[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 171 (Thursday, September 30, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6821-S6826]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                   Nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning

  Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, fellow Senators, and the American public, I 
rise today to underscore a travesty that is about to take place here in 
about an hour on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I am talking about the 
BLM matter, the Bureau of Land Management matter, the nominee the 
President of the United States has made to run the Bureau of Land 
Management as the Director of the Bureau of Land Management. That 
person is Tracy Stone-Manning.
  I think the facts have pretty well been laid out already in the 
media. At the same time, there is tremendous outrage, I can tell you, 
amongst not only BLM employees but among the people who earn their 
living and recreate on the millions of acres of BLM. It is incredible, 
it is astonishing, and it is an embarrassment for this administration 
to nominate a person who is an ecoterrorist and a person who has 
perjured themselves before the committee that she appeared before on 
her confirmation and, in addition to that, has espoused a ``let it 
burn'' philosophy for people's homes that she will take an oath to 
defend if she becomes head of the BLM, which I believe she is going to 
before the Sun goes down today.
  It is amazing to me that the administration would put this person in 
this position. There are 330 million people in America. Almost every 
single one of those people, including some high school kids, could do 
this substantially better than she could and would not tarnish the name 
of the BLM, which is going to happen when she is confirmed as the 
Director of the BLM.
  So what did she do? Well, she engaged in acts of ecoterrorism. She 
engaged in a conspiracy to kill other people. She engaged in acts with 
Earth First! that put her squarely in the target of the U.S. 
Government, along with her cohorts with whom she lived in a house in 
Montana at the time. But she got off the hook. She didn't get 
prosecuted because she turned on the others and turned state's 
evidence. She hired an attorney, and that attorney

[[Page S6822]]

negotiated with the U.S. attorney there, and she wound up testifying 
against the others, so she wasn't convicted. Nonetheless, she was as 
deeply involved in this as they were.
  Let me read for you a letter that she wrote. She admits to writing 
this letter:

       To whom it may concern, this letter is being sent to notify 
     you that the Post Office Sale in Idaho has been spiked 
     heavily.

  The post office sale was a Forest Service sale of standing timber in 
the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. She writes this letter 
regarding that.

       The reasoning for this action is that this piece of land is 
     very special to the earth. It is home to the Elk, Deer, 
     Mountain Lions, Birds, and especially the Trees.

  She is absolutely correct on that.
  The next paragraph describes what she did.

       The project required that eleven of us--

  Most of whom lived in that house in Montana--

       spend nine days in God awful weather conditions spiking 
     trees. We unloaded a total of five hundred pounds of spikes 
     measuring 8 to 10 inches in length.

  For people who don't understand what spiking trees is, and most 
people in America wouldn't, you think, how could it be harmful in going 
out and putting a spike in a tree?
  This is a spike. It is not a particularly large one, but it doesn't 
take a particularly large one. What they do is they drive this item 
into a tree. They drive it in far enough that you can't see it. It then 
stands there until some unsuspecting logger comes along and cuts the 
tree down. That logger could be injured, but it is unlikely they will 
be, but they could be because of the hidden spike that was in the tree.
  The tree is then, after it is cut down, cut into length--usually 16 
foot--put onto a truck, and hauled to the mill. Once it gets to the 
mill, it is put in a millpond. It is then pushed eventually into the 
mill, and when it enters the mill, it goes on a carriage, and the 
carriage carries it to a saw. The saw may move back and forth, cutting 
the wood that is on this log in the carriage, or more likely, the 
carriage itself will move against the moving saw.
  There are a couple kinds of saws. One is a circular saw. It could be 
5 feet. Depending on the size of the mill, it could 5 feet, 6 feet, 10 
feet. But in today's world, more often than not, it is a bandsaw. A 
bandsaw is a piece of metal stripping that is a quarter-inch thick or 
so and probably a couple inches wide with teeth, and it circulates in 
the mill between the first floor, the second floor, even the third 
floor. As the carriage hits it, it then saws the log into boards.
  All is well unless there is one of these in the log. What happens 
when that saw hits this item in the log? In the best description I can 
give you, it is much like a hand grenade going off, except that 
there is no fire explosion, but there is just as much shrapnel that 
goes out of this at a speed that is very, very fast because all of the 
moving parts are moving very fast. And what does it do? It kills, and 
it injures log workers who are right there on the floor.

  These are innocent people. They are people who are working to make a 
living for themselves, for their families, for their children. They are 
people who go to work in the morning and do not come home because 
someone knowingly, intentionally, maliciously, with a black and an 
abandoned heart, stuck one of these in the tree. That is the only 
reason you put one of these in a tree, is to kill and maim fellow human 
beings who are absolutely innocent and who have done nothing wrong.
  She was involved in this. This person whom the administration wants 
to run the Bureau of Land Management, which manages millions of acres, 
the largest tracts of land in the United States of America--they want 
to put this woman in charge of this Agency. They sell timber all the 
time. She will be in charge of that. There is no need for this woman to 
be in charge of this Agency. There are plenty of people who could do 
this.
  Today, in the Clearwater National Forest, those trees are still 
there. Some of them will be there for 100 or more years. It is very 
possible one of these is going to kill somebody working in one of the 
mills at some point in time after all of us are dead and gone.
  They will ask at that time: How did this happen?
  They will say: Well, a woman who eventually became head of the BLM 
was involved in putting these spikes in these trees here.
  People will shake their heads and say: What were those people 
thinking? That is shameful. It is despicable.
  Yet that is what is about to happen here.
  Now, that was a while ago that this happened, but what has happened 
recently?
  She will be in charge of firefighting. Firefighting is absolutely 
critical on public lands in the West. We need it on Forest Service 
land; we need it on Bureau of Land Management land. But, like I said, 
she has embraced the idea that letting fires burn and burning down the 
houses that are in the interface zones is perfectly fine.
  How do we know this? It is in writing. It is absolutely in writing. 
There was an article written, fortuitously, by her husband in 2018 but 
which she embraced on September 15, 2020, in a tweet, and I will get to 
the tweet in a minute. But this is the view that her husband takes of 
what should happen to houses--perfectly innocent people's houses--that 
are built near public lands. The idea is, let it burn.
  He says:

       But the federal government then needs to make fighting 
     wildfires--a social process--subject to a social contract. 
     Perhaps the feds should commit themselves to refusing to send 
     in the troops to any county that has not taken such measures. 
     Perhaps the solution to houses in the interface is to let 
     them burn.

  He says:

       There's a rude and satisfying justice in burning down the 
     house of someone who builds in the forest.

  She embraced this. Just a little over a year ago, she put out a tweet 
and said:

       Not a bad time to revisit this piece from my husband, 
     Richard Manning, from two years ago. [This is a] clarion 
     call.

  ``Let them burn,'' she says; a clarion call to let people's homes 
burn.
  She put that out on September 15, 2020, just a little over a year 
ago. This is the person we are going to confirm to fight fires and 
protect people's homes in the West.
  All of us in the West live relatively close to the interface zones, 
and many people, millions of people, live in the interface zones. She 
is saying it is a clarion call to let them burn, and, indeed, they will 
get a rude and satisfying justice in burning down the houses that were 
built in the interface zone.
  You can't make this stuff up. If someone wrote a book about this, 
someone would toss it and say: That is too ridiculous. This could never 
happen.
  This is the woman this U.S. Senate is going to confirm on a straight 
party-line vote in about an hour here.
  So she comes before the committee, and although we didn't have all of 
the facts at the time, as has been alluded to by my colleagues here, we 
were aware that she had attachments to ecoterrorist groups. So some 
questions were put to her, and as always happens before the committee, 
they are required to be signed under oath, which she did, and she was 
asked whether or not she had ever been arrested or charged or been the 
target of an investigation involving spiking. She says--now under oath 
after solemnly swearing to tell the truth--``No, I have never been 
arrested or charged, and to my knowledge, I have never been the target 
of such an investigation.''
  She hired an attorney to negotiate with the U.S. attorney because she 
was a target of the investigation, had received a target letter, and 
had been told she was a target of that.
  What are we doing here? How in the world can somebody come before a 
committee, take an oath that they would tell the truth, and then flat 
lie?
  She was also asked: Did you have personal knowledge of--did you have 
personal knowledge of--participate in, or in any way, directly or 
indirectly, support activities associated with the spiking of trees in 
Idaho's Clearwater National Forest on March 29, 1989?
  We read the letter she wrote where she admitted that she was involved 
in that.
  Her answer to that: ``I had no involvement in the spiking of trees.'' 
Under oath, she said that. We know otherwise.
  She said, ``Eleven of us [spent] nine days in God awful weather 
conditions

[[Page S6823]]

spiking trees,'' and she under oath says, ``No.''
  Next question: Did you have personal knowledge of, participate in, or 
in any way, directly or indirectly, support activities associated with 
the spiking of trees in any forest during your lifetime?
  Answer: ``No.''
  We know better. She admitted to signing this letter where she fessed 
up to it.
  Well, look, I know I am not going to talk the Democrats out of 
confirming her. I can tell you that this is a shameful, shameful thing 
for the administration to do. It is a shameful thing for my friends in 
the majority to confirm her.
  What I can tell you is, when she comes before the committee that we 
sit on, where we have oversight of the BLM--and we have the Director in 
regularly because we have oversight responsibility--how will we believe 
one word she says when she has already perjured herself?
  This is wrong. It is a shameful moment for this administration. I can 
tell you the employees of the Bureau of Land Management are going to 
have a very difficult time working under a person who is an 
ecoterrorist and who is a perjurer. She should not be confirmed.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kaine). The Senator from Wyoming.
  Ms. LUMMIS. Mr. President, I rise today to associate myself with the 
remarks of the gentleman from Idaho and the gentleman from Utah, who 
just spoke about one of the most egregious nominations to ever receive 
a vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate.
  I am speaking of President Biden's nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning 
to be Director of the Bureau of Land Management.
  I have been here in Washington, DC, for close to a decade now, and I 
know that oftentimes it feels there are few things that unite us as 
Democrats and Republicans. I would have hoped that just one of those 
things that would have united us would be opposition to ecoterrorism; 
and yet, in about an hour, the Senate will be voting to confirm a known 
ecoterrorist collaborator to lead one of the most consequential land 
management agencies.
  I am flabbergasted. I am aghast. I am horrified. This is a solemn, 
bad day for land management in the United States.
  Here we are, $28 trillion-plus in debt--28 trillion-plus in debt. 
Inflation is threatening every single American. We have a global 
pandemic, a major crisis at our southern border, a massive government 
expansion, and debt ceiling debate, and Senate Democrats want to put an 
ecoterrorist collaborator to manage one of the biggest land management 
agencies in the United States.
  The Bureau of Land Management administers about 245 million acres of 
land. It manages 18.4 million acres of public land surface in my State 
and nearly 43 million acres of Federal mineral estate in my home State 
of Wyoming.
  As is required by law, the Bureau of Land Management operates under a 
multiple-use mandate that balances recreation needs, energy 
development, grazing, conservation, mining, wildlife habitat, and more. 
Leading this Agency requires someone who is balanced and committed to 
supporting this multiple-use mandate. It is the law that governs the 
Bureau of Land Management.
  Do we have that in Ms. Stone-Manning?
  As reported by the Washington Post, of all places, Ms. Stone-Manning 
was a spokeswoman for Earth First!, the group responsible for the 
ecoterrorist tree spiking spoken of by Mr. Risch and Mr. Lee moments 
ago in Idaho's Clearwater National Forests.
  So what is the motto for the group for which Ms. Stone-Manning served 
as a mouthpiece?
  Here it is: ``No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth.''
  No compromise. None. And yet we are supposed to trust that Ms. Stone-
Manning will compromise on the inevitable conflicts that will come 
before her as BLM Director, the requirement that she balance the 
interests on use of BLM land?
  For President Biden and my Senate colleagues across the aisle, do you 
really want your names associated with a ``no compromise'' mouthpiece 
of a convicted ecoterrorist organization; someone who lied under oath 
to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee?
  In her testimony, she lied under oath. Someone who has advocated for 
population control as a means to save the environment; someone who has 
written that grazing is ``destroying the West.''
  Now, pair that remark with what you just heard from Senator Risch. 
Senator Risch says: She and her husband want those houses in the 
interface with the forest to burn.
  What prevents them from burning?
  It is grazing. Grazing done right helps keep the forest floor and the 
grasses from igniting conflagrations. Grazing is good for the West, yet 
she has written that grazing destroys the West. Grazing is one of the 
elements of multiple use.
  Does that mean that she is going to use her position to try to 
eliminate grazing in the West?
  That would add to catastrophic fires. That would add to carbon 
emissions from these monster fires that we are having.
  Management requires land management. That is why it is called the 
Bureau of Land Management. It is not the bureau of land let it be, let 
it burn, let it rot, let it be ignored. It is the Bureau of Land 
Management, with a multiple-use mandate.
  Ms. Manning is wholly unqualified to serve in this position--
absolutely unqualified.
  I urge President Biden to withdraw her nomination before 7:00 
tonight, and for Senate Democrats to join us in saying no to this 
nominee. This nominee is an insult to the American West.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to 
use a prop on the Senate floor, a tree spike.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, you see some of my colleagues are down 
here. We are a little bit fired up. Right? And this is not some kind of 
partisan game. We are fired up for a reason--that the U.S. Senate is 
getting ready to confirm a nominee who has no business being even 
considered on the Senate floor. No business being considered on the 
Senate floor.
  And with all due respect to my colleague from Montana, this isn't--
what did he say--attacks against somebody. These are facts that we are 
going to talk about. These are facts--someone who is still continuing 
to not even tell the truth about her past as a violent ecoterrorist.
  Now, look, we know this administration has put forth far-left 
individuals. I am going to talk about a few. But to put forward a far-
left, violent nominee--I think we all should recognize--is kind of a 
bridge too far for the U.S. Senate.
  But that is happening right now, and I am really hopeful that at 
least some of my Democratic colleagues, at the last minute, will go: 
Maybe we shouldn't do this. Maybe we shouldn't set this standard.
  So I have been on the floor a number of times talking about Tracy 
Stone-Manning's nomination. It is actually the first time in my Senate 
career that I asked the President to withdraw a nominee, and for good 
reasons--because of all the things you have heard from my colleagues 
from Wyoming, Idaho; colleagues from mostly Western States.
  And I am going to ask my Democratic colleagues from Western States: 
Do you really want to set this precedent? How are you going to go home 
and tell people who harvest timber legally for a living that you were 
good to go with this; good to go with someone who put hundreds of these 
kinds of tree spikes in trees for people--our fellow Americans--to get 
hurt?
  But that is what we are seeing right here.
  You know, I think that maybe the Biden administration, after I and 
many others requested that they withdraw this nominee, that maybe they 
thought: Well, look. With all the noise going on around here--a 
reckless $3\1/2\ trillion tax-and-spend extravaganza, the botched 
Afghanistan withdrawal, the crisis on the southern border, inflation 
going through the roof, the price at the pump hurting working families 
in my State and those across America,

[[Page S6824]]

the shutdown of the energy sector unilaterally and then going begging 
Russia and Iran for more oil that they can import to the United 
States--I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
  But I think the Biden administration thought, with all this chaos 
that they are creating, maybe nobody will notice Tracy Stone-Manning's 
confirmation process and vote.
  Well, they are wrong. As you see here, there are some really strong 
feelings about this nominee--a past ecoterrorist; a member of Earth 
First!, an extreme group that performed violent acts as part of their 
platform for getting attention in America.
  In fact, she is so extreme that the Director of BLM from the Obama-
Biden administration, Bob Abbey, made a statement saying that if her 
violent ecoterrorist past activities were true--and they were. They 
were. I am going to talk about them. Senator Risch has already talked 
about them; Senator Barrasso has; Senator Lummis has--if these were 
true, then President Obama's BLM Director said she does not deserve the 
job.
  So this isn't just Republicans. This is the former Democrat Director 
of the Agency that we are going to vote on that she wants to lead.
  So before I talk a little bit more about her--and I know we have had 
a number of Senators do it--I want to make another point.
  The reason I have been down here so much, focused on this nominee, is 
that BLM to some states--heck, if you live in Connecticut, probably 
nobody knows what that is. But the Bureau of Land Management in my 
State is one of the most powerful Federal Agencies there is in the 
great State of Alaska.
  The Alaska BLM manages more surface and subsurface acres in my State 
than in any other State in the country, by far.
  The BLM Director in Alaska is our landlord, and I don't want an 
ecoterrorist as my State's landlord, and neither do my constituents.
  Let me give you some numbers. The BLM manager in Alaska manages over 
70 million surface acres of land and 220 million subsurface acres of 
land in Alaska.
  A little context: That is the equivalent land of about one-fifth of 
the entire lower 48. Do you see why this is really important to me and 
my constituents? Most States can't even comprehend land that size. One-
fifth of the lower 48 of the United States of America is about the 
amount of land BLM manages just in my State. This is a huge amount of 
land, and, of course, by definition, a huge amount of power that this 
Federal Agency has over the people I am privileged to represent--their 
work, their jobs, their hunting activities, their subsistence 
activities. And that is why I have been down here talking about this 
nominee.
  I know to some in East Coast States--forget it. We don't know who she 
is. No power. She doesn't have any power over New Jersey or some of 
these other small States on the East Coast.
  But in my State, massive power, and it is imperative that the 
Director of this Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, with so much 
power and so much control over the future of Alaska and its economic 
opportunity for working families, that the manager of BLM be 
trustworthy, be honest, be fairminded, beyond reproach, and certainly 
not someone who was involved in ecoterrorism earlier in their career.
  Is that too much to ask, my colleagues in the Senate?
  What we know about Tracy Stone-Manning is, she is none of these 
things. She hasn't been trustworthy with the Senate, fairminded.
  Well, let's go back to a little bit of her background because people 
need to know this. People need to know this. My colleagues have already 
done a good job, but I hope the American people are watching this. She 
was not only a member of Earth First!, a radical far-left group that 
has engaged repeatedly in what is defined as ecoterrorism, she, 
herself, was complicit in putting metal spikes--see this--big, thick, 
metal spikes, by the hundreds, in trees that were meant either to hurt 
or gravely injure American citizens who were legally harvesting trees.
  We are OK with that, Senate Democrats? We are OK with that? Americans 
who were cutting down trees legally as part of their job to help their 
economy, to help their family, who were putting trees in saw mills 
legally. All the while, she and her buddies--comrades, I call them--
were acting illegally, putting these spikes, by the hundreds, in trees.
  This was a common technique--tree spiking is what it is called--
developed by ecoterrorists in the 1980s and early nineties. Now, Ms. 
Manning's group, Earth First!, began in the 1980s by disaffected 
environmentalists who thought their movement wasn't radical enough: 
``So how can we get more attention? Let's perpetrate violence against 
fellow Americans.'' That is how they could get more attention. Their 
slogan was ``No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth.'' In their 
view, ``no compromise'' meant destroying property, putting steel spikes 
in trees that could kill someone who harvested a tree. And they 
celebrated and even encouraged such actions. The group even put out a 
manual detailing tree spiking and instructions on how to do other 
sabotage activities: cutting down power lines, flattening tires, 
burning machinery--all directed at those who were trying to legally 
harvest trees.
  David Foreman, the founder of Earth First!, described all these 
activities as ``fun.'' ``This is where [you] can have fun.''
  Let me talk a little bit about ``fun.'' I have an article from the 
Washington Post during that time. They were talking about a tree-
spiking incident, and I am going to quote from it:

       George Alexander, a third-generation mill worker, was just 
     starting his shift at the Louisiana-Pacific lumber mill in 
     Cloverdale, Calif., when the log that would alter his life 
     rolled down his conveyor belt toward a high-speed saw.

  Now, we have some of these saws in these mills in Alaska--not nearly 
as many as we used to have. They are huge. They are giant. They are the 
size of people. They spin at incredibly fast speeds with huge teeth. 
They are dangerous to work with normally. But when you put a steel 
spike in a tree that is going through a fastly spinning saw, you can 
imagine the explosion and the violence.
  I will continue the article:

       It was May 1987, and Alexander was 23 [years old]. His job 
     was to split logs. He was nearly three feet away when the log 
     [he was working on] hit his saw and the [giant] saw exploded. 
     One half of the blade [struck] . . . the log.

  It exploded when it hit one of these.

       The other half hit Alexander in the [forehead, with the 
     giant saw] tearing through his safety helmet . . . [tearing 
     through his]face shield. His face was slashed from eye to 
     chin. His teeth were smashed and his jaw was cut in half.

  Good job, Earth First!--a fellow American, trying to kill a fellow 
American. These were the kind of activities that Tracy Stone-Manning 
once conspired in.
  I wonder if that disturbs anybody?
  I was up at our fish camp on the Yukon River this summer over the 
Fourth of July clearing some brush, trees, working a chain saw--a 
smaller chain saw--and I literally was thinking, ``Boy, I wonder what 
would happen if my chain saw hit one of these?''
  It wouldn't have been good. So I think if you are not disturbed by 
this, you really should be.
  So I know that some of my colleagues have already read the letter on 
the floor that she wrote, a profane, anonymous letter from this member 
of Earth First!, about the 500 pounds of tree spikes--500 pounds--
hammered into trees in Idaho.
  She rewrote the letter on a rented typewriter because, she later told 
a reporter, her fingerprints were all over it. So she didn't want to be 
caught. So, obviously, she knew she was engaging in criminal activity. 
She didn't just handwrite it; she typed it and then sent it to the FBI. 
Now, I know some of my colleagues have already read it. I am just going 
to notice a couple of highlights:

       This letter is being sent to notify you that the Post 
     Office Sale in [the great State of] Idaho has been spiked 
     heavily. . . .
       The project required that eleven of us spend nine days in 
     God awful weather conditions spiking trees. We unloaded a 
     total of 500 pounds of spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in 
     length. . . .

  Five hundred pounds of these. That is a lot of spikes.

       The majority of trees were spiked within the first ten 
     feet, but many, many others were spiked as high as a hundred 
     and fifty feet.

  Again, why would they go that high? That is not where you are going 
to cut

[[Page S6825]]

it down. So when it goes to the mill, you injure and kill the mill 
workers.
  She goes on further.
  Mr. President, I don't know if I am allowed to swear, but you can 
call me out if I am not supposed to:

       P.S. You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people 
     could get hurt.

  That is real nice.
  Now, she kept quiet for many years on what she did. She later 
received immunity for her part in this tree spiking when prosecutors 
went after other members of Earth First!, and she testified about it. 
But in her narrative, she has always tried to portray herself as a 
victim.
  She wasn't a victim.
  The investigator of this disputes that characterization dramatically. 
The U.S. Forest Service Special Agent Michael Merkley described her as 
vulgar, antagonistic, and extremely anti-government. She was 
uncooperative.
  It was also clear that only after she knew she was going to get in 
trouble that she began to cooperate. ``Let me be clear,'' Special Agent 
Merkley said recently, ``Ms. Stone-Manning only came forward after her 
attorney struck the immunity deal, and not before she was caught.''
  In testimony to the Senate, she claimed that tree spiking was 
alleged.
  It wasn't alleged.
  And that it was never investigated.
  That is not true. We know that is not true.
  So that was recent.
  So it is not just the tree spiking. She hasn't been honest, but she 
is still clearly a radical.
  Let me give you another example. Her husband wrote an article for 
Harper's Magazine--Senator Risch already talked about this--in 2018, 
claiming wildfires were a political issue and that such an issue should 
be solved by letting houses in forests burn.
  Think about that.

       Perhaps the solution to houses in the interface is to let 
     them burn.

  Those are his exact words. Now, look, that is her husband. We can't 
blame her for her husband's radical views.
  But here is what she did. She weighed in herself in 2020--last year--
retweeting the article and basically endorsing his views. Here is what 
she said:

       Not a bad time to revisit this piece from my husband, 
     Richard Manning, from two years ago. Clarion call . . . [on 
     climate action].

  So think about that.
  So I was in charge of our lands in Alaska. We worked--including 
fighting wildfires--we worked really closely with the Federal 
Government, the State of Alaska, Federal officials, on fighting our 
wildfires. We have big wildfires in Alaska, always have had them, 
always will have them. Never ever, ever, in any time I was involved in 
issues relating to fighting wildfires, have I heard a State official or 
Federal official say, ``Hey, if there is a fire near a bunch of homes, 
let them burn.''
  But do you see the problem? She is going to be in charge of that in 
Alaska.
  ``Let them burn.''
  You know what our Federal firefighters do? They save structures. They 
save houses. They are very heroic.
  ``Let them burn,'' she said last year.
  In a nutshell, this is potentially, if we don't stop this vote 
tonight, the new head of the BLM. She was a member of an ecoterrorist 
group who had a goal to actually threaten to hurt or actually hurt 
American citizens, hard-working Americans doing something legal. She 
has clearly been dishonest recently.
  With all due respect to my colleague from Montana, these are not some 
kind of ad hominem attacks. These are facts.
  Last year, she said: Hey, I agree with my husband's article. Let it 
burn. Let the homes burn in these wildfires.
  That is not going to work in my State. She is going to head up an 
Agency with enormous power over my State and its future.
  So, look, we have differences on issues of resource development, 
energy for America, certainly on issues of jobs. In my State, 
unfortunately, the Biden administration seems to, weekly, want to shut 
down resources just in Alaska. I think we are up to almost 20 Executive 
orders or related actions from this administration focused just on my 
State--to shut down jobs.
  I gave a speech here a while ago asking, not the President of the 
Senate, the President of the United States: Can you imagine if a 
Republican administration came in and issued almost, who knows, 10, 
15--it is hard to count--Executive orders shutting down Delaware's 
economy? What would you do, Mr. President, if you were a Senator? You 
would be furious.
  Well, I am furious, and I am furious because we have got another 
radical who is going to be in charge of my State's future.
  ``Let it burn.'' Tree spikes.
  But here we are, unfortunately, about to confirm this individual as 
the Director of BLM. But here's the thing I want to know. If you are a 
western Senator--say, Arizona, Nevada, California--good luck going home 
and explaining this to your constituents. Good luck with that.
  I am going to just mention another nominee to speak about briefly. If 
Tracy Stone-Manning weren't radical enough, I would like to mention 
another Biden nominee from the far-left socialist fringe. This is Saule 
Omarova, who was nominated by the President to be Comptroller of the 
Currency.
  So what does the Comptroller of Currency do?
  It charters and regulates and supervises all national banks--another 
very serious position. Not a lot of Americans, you know, highlight this 
or think about it a lot. It is like BLM, but it is important and 
powerful. And you would think you would have somebody in that position 
who would understand or value and respect free markets in our financial 
system, particularly our banks.
  Ms. Omarova doesn't value our system and doesn't seem to much like 
banks. She has other ideas. According to the Wall Street Journal today, 
they said that it might even make our colleague Senator Sanders blush.
  So who is Ms. Omarova?
  First, she is a 1989 graduate in Moscow State University, where she 
received the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Yeah, you heard me 
right. I am not talking Moscow, ID. I am talking the real Moscow in the 
Soviet Union. Let me say that again. A graduate of Moscow State 
University, where she received the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. 
You can't make this stuff up.
  From her writings, it appears that she still significantly believes 
in what she learned at old Moscow U, particularly about our free market 
system and communism and socialism.
  Here is what she tweeted in 2019--2019, 3 years ago--2 years ago: 
Until I came to the U.S., I couldn't imagine things like gender pay gap 
still existed in today's world. Say what you want about the old USSR, 
there was no gender pay gap there. Markets don't always know best.
  That is a tweet 2 years ago: Say what you want about the old USSR, 
about Stalin and Lenin and the roughly 100 million people killed during 
their reigns. Say what you want about the old USSR, the famine, human 
degradation, about the ill-fated violent attempts to snuff out the 
flame of freedom and liberty all across the world. Say what you want 
about the old USSR, the gulags, pogroms. At least there is no gender 
gap. There is no food either, by the way; and there is no freedom.
  So she is like: Hum, maybe I should clarify this.
  So here is her clarification: I never claimed men and women were 
treated absolutely equal in every facet of the old Soviet Union, but 
people's salaries were set by the State in a gender-blind manner, and 
all women got very generous benefits, but those things are still a pipe 
dream in our American society.
  Wow. That was her clarification. Oh, the golden days of the USSR, a 
mere pipe dream now. Her nostalgia for socialist communist regimes and 
policies doesn't end with pay disparities. She has advocated for 
expanding the Federal Reserve's mandate to include draconian controls 
over financial institutions, wages, and consumer bank deposits.
  How would she do this?
  Through ``a people's ledger, a national investment authority, a 
public interest council.''
  Sounds like a modern-day version of the system set up by the 
Bolsheviks that I am sure she learned about at Moscow U. Plainly put, 
she is another radical who will have sweeping powers

[[Page S6826]]

over the institutions of our United States Government.
  So I am going to conclude with this: If you are watching America, I 
hope you are seeing a theme here. The Biden administration, 
unfortunately with the help of some of my Senate Democratic colleagues, 
is trying to make us comfortable with far-left fringe radical 
appointments who will take over very significant posts in our 
government and will push us towards the path of socialism. They are 
pushing a radical left lurch for our country that the vast majority of 
Americans don't want.
  Just look at what my colleagues are coming up with, with their $3\1/
2\ trillion tax-and-spend bill written by the chairman of the Budget 
Committee, an avowed socialist. It is not an insult. That is a fact.
  All this is being done with no hearings, no markups; the biggest 
social spending bill in decades with zero transparency. Even the House 
had a markup. But the Senate, once known as the most deliberative body 
in the world, is not having one hearing or one markup on a $3\1/2\ 
trillion reckless tax-and-spend bill.
  But mainstream middle-class America does not want socialism, and they 
don't want far-left radicals to run our Federal Government. My 
Democratic colleagues keep thinking they can ram through this far-left 
agenda without anyone noticing, but the American people are noticing. 
The American people are wise, and they are already starting to feel the 
pain of the Biden administration's far-left, anti-energy, anti-
capitalism agenda, especially at the pump.
  They will remember which Senators are enabling this, and they will 
remember the Senators who have no problem voting for nominees who have 
a record of being part of organizations that sought to perpetrate 
violence against their fellow Americans.
  I hope my Democratic colleagues have a change of heart and vote 
against Tracy Stone-[Spike]-Manning because our country and my State 
really don't need her in charge.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.
  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, there has been a lot of impassioned 
words about a nominee that we will have before us in just a matter of 
less than an hour, Tracy Stone-Manning. Know that I join my colleagues 
in the concerns that they have expressed, as we look to those 
individuals that we asked to take the helm of some of these very 
important Agencies--Agencies, as my colleague from Alaska has pointed 
out--that have extraordinary impact on the activities and the actions 
that go on in our State. We need to have only the highest caliber of 
men and women. And in what we have seen, the background that we have 
seen with this particular nominee, I would hope, would shock us all.
  And so as we move forward with this nomination process and consider 
the impact to, again, not just an Agency, not just to a department, but 
the impact that then comes to our communities, our States, the people 
who we work for, it is only appropriate and fitting that we speak to 
the issues that we have learned of; we speak to the truth of the 
matter; and the truth of the matter is that this nominee is not an 
individual who should be in this position.