Congress Will Reject Repeal, Senator Says

Congress will reject President Clinton’s call for repeal of part of a controversial law that has allowed logging to proceed in some old-growth forests, Sen. Slade Gorton predicted Tuesday.

“The president’s request amounts to a complete surrender to people who say there should be no harvests under any circumstances in any of our national forests at any time,” the Washington state Republican told reporters.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, say Clinton hasn’t gone far enough because he stopped short of urging a repeal of the law in its entirety - proposing to leave in place a loophole that allows cutting of healthy trees in national forests under the guise of salvage logging.

Rep. Elizabeth Furse, D-Ore., has more than 100 co-sponsors on a bill that would fully repeal the law, which suspended most fish and wildlife protections to expedite logging.

Gorton said little if any logging would take place without the law’s exemptions, which insulate the harvests from environmentalists’ legal challenges.