Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 64.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Moore's efforts to help communicate the message the American people need to see, not just tomorrow night from one side, but as best as we can maybe looking at the other side of the issues.

If you could look around the room here, you would see some of the special equipment for the event that is starting to be set up, extra cameras, lighting on the House floor so that it is illuminated in a way that shows up well on TV. Unfortunately, what is not illuminated well enough is the record of this White House in supporting the needs of our Nation.

With the State of the Union tomorrow night, these 3-plus years have been, indeed, chaotic, and you could even say a full-fledged crisis in the making or being made.

Over the last few years, President Biden has made a lot of decisions and implemented a lot of policies that have ultimately led to a 17.9 percent rise in inflation since he took office. The cost of rent, electricity, and household goods are actually becoming out of reach for many Americans.

How can these things become out of reach?

I grow food. I am a farmer in my real life in northern California at home. Food has always been for many, many decades for Americans such a low-cost item, they didn't even have to think about it.

Why is it reverting to a situation where we are more like a third world country and food is hard to afford? Energy, driving our cars around, the whole works, housing--housing is becoming almost unaffordable. What has changed?

Our Nation is less safe than before, with rising rates of carjackings and attacks on law enforcement officers. You are not safe in your home.

Right here in this town, in D.C., is an example of a carjacking affecting one of our colleagues in this body, attacked in what may seem like a fairly safe neighborhood. What is going on here?

Our country has been weakened on the world stage as well. President Biden caters to oil oligarchs in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and even Russia.

He hastily removed U.S. troops from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to take over after all those years of our side fighting for freedom in those areas and to have at least a modicum of a government that would work for people over there. On top of that, we needlessly lost the lives of over a dozen soldiers on that hasty, poorly planned withdrawal.

One of our other allies, one of our strongest allies in the whole world, Israel, he is walking back support for that great country, that great ally.

His Vice President, Kamala Harris, basically threw Israel under the bus with her comments recently. What is this all about? What are we going to hear in the State of the Union that you could actually point to as a positive?

I hate to be negative. I hate to be, like, oh, partisan stuff that you can't find agreement on this or that, but it is really difficult with the state of things, from what the United States was 3 years ago, even amidst that COVID mess, to what we have now.

Unfortunately, the President has been chipping away even at our Nation's sovereignty. He has taken dozens of well-documented and concrete actions that have opened our borders and undermined our laws.

Our laws aren't broken. Immigration isn't broken. The enforcement, the action of the executive branch, to maintain them is the part that is broken.

We did pass H.R. 2 early on in this session to help fortify some of these laws, to help define better what asylum means, since they are defining it in the most loose possible ways.

For the past 3 years, the Biden administration has ignored the crisis. You can't get him or Kamala Harris hardly to go to the border at all. When they do, it is not the part of the border that we could easily document that has been the problem, and he is directly responsible for it.

I have to ask the question as I do occasionally: President Biden, whose side are you on with these actions you take?

He canceled the remain in Mexico program, which was working fairly well. He revoked title 42 for health concerns. He revoked it. He stopped construction of the border wall.

I had a chance to visit that most recently down in the Tucson area, on farther south. Stacks and stacks of the metal that would be used to build that fence were just laying there, dated October 2020 on some of that material.

He even promised a little over a year ago, well, maybe we will start filling in some of the gaps. There has been no action on that.

He has reprimanded border agents, making up bogus claims that the agents riding their horses with their reins were somehow whipping immigrants with that. That was finally dispelled, but not before the lie had spread all around the world from the administration and some of their cronies. They were just trying to do their jobs, and they are being impaired by this White House in doing so.

He allowed for the release of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into this country with no way to track them--actually, millions. Biden's Department of Homeland Security has now admitted that 40 percent of catch and release migrants have disappeared.

Last week, it was revealed that he never once spoke to his chief of the Border Patrol about any of this. Border security isn't even a priority for this administration, though they may want to put the dressing on it as we come down to an election here soon.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, is leading an effort to ban his Department from doing something politically incorrect by saying the words ``illegal immigrant.'' That is what they are focused on, not the actual immigration. That is their concern.

I have to ask again: President Biden, Secretary Mayorkas, whose side are you on? Is it the American people, or is it some other agenda? We can't tell.

Tons of fentanyl are being smuggled into our country, killing our youth. The price of fentanyl is coming down. It is so cheap now because there is such a massive supply--you know, supply and demand. It is getting cheap because it is so frequently available coming across our border illegally.

Deadly chemicals and people are being trafficked to work on the illegal marijuana grows, like we have so many of in northern California, just taking over the land.

Criminal aliens repeatedly broke the law, like the Venezuelan national who recently killed Laken Riley in broad daylight.

House Republicans know that border security is, indeed, national security for our whole country. Every State, as we have said time and again, is now feeling like a border State.

We did pass the strongest border security bill in history in H.R. 2. Now, about a hundred yards that direction, Senator Schumer and the gang over there have refused to bring it up for a vote. Instead, they proposed a watered-down immigration bill that would allow--get this-- 1.8 illegal immigrants a year in our country. It codifies that.

Go ahead, 1.8 million, come on in. Once we reach that threshold, then we will start enforcing something.

How can you take a law or a bill idea like that even seriously?

They would be rewarded with immediate work permits and an ability to stay longer once they are identified. I mean, calling that a border security package is an unfunny joke.

President Biden's open border policies are putting Americans in true danger. This border crisis is responsible for the deaths of countless Americans and the destruction of countless American families.

I just saw a video back from 1995 when President Clinton stood right up there and gave a State of the Union Address and outlined the problem that illegal immigration is in displacing jobs and providing more danger for the American public. That was in 1995 when President Clinton, a Democrat, said that.

What has changed politically in that timeframe that now the Democrats are all for what is happening on our border or, at the very least, doing nothing about it?

They had a period of time when they controlled both Houses and the White House with President Biden just a little over a year ago. They had a 2-year window to do something about that. They had all the ability to line up the votes and the signatures they needed to do that. They did nothing.

Instead, they are saying it is Republicans that are blocking it. We have been for solid border policy since day one.

President Trump led the charge for 4 years on that, and they pushed back. They thwarted him. They thwarted funding for the border.

They want to send billions and billions overseas for other things when a fraction of that would secure our own southern border. Come on.

One more time: The President will be here tomorrow night, and that side of the room is going to be applauding everything. Our side? Some good, maybe some bad. It will be a mixed bag on this side of the room.

I have to ask the President: As you address us, remember, ask yourself, whose side are you on?

Madam Speaker, maybe soon we will actually get serious about enforcing our border and the immigration mess we have down there.

We see what is happening with sanctuary cities, and certainly, Mayor Adams from New York City is feeling the heat on that, as well, and actually starting to talk the right language.

On top of that we have San Francisco that is not only fully embracing illegal alien sanctuary but starting this November--get this--they will let illegal aliens vote in their local school board elections.

Right.

So how can we even think that that is constitutional? How is that going to make San Francisco elections and the legislators they would send to Washington, D.C., or Sacramento in the eyes of the voters in the rest of the country, how do they have confidence in that?

Texas can't enforce their laws on illegal immigration invasions into their State, but San Francisco can ignore Federal law and allow illegal aliens to vote in their local elections and set up ultimately to legitimize them in their eyes to vote in Federal elections? That will lead to this body having to invalidate their elections for Congress and Senate and for the White House.

Mr. Speaker, I am fascinated by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle being so fixated on Ukraine when our porous southern border, our U.S. borders, are causing so much harm to our American economy and losing American lives such as Laken Riley here most recently.

We have been fairly generous to Ukraine since their problems have started with Russia. Indeed, the amount of money they received is at least 20-fold more than what we are even talking about that would secure our own southern border.

Now we see President Biden will be chasing former President Trump down to the border--in reality, a desperate attempt to stabilize his plummeting poll numbers on the issue, but let's not be kidded by that.

Today's visit, much like Biden's first and only other visit to our southern border, will be basically a photo op.

He will be visiting Brownsville, Texas, an area of the southern border that, according to reports, has had virtually nonexistent activity in recent days, weeks, and months compared to all the other places along the border where you can see plenty of footage of tens of thousands of people coming across. Create a distraction here by going over there.

This is nothing more than a smokescreen and an attempt to distract American people from his disastrous policies and the chaos he has unleashed at our southern border.

For the past 3 years, President Biden has not only ignored the crisis at the southern border, he is directly responsible for it.

Since his first day in office, he has worked to implement his own far-left failed policies which have basically turned every town in the whole country into a border town and destroyed countless American families. We then talk about this issue here on the floor since the media doesn't seem to want to cover that very well.

There are over 60 instances of President Biden and his administration taking actions that undermine our Nation's border security.

The first thing he did when he came into office was to get rid of the procedures and the policies that President Trump had put into place.

Yet, recently in the press, he is yelling at Republicans, saying: You need to back some of our border policies we are working on. Really? Put back in place the policies that already worked.

These eight items, he could do all of these without having Congress fund or come to agreement on a bipartisan fashion on any of them: end catch and release, reinstate the remain in Mexico policy, enter into an asylum cooperation agreement, end parole abuses, detain inadmissible aliens--wow, wouldn't that be something--use expedited removal process, rein in taxpayer-funded benefits for all illegal aliens--wouldn't that be a relief for families who are struggling--issue a proclamation to suspend or restrict entry in the United States.

Those are actions he could take on his own without having to battle through both sides of the aisle in both the House and Senate.

We would be happy to do that as Republicans. Republicans have been standing for these types of policies all along.

It all changed under the Biden administration. That is why we have suffered these last 3 years with the mass amounts of people coming across our border illegally and invading our country.

We know border security is national security. That is why the bill we passed, H.R. 2, earlier on is the right policy.

Yet, it is sitting there languishing under Senator Schumer and the Senate Democrats who won't bring it up for a vote or discussion.

Instead, they gave us a watered-down immigration bill that would allow 1.8 million illegal immigrants a year into our country with immediate work permits, benefits, and the ability to stay even longer, thereby codifying illegal immigration.

We are going to automatically concede 1.8 million can come in illegally without process, and we are going to give you stuff. Calling that a border security package and then reaming Republicans for not being for that, it is not even a funny joke.

Let's look at the numbers. Since Biden took office, there have been 7.2 million illegal crossings of our southern border; 8.7 million entries nationwide.

The total number of illegal immigrants who have entered through our southern border is greater than the population of 36 of our individual States.

Let's not forget about the terrorists. Mr. Speaker, 340 individuals whose names appear on the terrorist watch list have been stopped trying to cross the southern border.

So far in 2024, there have been 58 individuals whose names appear on the list who have been stopped trying to enter the border. How many haven't been stopped?

The total is more than the encounters in all fiscal years 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 combined. That is how bad it has gotten to this point.

It is not just terrorists crossing our border. It is also Chinese Communist Party nationals. Mr. Speaker, 20,000 Chinese nationals have illegally crossed the southern border since fiscal year 2024 began in October.

Just last week, 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley's life was taken. How many more examples like that have to happen because of Biden's wide-open policy and today's photo op? We must do better.

Madam Speaker, what is it going to take to get people in this country on both sides of the aisle to understand that the Biden border crisis is killing people?

Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student whose life was taken by an illegal immigrant, not a migrant. I hear this word ``migrant'' used all the time. This is a misnomer, trying to brush it under the rug. These aren't migrants; there is an illegal immigrant invasion of this country.

Earlier this week, another 2-year-old boy in Maryland was murdered by an illegal immigrant, not a migrant.

President Biden is down there in Texas pretending to do something about the border now in Brownsville. This is not a problem area like Eagle Pass, but a quieter area currently.

He is yelling at Republicans and saying: Well, you are not doing anything about the border. Well, his first day in office, he reversed all of President Trump's policies that were helping keep the border in check.

All these eight items on this list he could do by executive order. He could sign with a pen and do a legal constitutional executive action immediately.

Instead, he wants to blame Republicans or somebody else for the policies he invoked on day one that have put us where we are.

Instead, he wants to sue the State of Texas because they say their State is being invaded, and they have laws at the State level to stop invasions. He is suing them to get rid of their razor wire measures along the border. What a joke.

Mr. Speaker, indeed, a very somber thought is that we have three young ladies who are direct victims of the wide-open Biden border policy. They are not getting much notoriety for that. They are not getting talked about a whole lot.

Kayla Hamilton, 1\1/2\ years ago, was taken by an illegal immigrant in this country. Lizbeth Medina, just this last December, was taken by somebody who had overstayed their visa and was here illegally. Now, most recently, Laken Riley, who we are starting to hear about a little bit, was taken by an illegal immigrant just a few days ago.

All of this is at the hands of the Biden border policy, which is endangering our citizens and causing them to lose their lives. What are we going to do about this? What are people doing? Are there protests out there? Are there

marches? Is there national outrage? Is there national media coverage?

I guess we are trying to do that here a little bit tonight because the media seems to not want to report this. They want to report other things. They don't seem to care about this issue that is affecting Americans so negatively.

Laken, Lizbeth, and Kayla are not forgotten. We are going to fix this border. These are not migrants. This is an illegal immigrant invasion hurting Americans.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, February 29, 2024, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and service of Tehama County resident, Burton Miles Bundy, my good friend who passed peacefully at home, on January 25, 2024, after a lengthy battle with Parkinson's Disease.

Burt was born on October 2nd, 1941, in Santa Maria, California. In 1946 his family moved to a ranch in Los Molinos, California, where he lived until his last day. He was a graduate of Los Molinos High School in the class of 1959 before attending University of California, Davis. Burt enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1960 and specialized as a jet aircraft mechanic on F102's, F105's and F106's. He was stationed at McCord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington where he met and married his wife Joyce McGinn in 1962. Afterwards, he deployed to Thule, Greenland before being discharged in 1963.

In 1968, Burt and Joyce opened the Los Molinos Feed and Supply Store. They owned the business until Burt was elected to the Tehama County Board of Supervisors in 1981. Burt was a leader in water, land, and fish issues throughout the North State. Burt not only served as County Supervisor for five terms, but he also served as a board member on the California Bureau of Reclamation, the California State Farm Bureau, the Tehama County Farm Bureau, the Regional Council for Rural Counties, the Northern California Land Trust, the Mill Creek Conservancy, and the Los Molinos Mutual Water Company. In 1998 he developed and led the Sacramento River Conservation Forum until his retirement in 2010. His outstanding service and dedication to his community was instrumental in the development of the area and his contributions will live long past his time of service.

Burt was a husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, and a friend to so many. He and his wife Joyce have attended nearly every Tehama County event. They were always willing to volunteer and lend a hand when anyone needed help. He coached his sons for years with Little League, was a lifetime member of the Central Tehama Kiwanis and played cards with a group of friends for over 35 years. He was a dedicated husband and father as well as a public servant, volunteer, and businessman who spent hours working for the betterment of the community around him.

An avid hunter, Burt's special place was a cabin located on Mill Creek where he enjoyed hunting and fishing with family and friends. He loved the San Francisco Giants and listened to all the games on the radio. He loved to fix up old cars and raised cattle his entire life. Burt not only traveled with Joyce but traveled around the world representing his lifelong passion for farming and ranching as a graduate of the 1998 AG Leadership Class 29.

He will take a seat at the poker table with his buddies in heaven who are waiting for him.

Burt is survived by his wife Joyce of 61 years, sons Lance and Justin, his grandchildren Britta, Carson, Angus, Abbey, and Axel, and his sister Ruthe. Burt leaves a legacy and example to follow. He will be missed dearly.

Madam Speaker, what I am illustrating here today is one of the largest environmental disasters in American history. This was caused by environmental movement actions here.

What you see is the Klamath River up in northern California, which

reaches partly into Oregon. There have been four hydroelectric dams that have been there anywhere from 60 to 100 years, creating clean, renewable, CO2-free, green electricity, something that Americans seem to want and certainly the government is pushing hard for as it tries to electrify everything by mandate: our vehicles, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, stoves, what have you. On the other hand, they want to take away the generation capacity to make all this electricity.

Here you see this plume right here on the Klamath River, where one of the stems of the Klamath still has clean water. What you see here is the plume from where they started to knock down one of the dams so far, as well as release from the bottom, unplugging many, many years of silt and sedimentation that had been built up underneath at the bottom of the various lakes in the chain.

Guess what? We warned them about this. They just glossed over it and said: Oh, the silt will be fine. It will be fine. Well, they are finding out there are high levels of chromium and other heavy metals in that silt. We knew this. They ignored it anyway because these four dams for them are trophies for the environmental movement.

It is not about protecting fish. The latest projection by Fish and Game personnel, just said this week in meetings up in the north--again, you see here a normal part of the river, a tributary coming in. It is winter water there, so it isn't perfectly clear, but that is normal water for the winter.

Here is the dirty plume coming down the Klamath, this brown, mucky stuff that is killing the wildlife in that system.

They are actually expecting, and they said it with a straight face, that it might be 10 to 12 years now for the fish population that they ostensibly are trying to protect to return. The life cycle of a salmon is 3 years, so you are going to be wiping out several generations, hoping, I guess, that the salmon that are out in the ocean that return up the river will somehow find their way back after 10 and 12 years of forgetting about their habitat and where their imprint is to their normal breeding grounds.

Would you have bought into this idea that the salmon are going to be wiped out for 10 or 12 years and think that is an environmental win? I don't think any normal person would think that. That is what they are saying since they started this project of tearing down.

This shows an existing dam that makes hydroelectric power, but you can see the plume right here. It may be hard to see on TV, but this is a gray, blackish, brown crud hitting that dam from up above and coming through at the bottom where they have unplugged it and just let it run. Again, if it is supposed to be about wildlife, it isn't.

The final poster I have to show you here, this shows dead deer that have waded out into that muck that came from the bottom of the dam. This is not the natural condition of the river, by any stretch, with the dams in place. At least three deer in this photo--there are several more in the larger pull-away of the photo--that wandered out and got stuck, as the Fish and Game Commission helplessly stood on the shore and could hear them bellowing and bleating, being unable to get out.

They had, of course, no means to go out and rescue them. Heaven knows if people would have gone out there or some crazy kids out there mud bogging in their four-wheel drives or something, how they would get anybody out of that. They don't have a plan for that. We will have that plan later. They are working on it as they monitor it, says Fish and Game.

This is what you have, an environmental disaster under the guise of preserving fish. They are trying to differentiate, well, there is a bunch of nonnative fish that are dying off, like yellow perch and others. The salmon they are trying to protect, we still think they are up in the tributaries, hiding out right now. What happens as soon as they come down into that, if they move at all or if they come upstream at all? What happens? They are going to get wiped out on that.

As much as farmers and ranchers there have bent over backward in the Scott and Shasta Rivers, as well as the Klamath River up in Tule Lake Basin, not to mention the refuges that don't get water for ducks, geese, and other waterfowl habitat, what is the answer to them? Oh, I guess we messed up.

Likely, they are going to want to take even more water out of Klamath Lake and cut off agriculture even more so because they have to now clean this mess up here.

Who is going to be held liable for this? Who is going to be held liable for the lies about this whole system here? Is it going to be the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, which signed off on this 5- 0 finally, after we tried to give them facts on what was going on here?

Is it going to be EPA? Is it going to be NOAA fisheries? Is it going to be the California Department of Fish and Game? Excuse me. It is now known as Fish and Wildlife--politically correct. Will it be U.S. Fish and Wildlife?

Are they just going to keep coming back more and more to agriculture and saying: Well, you are going to have to pay more for your water supply because we screwed up?

The people out there have been wronged by this, and the government needs to do much better, and they are going to have to be paying restitution for the damage.

Mr. Speaker, the Klamath River Hydroelectric Project in the northern California and southern Oregon area, including my district, had produced annually enough reliable, cheap, renewable, CO2-free electricity for 70,000 households. They provided good-paying jobs and were the largest single private taxpayer in Siskiyou County, California, by having these dams.

Now, the Klamath removal project is an assault on the people and livelihoods of the people in the Klamath Basin. It is an attack on American agriculture, a misguided attempt to help a fish population that this Klamath dam removal will likely end up destroying, as evidenced by the dirty plume of water you see entering into the stream there. Unbelievable.

People are now finding their wells are going dry because they are not being supported by having the lakes there anymore. They are finding that the wells they do have are starting to feel the effects of this toxic plume hitting them. The water supply that the fish, wildlife, and livestock would normally get out of the river is tainted. You are seeing massive fish kills and wildlife kill.

One lady sent an example to my office of the water that came out that she used to bathe her child in. It was the same color as this stuff right here. I wouldn't wash my snow tires in that, I don't think, let alone my child.

Mr. Speaker, I am speaking out today about an issue that has been going on in the northern part of my district in northern California. They are touting it, of course, as one of the biggest dam removal projects in American history, but it also is turning out to be one of the biggest environmental disasters in American history.

You can see right here the plume. This is the Klamath River, and this is one of the tributaries that feeds into it. This dark muck that is coming down is a result of what they have done to tear down dams or cut loose the material at the bottom of them under the drain.

This is a tributary coming in with winter water on that. It is kind of greenish and such. So you see, it is two different diverging bodies of water that is turning into muck, and it is an unbelievable mess there. It is killing wildlife, killing fish.

The Klamath River project used to make 70,000 households' worth of clean electricity. Good-paying jobs are very important to Siskiyou County. Now, the project, indeed, is an assault on the people who live there in the basin that are opposed to this, but outsiders are coming in to tear this out.

At a time when the U.S. is trying to electrify everything-- automobiles, stoves, leaf blowers, and everything else--they are taking out clean, hydroelectric power.

The chromium levels in this material, the pollutants in there, is unbelievable. There is a lot more to this story. Keep watching to see what is going on with this Klamath River system and the disaster that it is becoming.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Moore of Utah for leading us once again at this important time to get the message out in front of the American people that wish to pay attention.

Just following up a little bit on what Mr. Grothman was talking about on the border and the horrific illegal immigration and how many are coming into this country is just overwhelming.

I had an experience last week in Tucson, myself and Mr. Tom Tiffany from Wisconsin. We both, after a border tour, attempted to stop in at an illegal--well, they call them migrants. That is a euphemism. They say we are migrants. It drives me crazy listening to that--an intake area that had been a Ramada Hotel there run under the guise of a group called Casa Alitas.

It is run not with a whole lot of daylight on how they operate there. Again, we have many NGOs, nongovernment organizations, that are making a lot of money that are incentivized to move a lot of illegal immigrants into this country and place them where have you.

They have busloads going here and there and everywhere and plane rides. My understanding is there have been approximately 5,000 plane rides, with planes full, since the start of the Biden administration, moving people around the country.

We attempted to meet with people there and see. It was quiet. They weren't intaking anybody at the time, and they would not see us. They would not see us, even though we had our IDs.

Two Members of the U.S. House of Representatives wanted to sit down with somebody and see what they are doing and have them at least give us a few minutes, an overview.

They refused to do that. They basically kept us outside in the parking lot and called the sheriff's office in case we decided to try and go knock on the door and talk to somebody in charge.

It was amazing that the people that are in charge of the U.S. House, those that are elected to make taxpayer expenditures, taxpayer appropriations, were shut out of being able to ask questions about how the tax dollars are being used on the intake of these illegal immigrants in Tucson. Folks, obviously we have a giant problem. The numbers are horrendous.

Mr. Grothman was talking about the fentanyl. What is interesting about that, there is so much fentanyl coming into this country and it is so negatively affecting and taking lives so much is coming in.

He talked about the market price; the price is so low. The price of actually buying it is really low now because there is so much of it.

Price and demand. When a high volume comes in, they have to cut their prices. It is such a high volume now, the price of it is getting dirt cheap, they are saying.

It is just another example of the Biden administration working against the people and working against American values.

There is no reason it needs to be this way. They say: Oh, you guys, the Republicans, aren't passing a law in Congress. No bills.

Biden has the tools. He could do eight executive orders that are perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional.

There is the remain in Mexico policy and several others he could do without us even passing a bill. There are plenty of laws to already enforce that that they are not doing.

Yes, we added H.R. 2 to that to help define better asylum because asylum is being abused and other good aspects, beefing up the personnel at the border, finishing the fence.

They don't want to do any of that. That is all double talk. That is a bit of my experience at the border just the other day.

Another thing that President Biden has done that has caused unnecessary harm to our country is our energy policy or lack of.

The core of so many of our problems with the cost of inflation and hiked prices of everything starts with the cost of energy.

Whether it is electricity that is generated--and they are tearing out hydroelectric dams in my district--as green renewable power, electricity generated by nuclear power. We need to do a lot more on that.

For years and years, that has been held down by permitting and the inability for government to move on that.

Also, natural gas is a very important component for heating homes as well as operating electricity generation.

Biden has stepped forward to make it almost impossible to explore for oil and gas in this country, and there was also a recent decision to slash all pending and future liquefied natural gas export permits.

This is important because we were exporting this to Europe, for example, to Germany or others. Instead of them relying on Russian gas coming in in that big pipeline, we could be helping because we have such an abundance.

The Biden administration has another wrongheaded approach on energy, harming Americans and harming our allies around the world.

He systematically destroyed key energy initiatives, canceling the Keystone pipeline, shutting down already authorized oil and gas programs in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a really tiny part of a 1.3 million acre refuge in Alaska. It has been approved. They are shutting it down.

The high prices of everything start with the cost of energy. Americans suffer from the high price of food, transportation, and everything else because energy costs way more than it needs to.

We lay that at President Biden's feet. We have the ability to be energy independent like we were under President Trump, an energy exporter helping our allies. Yet, what we have is a ban on being an exporter and a ban on new exploration to make us energy independent.

The Biden administration is way out of whack on this, and we need to do something. The American people need to let them hear about it. The American people need to make themselves heard on that as we try here in this time here in Congress with speeches like this tonight to do so.

I appreciate the time, and I appreciate Mr. Moore leading us on this Special Order to talk about these important topics of energy independence and controlling our border--two of the most important components to a more orderly society in this country.

Mr. Speaker, every State in our country has been negatively impacted by the Biden administration's wide-open border policies.

Last week, I traveled to Cochise County, Arizona, with the Congressional Western Caucus and the Committee on Natural Resources to tour our southern border and discuss President Biden's border policy and how it is affecting our Federal lands and parks.

While in Arizona, my colleague, Representative Tom Tiffany, and I decided to follow up on the story that James O'Keefe had exposed that alleged the Casa Alitas Ramada hotel in Tucson was housing illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense.

Congress has the right, of course, to exercise oversight, as Federal funds prop up these locations and nongovernment organizations, known as NGOs, that are secretly housing these illegals, and Congress has a right to see how American tax dollars are being spent. We have that accountability.

Instead, we were denied access to even the parking lot, given no information, and they even called the sheriff's office on us.

We will be back. Congress must immediately investigate and hold onsite hearings and get down to the bottom of this.

These NGOs that wrap themselves in charity and in religion, in some cases, are making a lot of money off this and are actually undermining the security of our country by trying to move people as fast as they can into this process.

These NGOs must publicly testify before Congress, and more importantly, the American public, about how our tax dollars are being used and what for.

Madam Speaker, I sadly rise today to acknowledge the loss of a friend, Burt Bundy. Burton Miles Bundy, age 82, passed peacefully at home in Los Molinos, California, on January 25, and will take a seat at the poker table with his buddies in heaven who are waiting for him.

Burt was born in Santa Maria, California. In 1946, his family moved to a ranch in Los Molinos, California, Tehama County, where he lived until his last day. He was a graduate of Los Molinos High School, class of 1959, before attending UC Davis.

Burt enlisted in the Air Force in 1960, and specialized as a jet aircraft mechanic on such planes as the F-102, F-105, and F-106. He was stationed at a base in Tacoma, Washington, where he met and married his lovely wife, Joyce McGinn, in 1962, and was then deployed to Thule, Greenland, before being discharged in 1963.

In 1968, Burt and Joyce opened their feed store, Los Molinos Feed and Supply. They ran that business together until he was elected to the Tehama County Board of Supervisors in 1981.

Burt was a leader on water, land, agriculture, and fish issues throughout the north State, serving as county supervisor for five terms. He also served as a board member on the California Farm Bureau, Tehama County Farm Bureau, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Regional Council for Rural Counties, and many others.

Burt was a husband, father, grandfather, brother, uncle, and friend to so many. He and his wife, Joyce, went to almost every Tehama County event--certainly every one I ever went to--and have always been willing to volunteer and lend a helping hand with anybody.

He coached Little League and was an avid hunter. His special place was a cabin located on Mill Creek. I would frequently run into him at car shows where they were showing off their really nicely done 1957 Chevy.

Burt was a big fan of the San Francisco Giants, and we hated the Dodgers together. He loved to fix cars and raise cattle his whole life.

Burt not only traveled with Joyce, but was also a graduate of the 1998 Ag Leadership Class 29, traveling around the world talking about California agriculture to everybody.

Burt spent 61 years with his wife, Joyce, and is survived by his sons, Lance and Justin, and five grandchildren. May God bless him and his family.

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Utah for yielding.

Madam Speaker, we come to this microphone day after day, especially the last 2\1/2\ to 3 years, recounting the difficulty that we--``we,'' this collective body, the House and Senate, and the government in general--we are putting the people of this country through, this unnecessary pain, unnecessary crisis, just one after another.

This isn't made by weather or nature or even foreign enemies, per se. We are causing it by the actions either from this administration directly or their bureaucracy. It is one thing after another. In my home State of California, we echo that in spades there as well.

One of them right now is the condition that we are treating women and girls in this country. Now, the usual saw might be about abortion or something. No, look what is happening. For girls and women in their sports, in their opportunities, you have men masquerading as women because they can't cut it on a men's team in sports, for example, so they switch over and just start competing on a women's team or girls' team in school.

How are we even at this point of entertaining this as a legitimate and wise way of doing things?

I keep asking, where are the feminist groups on this? Are they so locked into politics and being unified with the left that they are willing to sacrifice the futures of girls and young women in college with scholarships? Plus, the camaraderie of sports anyway, the goodness that comes from working as a team or those individual efforts you have in individual sports of excelling and finding that just dashed because there are a couple of biological males competing in that same sport with some of the built-in physical advantage they have in many sports, maybe not all but a lot of them.

We see them losing opportunities for scholarships at the college level or winning the gold medal in whatever sport it is.

I am glad to stand with the female athletes as they continue what has been a long fight to have that opportunity in sports. We have title IX coming along. We had some fits and starts getting there, but they deserve to have the same opportunities as men do.

It is a different fight these days. What we see is the left actually intentionally erasing women. Their opportunities are being taken. As I have said, the spaces on sports teams, filling out the rosters, with biological males on there, they lose scholarships, or on the podium, as they win their medals, being replaced with biological men.

Americans in these sports across the country are rightly outraged at what has happened and what is happening to women's and girls' sports. I have signed on to several initiatives at the congressional level to protect women and girls, such as the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act that keeps men from taking scholarships, roster spots, and championship titles from women athletes.

Indeed, it is a point of insanity where we are with this. It is really unfair that they would have to even fight for this opportunity to compete on a stage, on a field, or what have you, with biological men; be pitted against them in contact sports, possibly physically harmed due to the physical advantages that are frequent, or the indignity of having to share a locker room space the way you are raised, with modesty, with the obvious separation of the sexes--up until this recent phenomena that seems to be having so much momentum amongst the left, amongst people who it seems like have really lost their sensibilities.

This is an effective silencing of the voices of female athletes, with the expectation to conform, all because of a gender identity ideology that is running amuck right now. Indeed, we are kind of a laughingstock as a country from some of the countries that are still developing their own sports and contemplating what the heck is it they are doing over there.

Women are being directly hurt by this, as I mentioned, with the physical harm, concussions, skull fractures, other injuries, and being pushed out of their opportunities by this intrusion of males.

It is imperative for the next generation of girls that they be able to grow up and know that they are cared about, that they are loved, that they matter, instead of just being erased from these opportunities. It is just unbelievable we have to talk about this.

Indeed, under this Biden era and others, my home State of California and several other States that are doing this, it is one crisis after another.

I want to talk about energy for a minute, too, because that is another unneeded crisis that is being inflicted upon the people of this country due to the cost.

Now, energy is the basis for so much of our economy and the cost of our economy. In my real life, I am a farmer. Before the 2022 crop, we saw the price of fuel double and the price of fertilizer triple. In 2023 it came back down a little bit. In my home State of California, it is still often normal to see $5 fuel out on the roadway there. It is all because the day President Biden came in, he started having an anti- American energy policy, which is harming our ability to develop and transport natural gas, which is very important, for example, in fertilizer production, but also in warming grain storage around the country, putting warm air on the grain so it will dry out and stay preserved, and so many other forms of use of natural gas, heating homes and operating power plants.

With the miracle of hydraulic fracturing developed not that long ago, America came from being an energy user to the ability to be a major energy exporter. The prices came down so much that other countries were actually looking at locating more and more factories here because the cost of energy was going to be so low.

We have the Biden administration doing everything it can to cut off more development and usage of natural gas at the pass. Why is that? Natural gas burns cleanly. It is one of the good transition fuels as we move from other forms to that, but we still need all of them. We need all of them.

Hydroelectric power is clean, CO2-free electricity, yet it is being pushed out as more and more dams--in my own district in northern California, four dams on the Klamath River are being attacked right now. One of them has already been taken down. Ostensibly, the idea is to save fish there, even though the fish historically really haven't traveled up the river the way it is claimed. They aren't true spawning grounds in a lake that is warm, Klamath Lake, and not ideal for this type of fish. Science doesn't seem to matter on that, because it is a political situation that is being hustled on us.

We are going to lose this hydroelectric at the same time that many are mandating by the year 2035 or 2045, or whatever they want to make up at the time, that we have to have X amount of electric cars or electric stoves or electric leaf blowers and lawnmowers. Heaven knows, we will be moving into trucks and trains and even airplanes.

They are taking away the ability to generate electricity, clean, CO2-free, baseload power such as hydroelectric and really clean fossil fuel but still a very clean and efficient natural gas.

I have been attending a lot of seminars on nuclear energy as well. There is another CO2-free power source that is baseload, that is dependable, that is 24/7. And we are having such difficulty procuring and permitting new nuclear plants. The technology has continued to improve and get better. For these smaller plants, it would be more ideal locating near cities where the technology, the safety is there, but we can't hardly talk about that. We have to have a breakthrough on that so we can be energy independent with low cost and what would appear to be renewable energy.

Renewable isn't just windmills and solar panels, which are really unreliable. We have the opportunity to have baseload power that would be low priced and available 24/7 with these technologies. We have roadblocks time and time again. They want to tear down dams. They want to get rid of natural gas. They are hesitant on nuclear energy. There just doesn't seem to be a solution for the left, because everything is ``no.'' It isn't all going to be served by solar panels and windmills, because those are a tiny percent of our overall grid.

The rest of the world is going ahead with oil and gas development and usage. The curve is going way up around the rest of the world. It is only us and a couple other western countries that are hamstringing our ability to be energy independent, develop the energy we need, and have an economy here. Instead, we are going to export our economy to China and Asia.

We are harming ourselves by having this administration in charge with their wrong-headed, backward policies on this. We need energy independence. We can do it. We can do it cleanly and responsibly.

I mentioned CO2 a couple times, CO2 meaning climate change and the fear factor that is causing around the country. I remind you; CO2 is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. When asked, the average person on the street who is busy with their lives doing what they do, they will typically guess, from all the hype, somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. No, it is 0.04 percent.

With the U.S. and a couple other western countries actually flattening their CO2 production, even dipping down a little bit, it is certainly not us that would be the so-called problem. It is the continued export of jobs, export of economy, and export of manufacturing to places like China and the Pacific rim where they don't have nearly the protections.

As we keep talking about a carbon-free life and going zero carbon, it is actually not necessary. Because so little of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide anyway, it is not a threat. It is one that is used by government, by organizations, by international organizations, to try and control more and more of our economy and of our lives; taking away our vehicles, taking away our mobility, telling us we need to live in stacked communities instead of the way we live; running people off the rural areas like in my district and the western States, running people out of the cattle business and such by introducing wolves, decimating the deer and elk populations, as well as livestock; basically pushing people out that are productive people that serve all of those folks that make these policies that live in the cities.

I guess maybe they need to go to the end of the food line when they are talking about what they are doing to devastate agriculture, as well as these other industries that provide the minerals, electricity, energy, and everything they need.

There are so many crises that are unneeded in this country, I could go all day long, but I shouldn't. I hope people will take heart on this and look at what the policies are that are being made by the Biden administration, by Democrats in the Senate, and the majority in my home State of California, 3-1 Democrat majority with Governor Newsom, and the havoc that is being wreaked on the people of California with these wrongheaded policies. Certainly, I would invite the rest of the country not to emulate what California does.