The Bee’s latest editorial on water accuses me of “promoting” a “water grab.”  The Bee was well aware that as Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Water and Power, I intervened to stop the bill in question (H.R. 1837) and announced it would not proceed until and unless it is amended to fully protect Northern California water rights.  Yet the editorial made the accusation anyway while questioning my motives and integrity. 

Last year, to meet radical environmental demands, 200 billion gallons of water contracted to the Central Valley were instead dumped into the Pacific Ocean.  That act destroyed 250,000 acres of farmland and cost tens of thousands of jobs.  Our sub-committee is grappling with a solution to prevent such lunacy in the future while fully protecting Northern California water rights and critical habitat.  We’re not there yet.

I welcome the Bee’s constructive counsel, but all it has offered to date is distortions and invective.

Tom McClintock
U.S. Representative, 4th District

 

This bill purports to cut off funding for combat in Libya.  Full Remarks.

June 24, 2011

Congressman Tom McClintock today made the following remarks on the House Floor in opposition to HR 2278 relating to Libya.

 In Opposition to HR 2278

Mr. Speaker:

This bill purports to cut off funding for combat in Libya.  In doing so, it simply forbids what the Constitution already forbids: the waging of war without explicit congressional authorization. 

But then it specifically grants to the President what up until now he has completely lacked:

Congressional authority to engage in every conceivable belligerent act short of actually pulling the trigger:

•        refueling bombers on their way to targets;
•        identifying and selecting targets;
•        guiding munitions to their targets;
•        logistical support;
•        operational planning.

These are all acts of war in direct support of belligerents at war – and this bill authorizes them. 

The House has just considered whether to authorize war with Libya.  It has specifically, categorically and decisively rejected it.  The President is now on notice that he is in direct defiance of Congress.

That is the message we need to send today.  Let’s not enter a war through the back door when we’ve already decided not to enter it through the front.

###
 

Congressman McClintock will conduct a town hall meeting in Grass Valley on Thursday, June 30th at 6:00 PM.  The meeting will be held at Higgins Lions Community Center, 22490 East Hacienda Drive, Grass Valley.

Congressman McClintock questioning witnesses at a National Parks, Forests and Public Lands Subcommittee oversight hearing about the importance of forest access by the public, June 22, 2011.

Congressman McClintock spoke earlier this year about forest access in a speech titled The Royal Forests.

Committee Hearing Information

"If the President felt there was moral justification to attack Libya, he was constitutionally required to make his case to Congress and get its authorization.  He did not."  Full Remarks.

June 3, 2011

M. Speaker:  Lets be clear: without prior Congressional authorization, under the War Powers Act, the President may only commit armed forces to hostilities for sixty days if there is a direct attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions or its armed forces. 

There was none, so there is no sixty day clock and the President’s unprovoked attack on Libya – from Day One – constituted an illegal and unconstitutional act of the highest significance. 

If the President felt there was moral justification to attack Libya, he was constitutionally required to make his case to Congress and get its authorization.  He did not.

Some say, “we’re already committed; it’s too late for Congress to order a withdrawal without harming America’s reputation or undermining her allies.”  If we take that position, then we have just changed the Constitution to read as follows: “The President may attack any country he wants for any reason he wants and the Congress has no choice but to follow.” 

The President has crossed a bright Constitutional line and this Congress has a clear moral and Constitutional duty to intervene.

If we fail to do so, we will have destroyed the work of the American founders by fundamentally changing the legislative and executive functions on the most momentous decision our nation can make and take our country down dark and bloody roads the American Founders sought to avoid.

House Floor remarks by Congressman Tom McClintock, June 3, 2011.

Congressman Tom McClintock will conduct a town hall meeting in Georgetown, Thursday, June 9, at 6 PM.  The meeting will be held in the International Order of Odd Fellows Hall, 6240 Main Street, Georgetown.

House Water and Power Subcommittee, Legislative Hearing on H.R. 1837, “The San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act".  Statement by Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock.   

June 2, 2011

The tragedy of the man-made drought in California’s San Joaquin Valley has occupied a considerable amount of the sub-committee’s attention, and today we meet to consider HR 1837 by Congressman Nunes. 

 California’s Central Valley was devastated in 2009 and 2010 by the deliberate diversion of hundreds of  billions of gallons of water away from Central Valley agriculture to satisfy environmental edicts for salmon and delta smelt.  The practical effect of this action was to destroy a quarter million acres of the most productive farmland in America and throw thousands of hard-working families into unemployment. 

This occurred:

• Despite the findings of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center that determined the Pacific Decadal Oscillation was the principal factor in salmon migration;

• Despite the California Department of Water Resources analysis of pumping flows that determined the pumps’ influence on salmon and smelt migration is negligible compared to natural tidal flows; and

• Despite the findings of the Federal District Court that the U.S. Interior Department’s 2006 biological opinion on Delta smelt was “arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law.”

I vividly recall Interior Secretary Salazar’s testimony to the full House Natural Resources Committee in 2009, in which he admitted that he had the authority to suspend federal restrictions on pumping but chose not to do so because, quote “that would be like admitting failure.”

After two years of failed attempts to get this sub-committee to hold a hearing in the Central Valley, the new Republican majority did so earlier this year.  Attended by an overflow audience – many of whom were unemployed farm workers – the committee learned that despite one of the wettest years on record – with snowpacks at 165 percent of normal, farms had been guaranteed just 75 percent of their contracted water.

We heard that California’s San Joaquin Valley is ground zero for what’s gone wrong with our current federal water policy: the deliberate creation of water shortages by governmental fiat and the abandonment of the government’s responsibility to develop our water resources for the prosperity of our nation. 

The bill before us today seeks to respond to this government-created disaster with several important steps:

• It restores the original structure of the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, as that act was sold to Congress by its sponsors in 1992 by limiting bureaucratic takings of water by fiat;

• It strengthens our ability to control non-native predators that are decimating native fish populations in the Delta and strengthens our ability to dramatically increase native fish populations with fish hatcheries;

• It brings transparency to the CVP Restoration Fund, a federal slush fund that despite $800 million of expenditures has had no measurable effect on environmental improvements; and

• It provides Central Valley Project water customers the ability to pre-pay water contracts in the same way that a homeowner can pre-pay a mortgage. 

I have found the attacks on this reform wildly disingenuous.

The central complaint is the pre-emption of state water rights authority.  The Left never complains when the federal government pre-empts states seeking relief from overly burdensome federal regulations but it becomes selectively offended when the federal government pre-empts “greens-gone-wild” regulations typical of states like California.  But in either case they ignore the long-established fact that when the federal government participates in a project it takes supremacy over issues arising from that project.

 Like all movements, the impetus for stronger environmental protection of our air and water was firmly rooted in legitimate concerns to protect these vital resources.  But like many movements, as it succeeded in its legitimate ends, it also attracted a self-interested constituency that has driven far past the borders of commonsense and into the realms of political extremism and outright plunder and I am hopeful that we are now entering an era when common sense can be restored to our water policy.

Protecting endangered species is a worthy goal and worthy goals need to be pursued with common sense and sound science, not left-wing ideology and junk science.  We need to ask whether the enormous wealth consumed by these policies has made any significant contribution to enhancing endangered populations – particularly compared to far more effective and less expensive alternatives, including predator control, increasing overall water supplies and hatchery production. 

This bill does so, and as such is the first step in bringing the policy pendulum back toward a sensible balance between environmental and human needs.