Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I hear a lot of complaints about what it is going to do for California. Well, don't cry for California. We do a lot of bad ideas that affect the whole country. Indeed, we have one-eighth of the country's population and a little over one-eighth of the country's auto sales.

So what does that mean? Well, we are not going to get a whole lot of help from the manufacturers or the CEOs because they want to get along with Washington, D.C., but we are here about preserving choice for all Americans on automobiles.

The California Air Resources Board is an unelected board appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom, who is not the guy that is on your side for freedom.

As well, recently, after this mandate in California came out by 2035, a few days later he said, oh, people, will you please not charge your electric vehicles right now because it is going to affect our grid because we don't have enough power in our grid--rolling blackouts, bans on hydroelectric dams. They almost took down our last nuclear power plant.

So California is not the place a lot of solutions are going to come from. You said Republicans put these in place. Well, these have been weaponized in the 50 years since then with the Air Resources Board and all the other entities that have been put in place.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 1435 will preserve choices for people. I have actually lived it myself as I have had a real job on a farm.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the motion to recommit and ``yes'' on H.R. 1435.

Madam Speaker, today, I rise to speak about the passing of a very good friend and an American hero, Lieutenant Commander Jim Gibson of Redding, California.

Pictured here at an Honor Flight here in Washington, D.C., I got to accompany him that day. It was a lot of fun and very gratifying.

Jim was a career Navy officer for 26 years. He joined the Navy as an engine man right out of high school and rose to the rank of ensign before becoming a commissioned officer.

After working his way through the ranks to captain, he was assigned command of a submarine rescue ship in the 7th Fleet. This vessel, the USS Coucal, had the worst reputation in the entire U.S. 7th Fleet. When Jim took command, he turned things around and made it the premier submarine rescue vessel in the entire U.S. 7th Fleet.

After retiring from active service, Jim remained devoted to the ideal of duty. He was very active in veterans' affairs, founding a submarine veterans group in northern California and serving as its president. He was instrumental in raising money for the Veterans Memorial in Anderson River Park. I was proud to have him as a member of my congressional advisory committee on academy appointments, where he did a great job of helping us screen the best new and brightest.

Jim was faithful to his fellow veterans to the last, working faithfully out of the Igo Veterans Cemetery. He was always there to ring the bell for the last watch when a Navy veteran was laid to rest.

He is survived by his wife, Mary Lou. My heart goes out to her and their family at this time of grief. They will be in our prayers.

We will miss him dearly. Fair winds and following seas, Jim.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I just happen to be speaking about the subject of California.

Now, California is a beautiful place, beautiful climate and terrain and territory. It is just that its politics have gotten so upside down in the last--pick a number of years--40 years, 50 years. I am not really there to serve the people anymore but to serve climate agendas and other crazy agendas I will not go into here tonight.

I live in the rural part of California. I like to say, I live in the normal part still in the far north where we farm and we ranch--we still attempt to do mining--in order to produce the products that city people need. If they didn't have us around to do those things then, I don't know--they want to, I guess, import all of it, which seems to be the direction here. Let's import it all from China.

One of the interesting things--I won't say funny, although the people watching might think it is funny because we do this to ourselves--but our California Air Resources Board released a rule requiring all new cars in California that will be sold new to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

Now, this was tried back in the eighties where they said, well, we want--I believe maybe it was 1990--10 percent of all cars sold by the year 2000, if my memory is correct, to be zero-emission vehicles.

So what did we end up with? Car companies are trying to make battery- powered vehicles that look like glorified golf carts or maybe those little rigs you saw on ``Fantasy Island'' that Tattoo was driving around in to be legitimate vehicles you would have out on the roadway. You saw basically oversized golf carts with license plates on them trying to somehow meet this mandate.

Well, CARB figured out at the time it wasn't going to get there so they relented on it, but now they are not relenting.

So we have this mandate--not actually passed by legislature, signed by the governor but made by the California Air Resources Board, which is famous around the country for being heavy-handed on truckers and off-road vehicles and everything else.

Here is the funny part: Just a few days after this mandate came out, our esteemed Governor Newsom had to publicly beg electric vehicle owners to not charge their cars due to concerns about the power grid and blackouts. He told them, hey, please don't charge your cars right now because our grid is overstretched during that particular time.

You have also a few months later when the winter came in residents in Sierra Nevada lost power for many days due to heavy snowstorms knocking the power out, so they couldn't heat their homes and do normal things there. But if they had also had an electric vehicle they couldn't even have gotten out of there to go someplace where it was warm or for other needs, maybe emergency medical care or what have you.

We also have rolling blackouts that are common in the State due to overuse and not enough power on the grid to keep things going. Industries in California, many of them have agreements with the utilities that they will voluntarily shut down if they are called upon if the grid looks like it is going to be overtaxed at a particular point. So you have manufacturers that have to lay off their workers for the rest of the day, stop production in order to pull off-line and not use power because we don't have enough of a power grid in California.

Then up in my area because we have a forest issue--which our forests aren't managed as well as they should be, especially Federal land by the U.S. Forest Service--where the power lines have been run through for many decades, where there is hydrogeneration, et cetera, power may be coming in from another State, we don't get to maintain around the power lines like we used to because it might be an environmental concern. We can't take the trees down that you need to to make sure that they can't swing if they are falling; they might fall within the path of those power lines if the tree, you know, is taller than what the clearance is, right?

So I had to pass a bill a couple years ago to make the process just a little bit easier to get a permit from the Forest Service to do that on Federal land. It is still not easy, and it is not very timely, but it got a little bit better. So we have that to deal with. They call it a public safety power shutoff.

It especially affects part of my district. It seems like when I drive through Tehama County sometimes during that time of year--now, they have improved it a little bit--the whole county would be shut off because the wind blew, and it might cause branches to blow into the power lines, therefore, bad things happen such as the Camp fire, which 85 people died in Paradise, California, due to a power line problem a few miles east of there with the wind blowing through. Then other fires like the Carr fire near Redding, the Zogg fire, and many others.

Then we saw, of course, the effects, tragically, in Hawaii that we just mourned this week--and that is what this red ribbon represents-- because we are not managing the lands around power lines.

This is happening right in California at the same time they are mandating more and more electricity use, forcing us into vehicles we can't afford or don't want. Also, they want to ban gas stoves and gas water heaters and make them be on the grid, as well. I mean, you couldn't get any dumber with the stuff we are doing in my home State, my beautiful home State of California. Rolling blackouts.

By a miracle last year they decided we have to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant going for another 5 years instead of maybe a 40- year permit--it was put in in about 1982 when I was going to school down there in San Luis Obispo. It had a much longer life than what they were allowing because, oh, we don't like nukes, nukes are scary, even though they make zero CO2, as does hydropower.

Right now they are in the process of tearing dams out to make hydroelectric power in my district, and they have their eyes on more up in Washington and other areas because, oh, it might be an environmental issue. It is really absurd what we are doing to ourselves. We are putting ourselves into the Stone Age so we can go live in caves and eat insects that these guys are prescribing for us, you know. It is disgusting.

Now, they want to apply this toward our vehicles. We have got the cleanest burning, most efficient vehicles ever being put out by the car manufacturers, but they don't look at it that way. They don't give credit for how much better and cleaner it is. The Los Angeles Basin's air is cleaner than it has been. You remember the 1950s and 1960s and all that. It is so much cleaner now. We have made so much progress on this, yet they want to because they have the power to or arbitrarily think it is a feel-good policy to take these vehicles away, to take car choice away from people.

I remember the EPA under Andy Wheeler, just a few years ago, was trying to make it where people could have more affordable cars and not have this 54.5-mile-per-gallon mandate. What does a 54.5-mile-per- gallon vehicle look like to you? Is that a car choice to you when that mandate was going to be fully fleshed out?

I mean, most cars that get pretty good gas mileage get 30, 35, somewhere around there. A lot of others get 20, 25, depending on what you want, but it isn't about your choice. It is about government deciding what you need or what you should have; what is your neighborhood going to look like; how much do you get to travel anymore, all of these massive control issues.

We have public safety power shutoffs. We have them tearing down the hydroelectric dams. The dams they still do have, they are requiring more and more of the water to go out in such a way that they don't even turn the turbines. Instead, we want the cold water to go out to lower the temperature of the river maybe by 1 degree and it will be a little bit better for the fish in the river or we want the water to come off the top of the lake that can't go through the turbines because we want to save that colder water for later in the season so it can be 1 degree colder down the river for the fish. I mean, it is crazy.

When this first was announced by CARB, the Governor of California, we sent him a letter and his CARB chair,

Liane Randolph, asking them to consider alternate policies to reduce emissions that do not add additional strain to the State's energy grid or restrictions on consumer choice. Choice, we all like that around here, don't we?

I thank my California Republican colleagues for joining me on sending a unified message, and I believe that this letter has helped us get a bill on the floor this week, which is known as H.R. 1435. The bill would prevent the U.S. EPA from issuing a waiver to California Air Resources Board in order to enact that rule the State is trying to do, without, again, legislation by the elected legislators.

This is what they have been using for a lot of years to put California even under a tighter scrutiny than a lot of the rest of the country, and it makes us uncompetitive in many aspects.

Though 95 percent of the vehicles on America roads are run on internal combustion engines--they are using the acronym ICE these days--States like California are trying to pass these egregiously unrealistic emissions mandates to force American car manufacturers, and foreign ones, too, to prioritize EV manufacturing.

Where are we going to mine the materials to make these? Are we going to have the power on the grid to run them? You are going to change the power grid in neighborhoods to have the massive amounts of transformers and the wires and the poles and insulators and all of that in order to have these charging units inside people's homes and in their garages. They aren't taking that into account. It is just that la-di-da, pie-in- the-sky deal. We will just mandate it, and it will be great by 2035.

The idea that people just can't afford these vehicles, as many of them are sometimes $17,000 to $20,000 more for the equivalent, same size, same usage type vehicle, they don't care.

A whole bunch of the country's economy would be affected by this because probably a bunch of other States would follow California's ideas on this, with this waiver that they are seeking.

It is a real market manipulation that nobody has asked for other than the do-gooders in Congress, at the State level, and others that are forcing us in many ways in our lives. They want to force what kind of home we live in, what we eat, what we drive, and how we power our stoves and our water heaters.

Now, I mentioned a little bit ago how the grid got knocked out in some of the mountainous areas after the storm there. You think, well, at least people can go turn on their generator in order to provide some electricity and some heat in their home perhaps. No, no, they want to ban gas-powered or fuel-powered generators, too. I am wondering: What are you supposed to run a generator on if you can't run it on gas or diesel or natural gas or a propane tank or something you might have nearby? What are you supposed to run it on when the power goes out?

If you live in a rural area where there are frequent public safety power shutoffs or fire or other things happen that knock out the grid, what are you supposed to do? They just make up the mandates. Governor Newsom, who is maybe inspiring to be President--I warn people across the country who are watching, don't fall for this stuff.

I like to joke around a little bit. I am from California. People, don't do what we do, okay? It is going to affect your privacy. It is going to affect your freedom. It will affect basic choices. It will affect your economy of your household and of your State.

We don't even nearly have the EV charging systems that it would take to have them close enough or enough of them onsite. You ought to see the lines there. There is one place down in San Luis Obispo where you can see the cars all lined up, all the Teslas and all these other folks lined up waiting for the opportunity to plug onto one of these things for 2 hours and then go on about their way, about their business as they travel.

Mr. Speaker, you probably heard the story about the guy from, I think, Michigan who bought the new Ford electric truck and was going to go camping with it. He made it about one or two States away and finally had to give up on it. I think he went and bought a Dodge Cummins diesel in order to complete his family camping trip, because it was way oversold as to what it could do versus what it could actually do.

Getting back to the bill. We don't want to empower California, and perhaps up to 17 other States, with this EPA waiver, that they can force this stuff upon the people and take away their choices, their mobility to do what they need to do.

Ask a guy who is a contractor or a roofing company or a farmer or a rancher or a miner or a logger if they need their F-250 or if they want to get a fleet of five Priuses to go do the same job. They need to have choices. This is at a time when we have got, as I said, the cleanest running, most efficient vehicles we have ever made.

Oh, we have got to cut down on the CO2. Climate change. Climate change, give me a break. CO2 is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. They act like it is the end of the world. CO2 is an important building block for plant life. Everything is made out of carbon. They act like, because they have been able to dream this up as a killer, that we have to stop all things that make CO2.

I tell you what, if we are too good at this and we go below 0.2 percent, plant life starts dying off. Now, we will never be that good getting rid of CO2, but we are going to spend trillions doing it, and we are going to make ourselves a Third World country here while China and others keep going ahead.

Our Governor Newsom is running over to China for a visit to talk about climate change. Meanwhile, we have one of the worst homeless problems in the State of California, and our economy and our water isn't that greater either. Even though we were blessed with so much rain this year, we need to build water storage for people. We need to build that for our agriculture so we can supply this Nation with the food it needs from California, with so many of our crops, 90-plus percent, coming from California.

You wouldn't have your almonds. You wouldn't have your tomatoes. You wouldn't have your pistachios. You wouldn't have many things that come from California, but we are prioritizing this nonsense of taking away people's vehicles.

Climate change gets preached on half the time around here, and every policy in this place has to be run through a climate change filter, even though it is nonsense that CO2, once again, is only .04 percent of our atmosphere and it is not a killer, because carbon is a building block of everything we live off of.

Please, call your Congress Member and tell them to support H.R. 1435. Don't empower California to control your State and your economy by mandating what kind of vehicles you can drive because it is going to affect you and it will ripple out from our whacked-out State to your State what vehicles you are going to drive and how you are going to do your business. Please check that out and support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, our Federal wildland firefighters have been performing much of the heavy lifting not only this year with fires raging in my district, but every year, especially in the Western States.

What is their reward? If we don't get legislation done promptly, they could see a 40 to 50 percent pay cut. How did this happen? Well, a temporary measure was inserted into the infrastructure bill that was supposed to last for 5 years and keep funding a bonus system up for the firefighters. Instead, it ran out after only 2 years, and time is up this September.

How can we have a situation where firefighters are going to receive a pay cut of 40 to 50 percent mid-season, where they might be forced to walk off the job because they have to go somewhere else in order to make a living in September, as fire season could well rage on, as indeed that is the peak of the year in the West?

We have legislation known as the Fair Pay for Federal Firefighters Act, which will repurpose funds that are sitting otherwise unused, and probably justifiably so in other bills, and repurpose that in order to boost firefighter pay to at least keep them at a level playing field for the rest of this year until we can do a proper job of legislating this correctly to keep their pay up.

Mr. Speaker, soon the House Committee on Rules will begin its consideration of this year's farm bill. This is a bill to include some of the top priorities for not only northern California, but the whole country, as my own district is home to some of the most productive agricultural regions in the world.

We are the second largest rice-growing region in the Nation, and we grow over half of all the dried plums, also known as prunes, produced in the world. Our farmers are international leaders in almond and walnut production, among other crops.

The farm bill gives farmers the tools they need to manage their risks during a difficult economic year or a natural disaster with the insurance that has been so successful over the recent years. It strengthens incentives for our next generation of farmers, as our farmers' average age is well into the sixties now.

Beyond agriculture, it allocates resources to programs that are vital to the economic well-being of our area, and all rural areas that have agriculture, by funding rural health projects that help our communities address a growing opioid addiction issue and other substance abuse disorders.

It provides funding to close the rural and urban digital divide by improving broadband connectivity in rural areas.

It is really important that we get onboard with the farm bill this fall and pass it on time.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, as we know, the Chinese Communist Party poses one of the greatest existential challenges of our time.

Under President Xi Jinping, the CCP has made its intentions perfectly clear:

supplant the post-World War II international order created by the U.S. and forge a new world order led by China.

Clearly, the Biden administration is distracted from that. Time and again, this administration has projected weakness on the world stage and gotten bogged down by policies that only serve to divide our people and other silliness.

We can't afford to drop the ball on this critical matter. We must get tough on China and restore American greatness on the world stage by projecting strength, not weakness.

The CCP is only becoming more and more aggressive. Here are a few examples.

First is the issue of exit bans placed by the CCP on American citizens, including some of my own constituents. This behavior by the CCP needs to stop. We must find solutions for this dire issue facing American citizens.

Second, I was pleased to support prohibiting the CCP from acquiring American farmland, frequently near important military installations.

Third, we must deter any threat to Taiwan as well as Japan.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, Mr. Johnson, and I appreciate his leading this, once again, as we communicate with the American folks about the good things we are getting done around here. That is important. The communication and the openness of the House to the people is a critical element and something we were missing for about 2\1/2\ years around here. The COVID disaster that hit this country was exacerbated by government action.

Indeed, overreaction has cost us so much economically and so much to the goodwill and the mental state of many of our people. Look at the damage that was done to our schoolchildren as they lost basically 2 years out of their lives. I think that will be damage that was done to a generation, and I don't know how quickly they are going to recover.

Nevertheless, we here, the Republicans in the majority of the U.S. House, have worked toward restoring peoples' faith in the government by allowing them to participate and opening the House gallery once again. I can have people from my district here tonight. That right would not have been seen just not that many months ago.

Our committee process is open to the people instead of being done by Zoom or some other effect. Indeed, that is very important because there is nothing like being in the room with people to have our witnesses there and have Members be able to look at each other and have a dialogue across the way instead of on the internet with the distractions there.

So we opened the House and are bringing it back to the people and open to the people. Through tours people are able to see their Capitol and just be amazed by what the Founders had in mind when we feel the history here and what it is about.

We have worked on important policy this year, the Lower Energy Costs Act. Now, I can't even describe how important energy is to our economy, our way of life, and for our culture. All of our forms of energy have made us competitive and strong around the world.

It has helped us win World War II, and it has helped us become the most competitive and strongest economy ever until we see the damage being done currently by the Biden administration stopping pipelines and stopping traditional forms of energy driven by oil and gas.

Yes, there is always going to be a place for oil and gas.

When we look at energy projections around the world, it is only going to go up in all the other countries except for the ones that are hamstringing themselves with this Paris accord business.

So energy is the cornerstone of a strong economy, our way of life, and our culture. Oil and gas are part of that. We need to continue cultivating nuclear energy and the new technologies coming with that. It doesn't have to be a scary thing: Oh, nuclear waste, oh, it is going to have a meltdown. No. Nonsense. These are things that can continue to be improved on if we have the will to do it.

Congress needs to move in helping to fund this type of research, and also the permitting process needs to be streamlined so that these projects can move forward.

As we know, windmills and the solar panels don't work all the time. We have to wait for the wind to blow, the sun to come up, or the clouds to go away in order to have those forms of energy.

As far as nuclear power and hydroelectric, right now they are trying to tear down dams because of dubious environmental regulations in my district.

Oil and natural gas are cornerstones that we can rely on 24/7 as base-load power. So what we are seeing is forced conversion to electric vehicles and electric stoves. They are taking away our gas stove. Look how mad people are going to be at home when they have to cook in ways that don't fit how they like or what they are used to or what is efficient.

The latest crazy thing is banning gas generators. It seems the Biden administration is just copying the craziest in my home State of California.

Now, Mr. Speaker, what is a generator for?

It is for making electricity and generating electricity.

Mr. Speaker, how do you generate electricity?

Mr. Speaker, you don't use other electricity to generate electricity. It has to come from a different source, whether it is going to be hydropower--again, what I listed--or a personal generator. It is going to be either gas, diesel, or hooked up to your propane tank.

It is absurd what is going on. We need to continue to have an energy policy that helps Americans and helps us thrive. House Republicans are going to keep fighting for that because it makes sense and makes us stronger.

I appreciate the time to help remind people this is where things really come from, where our economy comes from, our freedom, and our basic lifestyle.

Mr. Speaker, it used to be California was the land of really good ideas and innovation, but the last 30 or so years it has been a place where a lot of really bad ideas come from and impact the rest of the country.

This morning I am talking about pork production in this country and California deciding that it should dictate to the rest of the country how it is done. There is not even that much pork produced in my home State, yet they want to dictate how it works.

A proposition passed that says you cannot use gestation crates for pork production. Gestation crates help piglets to not be squashed by their mother, but it has been interpreted to be something completely different.

We need H.R. 4417, the EATS Act, in order to have pork production in this country that isn't dictated by some crazies at Berkeley in California that say we can't have you produce like that.

We have already went through this with eggs. What this will produce is shortages of eggs, shortages of pork, higher prices, and even possibly lead to the importation of it because one State trying to dictate and reach across State lines to all of the others with its tentacles of its crazy ideas on how things should be done business- wise.

What will stop them from banning oil and gas being used to produce things in other States? It will keep going and going until we stop it.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment that I think is going to be loved by both sides of the room here today since it makes so much sense.

The situation we have is, it will fix an issue under the FAA regulations that currently prevents a privately owned, restricted category aircraft that is already performing a wildfire suppression operation from transporting firefighters to a scene.

Now, if this exact same aircraft were owned by a public entity such as the Forest Service, BLM, et cetera, that aircraft would be allowed to transport firefighters while performing a wildfire suppression operation. Even more egregious is the fact that if this government agency were to decide to lease this private aircraft for 90 days or more, that would magically transform it into the type of aircraft that would be allowed to transport firefighters on the way to a suppression action.

Under the current guidelines, however, they are not allowed to do so. This would either force contractors to have to get 90 days or longer leases with entities that may not want the aircraft for 90 days or be able to afford that. This may be a small local entity, local government.

What we are doing is allowing some flexibility here to not be locked into 90-day aircraft contracts that aren't needed and, at the same time, prevent unneeded ferrying back and forth, one for fire suppression activities and then another one to transport the personnel

when it would be perfectly logical to transport them on the same trip, saving fuel, saving wear and tear on the aircraft and the people, and even a little extra unneeded pollution in the air from running the aircraft, right?

My amendment requires the FAA to move forward with allowing private aircraft to also transport firefighters when they are fighting wildfires. The current policy is an unnecessary barrier to being able to deploy and fully utilize the capabilities of existing wildfire contractors for wildfire suppression.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I am really wounded by that because the logic just isn't there. What we are talking about is an aircraft that is fully certified. If it was under a 90-day or longer contract, everybody would be hunky-dory with it. It would be perfectly kosher.

However, in this situation here, since it doesn't have that long of a contract, it is not now considered a public aircraft. It meets all the standards for safety, for transporting personnel as well as transporting the products with which they will be putting out the fire.

I am just mystified as to the logic of why we can't do this. It will save sorties. It will save a lot of unneeded pain. It will also allow local entities to be able to afford to keep these aircraft around because they are not going to be locked into 90-day contracts. I am just at a loss as to why this couldn't be agreed to by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the comment of my colleague from Tennessee. He mentioned a while ago with Mr. Issa ``40-love,'' so I will pick up on the ``love'' part of that and say that this is a friendlier discussion.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, it ought to be obvious that American schools are for American students. This should not be a controversial statement, yet in the last few months, cities such as New York and Chicago, for example, and across the U.S. are using schools as shelters for illegal immigrants.

All of this is the result of the Biden administration's failed border policies that have turned every State into a border State, regardless if they are actually near the border.

The policies have only further encouraged more illegal immigration because of the promise of illegal immigrants being allowed to remain in our country with proper process and cushy food and housing. The tab of all of this is being picked up by the American taxpayer.

The recent expansion of these programs into schools is an insult to the reason public schools even exist, to provide a free education that teaches kids the necessary skills to lead a successful life, all of which stand to be disrupted by illegal immigrants being housed in their school gyms and classrooms taking up the resources that rightly belong to American students.

This is why we need the Schools Not Shelters Act introduced by Mr. Molinaro from New York.

We can't guarantee who are even coming into these shelters or if the information we have on them is at all accurate, and we certainly can't promise parents that there will be no harm to their kids.

A controlled border solves these issues, and the Schools Not Shelters Act is a very important key to starting on that.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 9 a.m.

Madam Speaker, until recently, we weren't supposed to discuss that indeed the United States does have an ammunition shortage for our military here and around the world. But it is so widely reported in the press, I guess we really shouldn't ignore it anymore and pretend it isn't a problem.

Recently, with the controversy around cluster bombs, the President has defended his decision to send them to Ukraine by announcing the U.S. Army ammunition stockpiles are depleted. In other words, basically, this is all we have to give them at this point.

The primary reasons are lack of funds, little focus on production, and truly a lack of will to truly ramp up and build our ammunition stocks to what they should be.

The U.S. military's goal decades ago was that we could fight a two- front war. The United States used to have that might and capability. We saw that in World War II with many other allies, of course, around the world that we fought side by side with.

As we know, modern, western military hardware is indeed incredibly complex, costly, and difficult to produce at scale. It requires a large infrastructure, a well-protected supply chain, and a large workforce of skilled labor. These are things that we are capable of as a country. Look at all the gadgetry we can build in order to satisfy a market of people desiring entertainment.

Artillery round expenditures we point to in Ukraine really paint a dark picture. Ukrainians burn through a year's worth of U.S. artillery round production in 1 month. In 1 month, they can burn through a year's worth of our production. That is just Ukraine. What does that make our own stocks look like?

We must ramp up production tremendously. If we are going to continue in

some fashion, or not, the controversial backing of Ukraine, we have to be able to supply them in order to have them be able to do a credible job on the field. If we are going to support that policy, we have to build our own stocks.

What does this mean for us? We are actually foraging shells and ammunition from stocks around the world, even from our allies, in order to keep the chain going into Ukraine. That is why cluster bombs, right?

The main concern for American defense really should be what does it mean if China's aggression gets much worse? What if they make a move on Taiwan that we are obligated and have promised to back up on? What about other issues that may happen in NATO? Are we ready?

We are not near ready for it. We need to produce the bombs and the bullets and the other hardware so that we have that as a deterrent and not have the idea that we are so weak that they know they can make a move on us or our allies. It is really that simple. It is really common sense.

So ramping up these domestic munitions production could run afoul of a lot of ideas the Democrats hold: climate, environment, or just a philosophy that if we don't produce the ammunition, we don't produce these arms, that we just won't have war.

We are going to have to make some very clear choices here with the Democratic policies. Is it about climate? Is it about environment, by producing these things and having them ready and available to deter war? Do they want to weaken us so much that China and others can make any kind of move they want and we just have to sit and watch?

These munitions are procured on a yearly basis. That is why when we have an orderly appropriation process in committees, instead of a last- minute continuing resolution, throwing last year's spending in the hopper, put some duct tape and baling wire on it and kick it out for another year or whatever the period is, you can't plan for that. You certainly can't plan long-term to up your military needs and fill them when we do last-minute things like that. We have to have a better process of procuring and planning for it.

What we saw from the end of the Cold War, we scaled down military. Okay, maybe there is a dividend there. We lost one-third of it in armament production after the Soviet Union collapsed. Then in the global war on terror, procurements and production was indeed focused on smaller, low-intensity conflicts, not a wide war.

Training skilled labor takes time and building the infrastructure to do so will take time, but what we have in place we should be running 24/7 and have the will to do it.

So what does that mean for our national security? I just said it. What are they going to do? Russia is going to continue to be able to bully Ukraine if they see us as weak.

China and Iran can do what they want, and who knows what we will get out of North Korea.

We must be ready. We must get the supply chain going again and bolster our military so those who serve in it have everything they need in order to do their job and be safe from unnecessary risk.

Mr. Speaker, I express my grave concerns regarding the alleged involvement of members of the Biden family in criminal activities. The evidence keeps popping up again and again and again that there are a lot of problems with the interactions with foreign concerns.

Our duty as Representatives is to demand transparency and accountability from our leaders, whether it is within this House, in the administration, in the bureaucracy, or what have you.

That said, Congress and the American people cannot ignore the mounting evidence and questionable business dealings that have plagued Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family for seemingly years now.

We know Hunter Biden served as a board member for a firm that has been accused of bribery. We know of his work with an investment fund that is controlled by the Bank of China, getting paid huge salaries for something he has no expertise and really spending no time on.

All this comes with other pressing allegations of questionable business ethics, legal exposure, and concerns about U.S. national security because of Hunter Biden's relationships in China.

What do we hear lately? They are going to go after President Trump again for January 6 stuff. What is the deal?

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 334, I mistakenly voted ``yea'' when I intended to vote ``nay.''