and have been documented swimming more than 20 miles across open oceans to reach new hunting grounds.
A few pics of a female and two cubs on a small iceburg, supposedly stranded, have created a fire storm of protests from those that have no clue about the polar bears true enviorment.

 

[vvvvvvv]

Partisan politics.

It looks to me like more cooperation...

 

[p238shooter]

I think it mostly comes back that the government does not have enough money to regulate what we would like to do, so we are not allowed to do it. Real endangered species should be protected. Phoney ones to impede our lives should be abolished.

 

[RickN]

I think it mostly comes back that the government does not have enough money to regulate what we would like to do, so we are not allowed to do it. Real endangered species should be protected. Phoney ones to impede our lives should be abolished.

This!

 

[Old Fart]

I believe there may have been a rather large spending bill attached to it in the senate....