Volunteers interested in learning how to collect and preserve the personal accounts of American wartime veterans for the Library of Congress are invited to a program overview and training session.  The program is a collaboration of the Library of Congress and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1487 in cooperation with Congressman Tom McClintock’s office. Materials will be provided. 

Congressman McClintock will hold a town hall meeting in El Dorado Hills this Wednesday, February 23rd at 6:00 PM.  The location will be Rolling Hills Middle School multi-purpose room.

El Dorado Hills Town Hall Meeting
Wednesday, Feb. 23 at 6:00PM
Rolling Hills Middle School
Multi-Purpose Room
7141 Silva Valley Parkway
El Dorado Hills, CA 95762
 

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The United States government is on the verge of bankruptcy.  HR 1 makes $61 billion in actual spending reductions for the remaining fiscal year ending on September 30.  Since 2008, federal spending has increased 24 percent; the cuts in HR 1 represent a 1 ½ percent reduction.  HR 1 isn’t enough to make more than a dent in the deficit, but at least it reverses the upward trend in spending and points us back in the direction of solvency.  It begins to restore this fundamental principle of federalism: programs that exclusively benefit local communities should be exclusively financed by those communities.  We will need to do much more as the debt ceiling approaches and still more as we take up the 2012 budget, but with HR 1, our nation begins its long road back to fiscal solvency and prosperity.

Congressman McClintock voted AYE on HR 1.  The legislation was approved by the House on February 19 by a vote of 253 - 189.

House Chamber, Washington, D.C. 

February 15, 2011.  Text.

House Chamber, Washington, D.C. February 15, 2011 

M. Speaker:

Last year I voted to extend the PATRIOT Act for one year.   I regret that vote and was glad to have been able to correct it, although I am pained that the House voted otherwise yesterday.

 During this past year, I have become convinced that the provisions of the so-called PATRIOT Act are an affront to the Bill of Rights and a serious threat to our fundamental liberty as Americans. 

The Fourth Amendment arises from abuses of the British Crown that allowed roving searches by revenue agents under the guise of what were called “writs of assistance” or “general warrants.”  Instead of following specific allegations against specific individuals, the Crown’s revenue agents were given free rein to search indiscriminately.

In 1761, the famous colonial leader, James Otis, challenged these writs, arguing that "A man's house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege." Two hundred and fifty years later, the PATRIOT Act restores these roving searches.

In the audience that day in 1761 was a 25-year-old lawyer named John Adams.  He would later recall, "Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.  Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the child, ‘Independence’ was born." 

The American Founders responded with the Fourth Amendment.  It provides that before the government can invade a person’s privacy, the executive branch must present sworn testimony to an independent judiciary that a crime has occurred, that there is reason to believe that an individual should be searched for evidence of the crime and specify the place to be searched and the things to be seized.  The John Doe roving wiretaps provided under the bill are a clear breach of this crystal clear provision.

The entire point of having an open and independent judiciary is so that abuses of power can be quickly identified by the public and corrected.  The very structure of this law prevents that from occurring.

I also object to the so-called “lone wolf” provision of the Act that allows a person who is not acting in concert with a foreign power to be treated as if they were.  This malignant fiction utterly blurs the critical distinction between a private person protected under our Constitution and an enemy combatant acting as an agent of a foreign power. 

My Chief of Staff, Igor Birman, was born in Moscow.  His family emigrated to America when he was 14.  He tells of the days leading up to their long-awaited departure.  His father had technical expertise and the authorities were desperate to find some pretense to cancel the family’s exit visa.

A week before they departed for America, the family returned home to find that Soviet authorities had turned their apartment upside down looking for anything that could be used to block their emigration.  This was not the result of suspected criminal activity, but rather the same kind of open-ended search the Fourth Amendment protects us against.

His younger brother was terrified and hysterical.  His mother calmed the little boy by saying, “Don’t worry.  We’re leaving in a few days for America.  This will never happen to us there.”

Our country is threatened by foreign governments and multi-national terrorist groups which are actively working to do us harm, backed by a fifth column within our borders.  But we have faced far more powerful governments and far better organized networks of spies and saboteurs in the past without having to shred our Bill of Rights. 

The freedom that our Constitution protects is the source of our economic prosperity, our moral authority and our martial strength.  It is also the ultimate bulwark against authoritarianism.  Abraham Lincoln was right.  No transatlantic military giant – let alone some fanatical terrorist group – can ever “step across the ocean and crush us at a blow.”  And no foreign power can destroy our Constitution. 

Only we can do that.    As Lincoln said, “As a nation of free men, we are destined to live forever – or die by suicide.”

Congressman Tom McClintock, Chairman of the House Water and Power Subcommittee, today made the following remarks on the House floor during consideration of a resolution directing committees to identify federal regulations that impede job creation and slow the economy

House Resolution 72
House Chamber, Washington, D.C

As Chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee of Natural Resources, my colleagues and I are excited and eager to undertake the mission outlined in House Resolution 72: to identify the federal regulations in this field that are impeding job creation and slowing the economy.

The only problem is deciding where to begin.

A generation ago, the principal objective of our water and power policy was to create an abundance of both.  It was an era when vast reservoirs and hydro-electric facilities produced a cornucopia of clean and plentiful water and electricity on a scale so vast that many communities didn’t even bother to measure the stuff.

But that objective of abundance has been abandoned in favor of rationing shortages caused by government. 

The result is increasingly scarce and expensive water and power that now undermines our prosperity as a nation. 

Nowhere is that more evident than in the Central Valley of California.  The last Congress sat idly by as this administration deliberately diverted 200 billion gallons of water away from the most abundant agricultural region of our nation – all to satisfy the environmental left and its pet cause, a three inch minnow called the Delta Smelt. 

These willful diversions cost over 20,000 farm workers their jobs, inflicted up to 40 percent unemployment rates in the region; destroyed more than a quarter million acres of the most fertile farmland in our nation and forced up the price of groceries for us all. 

Or we could look to the Klamath, where this administration is pushing to tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams that generate 155 megawatts of the cleanest and cheapest electricity on the planet – enough to power over 150,000 homes -- because, we’re told, of catastrophic declines of salmon. 

When I suggested building a salmon hatchery instead, I was informed that there already is one: it produces 5 million salmon smolt each year – 17,000 of which return to that river as fully grown adults to spawn – but they’re deliberately ignored in the population counts.  To add insult to insanity, as they tear down these dams in the name of saving the salmon, they’re also tearing down the fish hatchery.

Or we could begin in Colorado, where they’ve sacrificed over 1,000 megawatts from the Glen Canyon Dam for the humpback chub – at the expense of a long neglected species called Homo sapiens. 

Ronald Reagan was right: in this crisis, government is not the solution to our problems – government is the problem.  The good news is that’s within our power to correct – and it was clearly the mandate of the American people in 2010. 

And we will act on that mandate beginning with a series of hearings and actions directly related to this much-needed resolution.  

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Congressman McClintock questions Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about debt service payments.  House Budget Committee hearing on the state of the U.S. economy, February 9, 2011.