Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, American families are faced with historically high inflation and energy prices.

Energy demand is expected to increase by 50 percent by 2050. Gas and oil needs will increase, and they will be met whether it is in this country or other countries around the world that haven't gone all- electric or aren't being forced into doing so.

America's needs for minerals necessary for the defense and tech sectors are projected to grow exponentially.

To meet these crises, an all-of-the-above approach is needed for American energy. Unfortunately, the NEPA permitting process hinders American domestic energy expansion.

For example, it can take a decade to open a new mine in the U.S., while other countries such as Canada and Australia take only 3 years to do the same. There is nothing new under the Sun on what needs to be permitted. Get it done.

The NEPA permitting process is filled with repetitive assessments, lengthy and expensive litigation, and bureaucratic hurdles. It is almost impossible for new energy and infrastructure projects to ever see the light of day, but I think they want it that way.

What? Are we supposed to all live in caves and eat mealworms? That seems to be the direction we are going.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak about an extremely important topic that is very current and very disturbing in our Nation, in our Nation's schools, and the relationship of parents and their kids.

Mr. Speaker, during the COVID lockdowns, schools were closed, and much of the learning was conducted online, except for those courageous schools that did manage to stay open and teach their kids the normal way.

During this time, parents gained a valuable opportunity to see firsthand what their children were being taught in public schools, and in some cases, what is in their libraries.

What they found was very shocking to them. We heard a conversation a bit earlier about, Oh, this is banning books.

If you see the content that is in some of the books, some of the so- called educational materials, it is really nothing short of pornography that is being allowed to be in there.

Mr. Speaker, when did it become okay for kids to be subject to that kind of material or the performances that are being brought to their libraries under the guise of openness where it wouldn't be really any different than what is going on in a strip club?

You would get in big trouble should you take your kid to one of those. How is that allowed to be normalized these days?

Rather than teaching children the skills that they need and the knowledge to become successful adults, these activists, whether it is teachers, counselors, superintendents, they are filling their heads with this woke far-left propaganda and pushing radical gender ideology on children as young as elementary age.

In response to the backlash, teachers and public school administrators have attempted to keep this indoctrination and these agendas secret from their parents. Unbelievable.

This included helping encourage students to keep secrets from their parents, hiding their lesson plans and curriculums, trying to ban recording in the classroom, obfuscating what materials are being shown to students, and shutting down parents who spoke out at public school meetings when they heard about this, even so far as having the U.S. Department of Justice refer to them as terrorists.

They asserted time and again that parents did not have the right to be involved in their children's education. They claimed that once children walked through the schoolhouse door, those children belonged to the State.

What is that? Where are the echoes of that coming from?

In 2021, parents across the country revolted at school board meetings and

gathered to make their concerns heard in free assembly, a First Amendment protection.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, a father of a young girl who had been assaulted by a biological male was arrested for speaking out against the school board's decision to hide the perpetrator's history of assault against young girls. That decision put his innocent daughter and countless other students at risk.

In my own district in Northern California, a school district was caught secretly changing a young girl's name and pronouns and even encouraging that something was wrong with her body--she was in the wrong body--filling her head with falsehoods. The counselor who encouraged this activity allegedly manipulated the young girl to keep her transitioning secret from her own mother.

In both cases, parents rightfully pushed back against these assiduous attempts of public schools to force woke gender ideology on their children.

Unfortunately, parents across the country have been met with State force when they have tried to assert their rightful place as the supreme authority in their children's lives.

The Department of Justice infamously circulated a memo calling parents who exercise these rights as ``domestic terrorists.''

As Americans gradually become aware of the rotten corruption that permeates so much of our public school system, it became clear that Congressional Republicans needed to take action to support parents across the Nation and enshrine protections against government retaliation.

Last Congress, I introduced two bills: one that prohibits doctors from performing gender reassignment surgeries on minors and another allowed victims of these life-altering procedures to sue those who pushed these surgeries on them as minors.

These permanent, life-altering surgeries are being forced onto vulnerable children by radical activists. Mutilating a child's body is not medicine. It is not science. It is not affirming, nor is it care.

As we have seen in the recent exposure of the inside workings of a Missouri clinic, children manipulated into undertaking these surgeries are not informed about the life-altering damage being done to their bodies. They are being rushed through the process, and in the worst cases are outright lied to by the people who are somehow going to make their lives better or more in order, and that they know better who should be taking care of them instead of their parents when this harm is being caused.

Doing this to a child is immoral, and it should be punished with the full force of the law. Children whose lives are permanently altered due to these surgeries should be allowed to sue for damages and put parents back at their rightful place, their God-given right to oversee their children's education, their well-being, their health, and their bodies.

Mr. Speaker, this week is National Ag Week. It is a time where America honors and gives thanks to her farmers, ranchers, and ag workers. Without their hard work, dedication, and ingenuity, our Nation would not enjoy the rich bounty of food they grow.

However, there are daunting issues that face our agricultural sector: Fuel, water supply--especially in my home State of California; although right now, we are very grateful for the massive rain--market conditions, and the trade commitments being enforced, such as the deficit we have with China.

Agriculture is essential to the economic well-being of my district, northern California, and the West.

California farmers rely on an abundance of water and low fuel prices to grow the crops we eat.

The last several years have seen fields go fallow because California's broken water management system has not been able to deliver the water that was needed.

Indeed, if we don't have the water supply, these crops that America receives so much of from California would not be grown, they would need to be imported or not have them at all.

It is in America's best interest to pursue permitting reform and unleash our domestic energy potential.

We celebrate National Ag Week in order to keep Americans working, fed, and our farmers in the fields.

Madam Speaker, yesterday, the President's budget proposal was announced. It contains some of the largest tax hikes in American history. If enacted, it would set the corporate tax rate at 28 percent, a higher level than even Communist China.

Combined State and Federal taxes would amount to 32 percent.

This tax burden will primarily fall where?

On American workers and consumers.

It is broadly accepted by economists on the left and right that corporate taxes hurt wage growth, with labor bearing as much as 25 percent of the cost of corporate taxes.

Some estimates even place that burden as high as 70 percent. Raising the corporate tax will hurt American workers, depress their wages, and lower their purchasing power.

This is not a progrowth or proworker budget proposal. It is not even serious.

The President must meet with House Republicans and negotiate in good faith for spending reductions and work toward an actual balanced budget like everyday Americans do in their homes and their businesses.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding me time.

My colleagues again are here to talk about something that has been over and over again changed with the whim of every administration it seems. I have been here 10 years, and every new Congress there is a different enforcement. The law keeps getting changed. There is no certainty.

So how are we supposed to farm and grow the crops that people depend on in this country?

I am glad I got to follow Mr. Duarte because his operation is actually in my district up there where that went on. We tried to convince them at EPA and Army Corps of Engineers that farming is a normal activity.

I get my colleagues on the other side of the aisle when they start talking about rivers on fire and things like that.

This is normal farming. The way we are going here, we will not have these crops that Americans depend on, especially coming from California.

So the definition that is being put forward by the Biden administration is something that is undoing what the Trump administration had trying to bring it back to reasonable.

The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 and signed by President Nixon with bipartisan effort. Every 50 years or so we have to go back and see what is going on with oversight, and this isn't working. It is not working at all because it was never intended by Congress to limit farming and to take away the farming of food, which is what is going on with this act.

Mr. Speaker, the Federal excise tax is a 12 percent surcharge on the price of new heavy duty trucks, truck chassis, trailers, and semitrailers used for highway haulage. It was first instituted more than a century ago to pay for World War I for the wartime mobilization.

The FET is the highest percentage excise tax on anything in this country. The tax has really outlived its original purpose, unless you like spending. It disincentivizes truckers and trucking companies from purchasing new up-to-date rigs because the tax can add as many as $20,000 to even $30,000 on a high-end rig by itself, just for the tax.

Ever-increasing Federal and State emissions regulations often make it necessary for truckers to buy new trucks, especially in my home State of California. This burdensome tax hinders the ability of our truck drivers to acquire the most modern, safest, highest tech equipment.

Repealing this tax would make it easier to ship goods across the country at lower prices for consumers, saving businesses and consumers money. It will also allow our trucking fleet to modernize at a lower cost to the poor folks who are just trying to do their job.

At a time when our economy is reeling from inflation and high prices, Congress must do all it can to lower costs for small businesses and consumers.

Mr. Speaker, parents have a God-given right and role in the raising of their children.

When they send their kids to the public schools, they expect the schools to deliver a quality education to their children in order to prepare them for success in the future. Unfortunately, government schools have abused this trust and have been indoctrinating children with far-left lies and poisoning their minds with woke gender ideology.

School administrators and teachers unions seem to think they own America's children, that they alone have the right to decide what these children think and believe, and that they alone should be the sole authority in a child's life.

Schools across this country have been caught trying to convince vulnerable teenagers that their bodies are wrong, filling their heads with lies and convincing them to see their parents as enemies. This line of thinking is morally wrong.

In my own district, a school district is being sued by a parent for secretly changing her daughter's pronouns and identity without her parent's knowledge or consent. Woke administrators have no moral authority to experiment with children's minds in this way.

Parents have a moral right to be involved in their children's education and should never be kept in the dark about issues that their child is going through at school.

Congress must take action to enshrine parental rights over their children.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Johnson for leading these opportunities for us to communicate with the American people openly and freely in a more casual, unhurried way of doing so.

It is good to be able to talk about these issues. Hopefully, folks are paying attention. We are just trying to get the truth out and call out the issues that are extremely important to them that we are working on in Congress.

When I get up here, a lot of times I am talking about our food supply and the farmers who grow it--as a Californian, we grow a lot of different crops--the water it takes to grow those crops, our energy, the condition of our energy in this country.

Tonight, I will talk more about our fiscal condition in this Nation and of this government. It is troubling because a recent report issued by the Congressional Budget Office found that the net interest of our national debt--Mr. Johnson was talking about that a little bit ago on spending--just the interest payment on our national debt will amount to a $10.5 trillion burden for our taxpayers over the next decade.

We talk in these 10-year numbers. If you average that out, that is $1.05 trillion per year just in interest service. For comparison, those interest costs over the previous decade amounted to only $3 trillion, again, versus $10.5 trillion for the coming decade. That is crushing on our national budget and crushing on the discretionary portion that we have over that budget.

That is not to take away from the fact that the Federal Government already is taxing and extracts more in taxes from American families than at any point in history.

This kind of payment on interest will devour a lot of our budget if we don't get a handle on this. I shudder to think if interest rates go up much more, the service on that debt becomes that much more extensive. Of course, Federal spending coupled with that is rising at an even higher rate. The increased spending has pushed our national debt over that magic $31 trillion number, again, that we were speaking about.

As high as this is, it pales in comparison to the United States' unfunded liabilities, which amount to about $182 trillion. Unfunded liabilities, meaning the debt obligations that do not have sufficient funds set aside to pay them, include Social Security, Medicare, Federal debt held by the public, and Federal employee and veteran benefits. Social Security and Medicare's liabilities add up to $57 trillion. These numbers clearly show the United States Federal Government is living beyond its means.

Social Security and Medicare are called entitlement programs. Let me stop on that for a moment.

Sometimes that word ``entitlement'' is thought of as a dirty word, right?

It gets used pretty freely around here.

However, when you are talking about the entitlement as applied to Social Security and Medicare, it is not necessarily a dirty word because the people that paid into them are entitled to draw out from them. That is not a bad word in that sense. They are entitled to what they paid in and the amount that it grew during the time, hopefully, while it was being held for them more or less in trust by the Federal Government.

The CBO, Congressional Budget Office, predicts that Social Security will run out of money in 2033 and Medicare in 2026. The fund will be depleted.

We need to have an honest conversation about these funds, about these programs going forward. No one wants to take away Social Security. Nobody wants to deplete Medicare, but if they are going to be on the rocks in the year 2033 for Social Security, for example, then we better be doing something now. There needs to be an honest, bipartisan discussion about doing so.

What are we going to do to head that off and have the numbers not crunch badly by the time that time comes?

There are ways we can do that, but it is going to take an honest bipartisan discussion, not scaring people saying, oh, Republicans are going to take away Social Security. The President stood right up there and tried to claim that until he had to walk it back just a few weeks ago. There needs to be an honest discussion, not one used as a talking point or a political weapon.

What we have is 47 million retirees in America today, and 40 percent of the 47 million live entirely off Social Security. For these Americans, their benefits being reduced in the future could be disastrous. That is why we have to figure out how to make the fund go beyond 2033 and be sustainable, well, permanently.

If we are going to save these programs for the current and future generations, Congress must act swiftly, honestly with a real debate and set these finances in order and return to the fiscal responsibility that we should have had all along.

As stewards of the public's dollars, it is important that Congress spend the public's money wisely and respectfully. The House must use its powers to allocate government funds in a reasonable,

responsible way. There is a lot of room for debate on how that is, but if we are having an interaction, instead of hurrying through or doing a last minute patch-up at the end of the fiscal year, it is going to be a lot better in the light of day doing so.

The current D.C. model of taxing, borrowing, and spending money that we don't have will saddle our grandchildren with the burden of paying off today's debts. We don't even have to wait for our grandchildren. It is our children. It is us that are still in the work world. We are stuck with this. We have to do better.

Failure to fix Washington, D.C.'s, spending today will mean our children will have to live at lesser standards. We have always aspired that our children should always do a little better than us, to leave something a little better off. Why should they have to live under a worse standard only because we are spending like crazy? They will be saddled with a higher debt, higher taxes, and less opportunity.

America's strength on the world's stage depends on a strong American economy at home. We must get to getting it actually balanced and not take so long to truly balance our budget. It is our responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, for over 2 years, many institutions, Federal agencies, and the mainstream media demonized anyone who suggested that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Senator Tom Cotton was ridiculed for simply suggesting that the lab leak was a possibility.

Leading scientists, doctors, and pundits were censored for questioning the natural origins theory promoted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH, and CDC.

Now, FBI Director Chris Wray and the Department of Energy are reporting that the pandemic most likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan.

Big Tech and the media worked to actively suppress this theory and ridiculed anyone who promoted it.

At a time when accurate information was vital to saving lives, the people and institutions who we trusted to tell the truth lied to the American people and worked to hide important information.

House Republicans have been demanding transparency on the origins of COVID since the pandemic began.

We must get to the truth of how this pandemic started so that we can protect ourselves from future possible outbreaks.

Americans deserve to know the truth about their government, what it knew, and when it knew it. We must restore faith and trust in government and institutions, and that starts with transparency and accountability.

Madam Speaker, the Bureau of Land Management has revised down the number of unused oil drilling applications from 9,000 to approximately 6,700. The Biden administration has been deceiving the American people to pass the buck for his failed energy policy.

The President's Green New Deal agenda has led to some of the highest energy prices for American families ever. Today, the national price of gasoline is $3.35 cents per gallon on average, or even a buck higher than that in my home State of California. On the day the President was sworn in, the price of gas was just $2.39 per gallon, nearly a dollar less.

American households are paying the highest home heating costs in 15 years. On day one of his Presidency, President Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline project. This move cost the United States up to 59,000 jobs and $9.6 billion.

The President is currently sitting on over 4,800 pending applications for permits to drill for more energy. This administration is not serious about getting America out of these high costs of energy and this crisis.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and submit extraneous material.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the time to stand before the House here this afternoon and talk about some issues that are not only important to my district in northern California to a couple of our key industries but really, they are important to all Americans because this is a life-sustaining topic we are talking about, and that is food, energy, and shelter.

We had that in abundance in California when we were allowed to produce the things that cause those to happen.

In my northern California district we have much agriculture. We have also an amazing natural water supply and the opportunities that come with that by harnessing that water supply for food for people, for agriculture, for hydroelectric power to make electricity and keep the lights on in places like this and all over America, and to mine the minerals that we need to produce all manner of things. These come from the natural resources we have in northern California, Minnesota, and all over this country.

So we have been successful in developing them and making them real since the founding of this country.

We have fallen on hard times more recently, though, with regulations that although may be well-founded and well-minded 50 years ago have been turned on their ear and work against good management of our forestlands, the extraction of minerals we need to sustain some of the ideals we have going forward for the future, for water supply, for agriculture, and for this country that has always known plenty.

These days we are actually seeing at some points empty shelves in our grocery stores in the United States.

It reminds me of a story about the time when former Russian President Boris Yeltsin was visiting this country with President Bush 41. They had gone to Houston, I believe, to the Space Center. They had left and were driving down the road. He saw a supermarket. He hadn't been in an American supermarket before. So he wanted to just pop in randomly with the President, the then-President of Russia, to see what it looked like.

President Yeltsin was amazed by the products that we have on the shelves in American stores. Not only that, but

that people were freely and casually purchasing them, not in a frenzy like oh, this is the day the food comes in and everybody has to rush in and stand in line and rush out before it is all gone. No. People were easily coming and going and taking what they needed. They were purchasing it at the register and walking out.

There was all variety of the same kind. All of it was fresh and of high quality.

That is what the United States has been able to bring itself to over all these years, and now that seems to be in peril.

A key part of that in my home State of California is that water supply. So I will touch about upon that here in a little bit.

We have in the northern California district that I represent and also on the Oregon side, which my colleague, Mr. Bentz, represents, above this line here in Oregon is the Klamath Basin, the Klamath River.

Now, that is a natural lake that was formed at the beginning of the creation of this planet, but also it had been enhanced about 110 years ago through a Federal project. It yielded an additional 7 feet of elevation and approximately 400,000 new acre-feet of water supply that was intended when that Federal project was built to be agricultural water.

So back in 1906 when they created it, it made possible 1,400 farms and 200,000 acres of prime ag land. Under Federal law under the Reclamation Act and State law, all the stored water--the newly created water is called stored water--in the Upper Klamath Lake which was above the natural level of the existing lake was the stored water.

Again, there are 400,000 acre-feet of new water, but despite the clear law of the Federal Government, they have been taking advantage of the farmers year after year by mismanaging the lake and shifting that clear water right as adjudicated by Oregon courts to environmental purpose, to other purpose.

The water would not exist had not that project been built and paid for over the years by the farmers in that basin.

So what do we have, Madam Speaker?

In 2022, the Federal Government even cut off water that could have gone to finish the crop year. They eliminated 50,000 acre-feet of legal and available water to farmers. The really maddening thing is that at the end of the season, there was a surplus of water in the lake above what was needed to sustain what is known as a biological opinion to sustain the fish needs in the lake as well as what had been sent down the river for salmon needs.

There was extra water. We saw it ahead of time, yet they would not yield that additional water so we could finish the crop year on some of the needed crops that are planted up there. They plant all sorts of things up in that basin.

One of them would be the potatoes that they grow up there. They needed just a couple more weeks of water supply that was available, and instead they were allowed to die off. A normal, healthy potato ended up being the size of my pinky and obviously unharvestable and unusable all because they wouldn't listen to the projections that there would have been extra water. No. They wanted to start their new water year of 2023 in 2022 on the backs of a water supply that doesn't belong to the Federal Government. It is clearly for the farmers in the basin created after World War I and World War II for returning veterans to be able to set up shop and do that.

The Federal Government made this choice. They did this during a time when prices of food were skyrocketing around the country. Consumers are seeing these prices going up and shelves becoming more bare more often than we should ever see in this country.

So what else do we see?

They are depriving the farms of water. Here is another view of the basin here. It is a little more close-up of the various sumps and wildlife areas and the farmed land there. It is kind of hard to see from this distance, but indeed it is comprehensive, and it is rather complicated. But smart people have made that work over the years.

Indeed, when the farms thrive, also the refuges thrive. So negative effects have been such that when the farms don't get the water, the wildlife refuges in the area also lose access to the water that comes through that ag system and gets to them.

In 2020, over 60,000 ducks died in the basin in that Klamath refuge due to avian botulism. I paid a visit up there to folks who were working voluntarily and through fish and wildlife to help try and bridge the gap from the water supply that wasn't there and recovering ducks. It is pretty terrible.

Here we are fishing out dead ducks from the refuge.

Down here on the bottom is one that we rescued that was really sick but that we took back to a center there where they were helping the ducks that were recoverable to recover and turn them back loose.

The picture up here shows just how ugly it is.

A thriving basin is a key part of the flyway all through the Western States, including from northern California on south. The flyway is so key toward having the type of diversity of wildlife that is enjoyed all through the Sacramento Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, and other areas of northern and southern California and Oregon for sportsmen and for everybody.

It doesn't happen when this is the policy of the Federal Government to basically take the water away from farms and the refuges.

As I mentioned, as affirmed by the courts in Oregon where the lake lies, also a portion of the basis is on my side which Mr. Bentz and I both represent, the stored water is, indeed, owned by the farmers solely for the use of the Klamath project.

They have paid for it. They continue to pay for its ongoing upkeep and improvement even when they don't get the water delivered to them. Isn't that something?

It is one thing to get a bill for the maintenance and upkeep if you are getting to use the supply, getting to use the asset. They don't even get to use the asset half the time now, but they still get the bill for it. It would not exist other than for that 7-foot enhancement that created the 400,000 acre-feet.

In 2022, they were initially going to get zero water. They did find a way to increase it to 50,000 acre-feet after some late storms, which is 12\1/2\ percent of the allocation of their water right. There was extra water, as I mentioned, in the lake to be used in the basin at the end of the year above an amount that the environmental biological opinion said had to be remaining in the lake. They chose not to give it up.

In 2021, they were given 6 percent, or 33,000 acre-feet.

In 2020, after some battling, they tried to pull the pin on them early in the spring after the farmers had planted. They did end up getting 140,000 acre-feet, which is about a third of their allocation.

In 2019, which was an amazing water year in northern California and other areas, they still received 92 percent of their allocation. Pretty good by these standards, but it still wasn't 100 percent.

Downstream of that, on the complex Klamath River situation, are also four hydroelectric dams that California, Oregon, environmental groups, and others have all been conspiring for a long time to have removed. Think about that for a minute.

There is a big push in the whole country, especially in my home State of California, to convert everything to electricity for its energy source--automobiles. You are hearing the big controversy over stoves right now, kitchen stoves.

In my home State and some cities, they are really pushing getting rid of those. Now, most of the people I know who have gas stoves in their houses really like them. It is really handy to regulate the temperature, the rate with which the heat comes up on what you are cooking. You can see the flame. There is a photograph of First Lady Jill Biden using one in her own kitchen in the White House, but they want to take this away. It is going to have to be replaced by electrical appliances, electric automobiles, electric yard tools such as leaf blowers and lawnmowers.

I still chuckle at the idea that they are trying to ban gas generators in California. Think about that for a

minute. A generator is something you use a lot of times in an emergency for a home or business. There are a lot of other purposes as well for them, but a lot of people use them in an emergency when the power goes out. If you don't have a gas- or diesel-powered generator, what are you supposed to go to when the power goes out if you need to turn it on? Many hospitals, rest homes, things like that will have a diesel-powered backup generator. They are now constantly under the gun by an air quality group, even though they rarely have to use it: This is not compliant. You have to replace it or get rid of it.

When we keep banning fuel-sourced appliances like this and turn to more electrification, where are you going to get the electricity, especially in my home State of California in which the grid on any given hot day might be on the edge of shutting down?

They have arrangements with the power companies that large manufacturers have pre-agreed agreements, I will say, that they should shut down when the grid gets tough on a really hot day when the electrical load that everybody is pulling is about to break the grid. If that happens, you will have people having to shut down their businesses, shut down manufacturing, shut down a cement plant, whatever it might be due to a prearrangement because we can't keep the power supply up where it needs to be.

They don't really have replacements. That is expensive for jobs. It is expensive to stop your business. It is going to be expensive for the ratepayers to have to bear the brunt of that as well that use electricity other than those businesses. We want to convert everything to electricity, huh?

I mean, we had a last-minute intervention in the California State Legislature to extend the life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant by an additional 5 years. They were slated to shut it down, two reactors, one in 2024, one in 2025. That plant alone is 9 percent of the power grid. How do you take a 9 percent chunk out of something that is already teetering on the edge of failing?

There is a similar case up here on the Klamath River with the four hydroelectric dams. One is on the Oregon side in Mr. Bentz' district. The other three are on my side in California in Siskiyou County. They are hell-bent on getting them out. They think they have it done.

We are here to say no because we need the power supply and many other aspects of those dams that are important for the area. Indeed, the local folks have had two different measures in the county on the Oregon side and in Siskiyou County on the California side by well over 70 percent, an advisory vote saying to please keep the dams in place, that they are important. Siskiyou County voted 79 percent for that.

This course of action, of course, was based on one single study that supposedly showed that the dams are contributing to high water temperatures and reduced flows, which are causing fish populations in the river to decline, especially the salmon. This is at the same time-- you have dams so deep water in them, right?--on Lake Shasta and others, Lake Almanor, I think soon Lake Oroville, they are requiring Lake Shasta to be kept deeper so the water stays colder longer into the year so they can release colder water for the fish in the fall and early winter. It is all about cold water by keeping the lake deep.

If you take these dams out that have water stored behind them, you no longer have that deeper pool of water. They are trying to blame the dams with deeper pools of water for somehow raising the temperature. I mean, both sides of the mouth on these arguments here. This all came from a master's thesis by a government employee, not peer-reviewed. It contained no in-field research.

A former EPA science integrity officer, actually during the Obama era, a man named Paul Houser, was tasked with reviewing all of these efforts for the Klamath dam possible removal. His conclusion--again, the EPA science integrity officer--said it would be the worst of all outcomes to remove these hydroelectric dams--worst outcome for a lot of reasons, including environmental.

The three hydroelectric dams are the biggest taxpayers in the county on the Siskiyou County, California, side. Removing them will cause a huge hole in the budget of an already struggling county, which has had its timber business decimated, the mining business decimated. These large landholders, these large assets, are pretty fairly lucrative for the county.

When you couple that with already expensive energy in California, and probably in a lot of the country, this doesn't make any sense because this is, you know, green renewable power. When the rain falls behind a dam, that is renewable. It doesn't require a fuel source. That is the fuel source. Yet, of course, in my crazy State, it is not recognized as renewable if the size of the power plant is above 30 megawatts. It doesn't mean anything.

We all hear about, well, we need green power. I guess that can only mean windmills and solar panels. Try to get a permit. One environmental group says, ``Hey, we want these solar panels. They are the greatest thing,'' or the windmills. The other groups, maybe rightly so, say, ``Well, if we are going to cover a thousand acres with solar panels, we can't stand by and allow that to happen.'' It might affect the desert tortoise. We know the windmills chop up birds, sometimes falcons, sometimes endangered hawks, even eagles, stuff people care about.

In addition, they are not really very reliable sources of power. Indeed, some days in California, because of an anomaly where there might be too much power coming off those grids due to the way the load is managed, they will find themselves having to pay people to take that power because they can't just easily shut it off. It is strange, strange thinking.

I am appalled that this is where we have allowed ourselves in California to be forced into by the ideal of green power.

What does that mean? Everything else becomes a peaker plant. Peaker plants got talked about a lot 20, 25 years ago in California when we had other energy crises. A peaker plant was supposed to help supplement what the grid might not be fulfilling normally. Indeed, the peaker plants are going to become the hydroelectric plants and the natural gas plants because they want to go so far and wide with solar and wind that you know you can't count on them at night or when the wind isn't blowing, or, funny enough, if the wind is blowing too fast, they have to shut the windmills down.

Our electrical situation in the State is already in peril. Removing these hydroelectric dams means about 70,000 homes' worth of power goes off the grid and a whole host of other things. It will destroy the current ecosystem habitat, including some endangered species' spawning grounds, by releasing 20 million cubic yards of toxic, some of it possibly toxic, material--indeed, silt. These dams have a lot of silt behind them that has accumulated over the years. They don't really have an explanation for what is going to happen with it or how it is going to be disposed of. They are just going to release it into the river.

If you ever hear anybody talk about turbidity from a slight action going on in the river, you have to get a permit to do the slightest thing in the river, whether it is a gravel plant or doing something to clean up the river, having to move some material because of flooding, because of silt, and other situations. It takes months and months or years to get a permit just to move a little bit of material out. They say this is okay that we are going to unleash 20 million cubic yards down the Klamath River. The turbidity makes it hard for spawning. It is hypocrisy.

One of the other effects will be lowering the water table underneath the ground or near the dams. They have helped to build up the water table. The underground water table will be negatively affected by their removal.

It will remove flood control capability that is important for the communities nearby. The dams are a good way to absorb that water supply. If too much should happen to come from a heavy rainfall, they provide flexibility.

They remove the ability to control the river and have a flush flow if you need it in order to move some material or should it be for a fish need or other things downriver. That flexibility is taken away by removal of the dams.

Of course, as I mentioned, it takes hydroelectric power capacity away

from the users of the power and those that benefit from the income from it, including the County of Siskiyou.

It will possibly cost the taxpayers of California, who, in a water bond, put forward $250 million for the tearing down of dams. This is a water bond that builds water supply, builds water storage, but had that provision in there: $250 million of California taxpayer money to help tear down the dams. The ratepayers from the utility, mostly on the Oregon side, also had to front $200 million through a surcharge on their electricity, for a total of about $450 million raised.

Magically, when they were putting forth the proposal to FERC on what it will cost to remove the dams, it came in at just under $450 million. Well, they have already wasted about $40 million, maybe up to $50 million, talking about it, so they are down to an amount of somewhere around $400 million left of that fund.

When they remove a dam, they find a lot of things that they didn't count on, including much more silt. Up in Washington, I think it was, they found triple the amount of silt that they had expected. Instead of 20 million, it could be 60 million cubic yards of silt polluting the river for how long? Who knows how long it will take. The one in Washington, I think, was only about 12 or 13 miles from where the dam is to the sea, where you would have to push the silt. On the Klamath, it is somewhere 120 to 150 miles, depending on the meander of the silt going all through that. The life cycle of the salmon is 3 years. Will there be enough salmon to make it back through this turbid water over that 3-year period to actually have the species that all the fuss is over?

This removal will diminish the value of Siskiyou County property owners by about $1.5 billion, thereby lowering the tax rolls to the county. The electrical rates will have to go up, and the power supply will be even more uncertain.

Now, speaking about Mr. Houser a moment ago and the study he made on removing the dams being the worst option, for putting out that truth, he was fired by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy at the time.

I guess they didn't really want the truth out there. They just wanted one paper that they had hinged all this on since that time. The 20 million cubic yards--which might be triple of that, who knows--it is about the equivalent of one dump truck of material every minute of every day for 6 years being dumped in the river.

Now, imagine the fine if you accidentally put a little bit of silt in the river or a stream, like under Waters of the United States, for example, which we will talk about here in a minute. Imagine how you would be fined otherwise as a private party doing that.

The salmon hatcheries downstream will be destroyed as part of the removal. The salmon hatcheries that we are talking about are responsible for more smolts being raised than actually what the river has ever made.

There is a ridge under one of the dams, a natural ridge that was there that is much higher than the river level that no fish would have ever gotten over to begin with. They don't want to talk about that because they believe the fish were getting all the way up the additional 60, 70, 80 miles to Klamath Lake. Bad information.

Now they are trying to somehow cover over that in the dam destruction that they can maybe get rid of that ridge and have it act like it would have been a fish passage from the beginning of time. So it would do a lot to hurt the economy of the county, local agriculture, the flood control, many things up in that area.

There would be uncertainty when the river system would ever return to normal. It would result in, at the mouth of the river, at the ocean, underwater contamination at the Humboldt County estuary, which means basically loss of seabed life with all that material now being released with who knows what is in it.

This removal would even cause a violation of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Siskiyou County's governance over water would be lost.

What are they going to do to replace the salmon with the hatchery gone?

The actual hatchery is down below the lowest dam.

Of course, there is the loss of recreation, land value, the lake time, use on those lakes, again, tax revenue to the county.

And the replacement water, where are the farmers and ranchers going to get that replacement water due to the lower groundwater status?

So there is not a whole lot of good that comes from tearing down these dams that were there for a good economic purpose and actually do have ecological pluses, as well.

So moving farther south from the Klamath Basin, our water supply in California has been enhanced in the last century by some very forward- thinking projects. The State Water Project in the 1950s and 1960s and the Federal water, known as the Central Valley Projects, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Joining me here is my colleague from central California, Mr. John Duarte, who is a farmer down there, as well as a nursery operator of many of the nursery crops that we use to grow many tree crops, vines, et cetera. So the importance of the water supply to agriculture and to the people of California from these projects is incredible.

Madam Speaker, I recognize my colleague, Mr. Duarte, to offer whatever comments he would like to on the water supply and on how he has been treated by government in his agricultural operations down in his direction in the Central Valley, as well as the portion in my district in Tehama County.

Indeed, we have a mass amount of excellent and very valuable crops that are grown in California. Some of them Mr. Duarte is responsible for helping other farmers to have and even grows himself. I happen to be a farmer in my real life, too. So we see the value of what is grown in California and that is imperiled by government action.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Duarte).

I am certainly glad you could join us. You made it as a Member of Congress because you have a great story to tell as a Representative and as a farmer, also.

So we do have amazing abundant water in Northern California this year where so much of it emanates and ends up taking care of our part of the State and other parts of the State, as well.

Shasta and Oroville--Oroville, I believe will fill this year. It didn't look like that maybe a little while back, but it holds 3.5 million acre-feet of capacity. It has a good chance of filling.

Lake Shasta is a little lagging behind that. With the snowpack we are looking at, it could top off. It holds 4.5 million. It, combined with the proposed Sites Reservoir project downriver, would get us that 6- million number.

But we have to build Sites Reservoir. It has been looked at for many, many years. It has been planned. The voters of California passed a bond.

Remember the one I talked about a while ago that is going to use $250 million to tear out dams?

Well, it also puts forth a good amount of money to add to water storage.

So the Sites Reservoir has been able to corral around $950 million of that $4 billion or $5 billion bond. The rest is going to other projects, it looks like.

So we need to get this done. We need Governor Newsom, who expressed his support for it, to get his bureaucrats to move on that and get the permits approved so we can start. If we had it this year, we would have had that dam nearly full at Sites Reservoir with all the amazing water that we have had. So it is an issue of planning ahead, like those before us used to do when they built the Central Valley Project, largely Mount Shasta, and the State Water Project, Oroville, and others. Folsom Lake near Sacramento, it should fill up pretty rapidly this year with the snowpack.

So we are doing pretty good. I have to give credit where it is due. Thank you to the BOR for some of the settlement contractors, particularly in my area, that did get 100 percent allocation. So they did right on that, based on how things were looking with the supply, but that is a narrow group.

When Mr. Duarte talks about others that traditionally have grown 100 percent of their acres in normal-ish years, they have seen their permanent new normal is going to be 35 percent on a good year, perhaps. That isn't right. If we plan ahead and build the storage we need, which we know we can, we have done it, and the plans are out there to do that.

And when the delta pumps that he spoke about weren't run at max capacity to help fill another reservoir, known as the San Luis Reservoir, towards the west side of the central part of the valley, that facility holds 2 million acre-feet. Right now I think it is at about 75 percent full.

It wasn't looking so good a while back until we had Mother Nature bless us with so much. But see, they weren't running the pumps as hard as they could. They have other biological opinions that say, Well, you can't do this. You can't do that.

You have so much water in there, I don't know see how it is going to negatively affect the fish except if somebody is waving a document saying, No, you can't do that.

So we have to flush so much water through the delta that we could be capturing and not hurting a thing by running those two sets of pumps, one Federal and one State, and topping off the San Luis Reservoir.

Now, my neighbors might say: Well, Doug, what do you care about San Luis Reservoir for? It is way down past us. It can't possibly help us.

Well, the more we enhance the supply of the whole State, the better off we all are.

I want my neighbors down there to do well. I want my neighbors on the west side of the valley that got zero water, the west side of the Sacramento Valley, basically many, many acres had zero.

Some of the districts I mentioned had up to 18 percent, which in some cases wasn't even usable to them. So we saw dry fields like we had never seen.

So we saw dry fields like we have never seen; never seen. That ruins the

economies of small towns. It ruins the habitat for the flyways, I mentioned, coming out of the Klamath. There is no downside for having more water supply.

I just saw recently where the City of Oakland has approved 25,000 new homes, okay. Well, California does have a housing crisis; we need homes, but where is that water supply going to come from?

We will need approximately 12,500 acre-feet per year to sustain that amount of homes, if my numbers are right. Where is that going to come from? Magic?

They are going to have to take it from somewhere. We need to build the supply so we can continue to build the housing we need in the State.

John, we have both experienced this in different parts of the State. We both see that what we are growing here is, indeed, valuable.

These crops that we are talking about here, the country relies on them. Many of these crops, 100 percent, 90 percent, 99 percent come from California.

If we don't have this water, then United States citizens don't have this food. It will have to be imported, or they will have to do without.

They will have to eat something else. Well, there isn't always something else if we are not planning for that.

So it isn't just about California and just a few farmers; it is about everybody.

Tell them about what you had to deal with on just trying to keep your operation going on a wheat field or an orchard or what have you.

Mr. Duarte, I appreciate you bringing this sad story forward; indeed, being regulated for practices that are normal practices that are supposed to be exempt under the Clean Water Act, which was formed in the early 1970s, that were reinterpreted under the Obama administration.

They decided to reinterpret, and now it is a wider scope. We are having this battle right now in the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, this conversation where we are going to do a Congressional Review Act on the overreach of the regulation of waters of the United States, WOTUS. It is going to be in the Supreme Court soon.

So it is important we get back to a level of regulation that is reasonable. Nobody wants to skirt reasonable environmental laws, reasonable usage of water, all of the above. We all get that.

But the bureaucracy, as John was saying, is just waiting to pounce upon you and level huge fines at people.

He is not the only one in Tehama County that has faced this. I had one grower--this is some years ago--that had a clover field that he wanted to relevel.

They showed up there and said, oh, you can't do this. They took at least 3 years, 3 crop years he didn't get to use his land, while the bureaucracy pontificated whether he was doing something right or wrong.

I mean, he is owed compensation for that. And others, for planting an orchard, changing their ground from one type of orchard to another.

That is somehow now a new regulatable situation that is not meant-- Congress would not have had the guts to pass a Clean Water Act that did not have agriculture exemptions as it was written.

If they had not had those exemptions, there would have been a whole bunch ridden out of here on a rail had they been that abusive of farm policy and agriculture and the food supply.

Yet, they are getting away with it by a stroke of the pen by a bureaucracy, and it changes with administration.

President Trump, he saw they were wrong on this, and they were able to put through a modified policy on waters in the United States that actually was working and was reasonable, and Biden pushed it right out.

So this is what we face now; his agencies are pushing this. Waters of the United States: It means every drop of water that falls from the sky is under the jurisdiction of the United States.

Whether it is a puddle here--he talked about vernal pools that might hold some water here for a little while; that is going to become water of the United States.

There used to be a term known as navigable waterways, navigable rivers. Well, if you can't run a boat up and down it, it is probably not really navigable.

But they have expounded upon this definition so far and so wide that it works for the bureaucracy to be able to attack growers, to attack landowners, fine them, seize things from them.

So the American people should be outraged by this because farmers are just trying to provide. Madam Speaker, 99 percent of them are doing things correctly.

Yeah, you have your outliers that try and do things on the edge, but they are caught up with pretty soon, whether it is peer pressure or the reasonable regulations that should kick in.

They are trying to provide good things for the American people. They are made to feel like criminals. They are made to feel like why should I even bother?

So back in the 1970s, it was kind of popular to say after the oil embargoes, if you like imported oil, you will love imported food.

Do we want to really rely on some of our same overseas partners for our food supply? Can you imagine trying to--Russia has grown a lot of wheat in the past. Do you want to buy Russian wheat?

Ukraine, which is a good partner--it is part of the difficulty of wrestling with that situation. Ukraine is a major exporter of many agricultural crops and fertilizer.

Heck, somebody I know had a breathing apparatus that was only made in Ukraine. They had to wait a long time to get parts for it.

So do we want to be reliant on foreign sources for everything, China for pharmaceuticals? Well, we shouldn't put our food supply in that situation either.

We are on the road to do that due to lack of foresight, due to lack of water storage. We could be building Sites Reservoir, 1\1/2\ million acre-feet.

We need to keep chugging water into the San Luis Reservoir, which holds 2 million acre-feet. We could raise Shasta Dam 18 feet, which would yield 630,000 more acre-feet.

This is a representation of the water that was wasted during this winter, being allowed to run out the delta.

This is a snapshot in time here. You have got the upper delta running out into the ocean here; 6 million acre-feet during that snapshot in time. What are we doing here? We are not helping ourselves.

The economy is in a tough way, as Mr. Duarte mentioned. The costs for struggling families, for their housing costs and their food costs, almost envelops everything else.

So where is the compassion for the American people on this? We seem to be focused on a lot of other things. There are environmental issues that are brought up but show me where it actually is going to help the fish in the Klamath River. It isn't.

A lot of these other environmental issues, it doesn't really--since 1992, we have flushed hundreds of millions of acre-feet out to the ocean through the delta.

The Delta smelt is almost nonexistent now. They can't find it. When they do trawls for it, they cannot find it.

So it is almost like more water has actually harmed that fish. They have other predatory fish that are nonnative that are eating up all the salmon smelts there.

We don't do the right things about it. We do the wrong things. It penalizes good, honest, working people that are only trying to provide good things for the American people.

So, John, we have to keep telling the story because a lot of folks are just not quite understanding. They don't have time. They are too busy in their lives.

So for those that are viewing this today, I hope you will take this to heart and have your representatives do things that are going to help our food supply in this country and help farmers, help people that generate electricity.

On these environmental issues, you only seem to hear one side of it. No, those dams are not bad. Dams are actually created for a good purpose.

They don't yield the fish passage that is sometimes advertised. There are other remedies for that, but they are not allowed to come to the forefront. Can we build fish ladders around the dam?

Heck, in some cases, they are trucking fish from here to there because of drought situations. So why don't we have alternatives to these ideas?

This gets into a very important topic in my area too: forestry. We have overgrown forests that instead of a healthy 50 to 70 adult trees per acre, they will have 500, 600, even 1,000 trees per acre.

So what does that mean? Well, fire danger, big time. In my district, there is fire after fire. Last year in 2022, we kind of dodged a lot of bullets there.

In 2021, we had a million-acre fire. I have got the poster of it here. You have seen it before. Anyway, it is devastating toward the landscape, toward the habitat, and also affects the water supply because all this ash and silt washes into the water system and pollutes it.

It makes hydroelectric plants sometimes unusable because there is so much stuff that came down from the mountainside into the rivers, into the lakes.

We are not managing our forests properly. There is a Federal nexus to that; the U.S. Forest Service. The pace and scale at which they are doing things is way too slow to keep up with the amount of board feet that they are growing every year.

So how does that affect water? It affects not only water quality but water supply because the forest is sucking all the water in to have too many trees per acre.

What, you want to cut all the trees, Mr. LaMalfa? That is what I hear sometimes when I talk to the urban reporters on it.

No, we are not cutting all the trees. We are thinning. We are managing. We are having the amount of trees per acre at a ratio that is sustainable, that is healthy, and we are not doing that.

The trees are out there growing right now. There are manyfold more board feet of trees that are being added to the supply every year than we are even coming close to harvesting, so that shows we are going backward on that.

That shows we are going backward on that.

The pace and scale with which we manage our Federal lands and allow the permitting on private lands to not cut every tree from here to Oregon, but to manage them--that is the first thing the environmental groups yell. ``Oh, you guys are going to clear-cut everything. You are going to devastate the landscape.''

Do you think what is happening now is good? A million-acre fire-- several of my towns don't exist anymore in northern California. Many have heard of Paradise. Maybe you have seen some of those videos where 95 percent of that town burned down, and 85 people lost their lives. Many barely escaped. The town of Greenville in my district, 75 percent gone, and an adjacent town, Canyondam, was completely gone in minutes.

There is more up on the Klamath River even. Fire after fire because our forests are not managed, because the Federal Government can't get out of its own way to aggressively do what needs to be done.

We are way behind, so it affects air quality. The air plume, the smoke that went up in the plume from the Dixie fire in my district, came and settled over the East Coast because there was so much smoke. It affected air quality, I believe, here in Washington, all the way up to New York. People were advised not to go out and do athletic things because of air quality from a fire in my district.

I am sorry. We didn't want it to happen, but there it was, year after year, fire after fire. So, we need folks to be on our side on this thing. No, we don't want to wipe out the forest or cut down the owl or any of that stuff. The owls actually like a little room to fly between not overcrowded trees.

It will help our water supply. It will help the health of the forest. It will help not spend billions and billions on fire suppression every year once we are behind, endangering people's lives trying to put the fire out and flying the air tankers and all that fuel being expended trying to do that.

Let's talk CO2. I have a CO2 poster over there as well. When we are talking CO2, which everybody is scared to death of around here as being the major pollutant, more CO2 is released in those fires than a year's worth of cars driving in L.A., okay?

This climate change, which is half the time what they are talking about on the other side of the aisle in order to scare people to death, CO2 represents only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. The U.S. is a country leading the way on actually lowering the number anyway.

We are going to export our jobs and export our industry to countries that are doing nothing about it. China laughs at us as they build another coal-fired power plant every week, every 2 weeks, whatever it is. There are those that say, ``Hey, you guys in America, you are not keeping up with the Paris accords,'' and they keep cranking out more and more. It makes us look like a bunch of fools.

This climate change religion they are pushing is going to be really expensive. Watch out for these corporations that are pushing what is called an ESG policy. We acted on that this week here legislatively because it is going to make Americans uncompetitive in the areas of energy and everything else.

This is pie-in-the-sky stuff they are pushing here. It is actually very harmful to America, which is always the innovator of the cleanest, best way of doing things. We are always seeking to improve. We got the best-running car and truck engines, yet it is never enough for the regulators, including in my home State where 70,000 currently used trucks, up until January 1, now have to be sold or scrapped or something else, and therefore, people don't get the stuff delivered to the stores or to their homes that they normally would. It is going to be more expensive.

I heard somebody talk about the PRO Act here a minute ago. In California, that was a bill that makes everybody have to be part of a workforce or union instead of an independent contractor.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Duarte) to talk about regulations in California.

Madam Speaker, we want the American people to pay attention because this affects them. It isn't just for us to stand here and speak.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, for the last 2 years, the Biden administration has consistently waged a war on American energy and our fuel sources.

This unscientific, ideologically driven assault has crippled American energy and hurt American families and our economy greatly. The American economy and our way of life are dependent on reasonable, reliable, and easy access to energy.

He has gone so far as to even deplete our Strategic Petroleum Reserve--as you see here, these numbers going down dramatically--in order to cover over this bad policy and make everybody think it is going to be okay.

Americans rely on access to low-cost, efficient energy from sources like natural gas to heat their homes, cook their meals, and keep their lights on. It is neither feasible nor desirable for most Americans to abruptly switch to green alternatives, such as wind and solar power, and have to change all of their appliances and yard tools out simply because of the whims of government and having too much time on their hands.

Many can't afford to do these changes, nor should they have to. The unreliability of green energy makes it a much less preferable alternative. Faced with a choice between these two, most Americans make the sensible decision to stick with low-cost, reliable natural gas over expensive, unreliable green energy.

In my home State of California, the electricity power grid in the summertime at any time could go down, yet they are trying to force people into electrifying just about everything--their cars, their stoves, their yard tools, even generators. Think about this for a minute. How do you have an electric generator when the power goes off from your electricity?

I guess this is supposed to mean we have a warehouse of batteries somewhere because, otherwise, I don't know how you do it.

Generators are supposed to be a backup plan. Frequently, hospitals have diesel generators. People have generators they own for camping as well as backup for their homes. But they just keep going on and on, making up regulations.

So faced with these choices, Americans would rather have their own choices. This administration has essentially tried to ban and regulate Americans off of fossil fuels, off of nuclear power, it seems, until recently when California--hallelujah--decided to expand the Diablo Canyon Power Plant an additional 5 years, which is 9 percent of the power grid of California--9 percent. Imagine if they took that offline like they were hell-bent on doing.

Keeping natural gas is part of the equation. We have so much natural gas reserved in this Nation now because of the miracle of hydraulic fracturing. It is amazing what that has caused for us.

Radical environmentalists, though, can't take no for an answer. They have done away with trying to argue for their ideas and simply use government fiat, a stroke of a pen, to try and take these things away, including the latest proposal by the Department of Energy to ban gas stoves, which has got everybody all in a twitter right now.

Is that what we really need to be focused on right now with the situation with the railroad in Ohio and whatever the mess is we are going to make out of Ukraine, our border, and so many other issues?

No, let's keep people distracted with this gas stove situation here.

So what we have is a proposal by the Department of Energy to do it by the stroke of a pen, by just making a regulation to ban the sale of stoves that don't meet what is called an EL2 standard. They are just going to block the sales of these stoves, which means about half of them that are currently on the market will no longer be available on the market. People will have less choices that may not fit their style of kitchen, the size of their family. It may not fit a restaurant. It may not fit what you need for a kitchen that helps aid people that are short of food, soup kitchens. They want to take all these options away simply by a stroke of a pen.

People are getting furious over this stuff. And for families that enjoy the use of that gas stove, they work nice. I have one. I saw First Lady Jill Biden, a picture of her cooking on one in the White House.

So where does the hypocrisy end on all this?

Evidently, it doesn't end at the White House. It ends at the choices that humans have in this country.

We need to block this EL2 regulation that the Department of Energy is putting out, yet another thing that is trying to distract us I think from other issues. It is an important one for people to have natural gas stoves and

other appliances that are available to them.

And so I sum up on that with the ideal being that the only reason we are really doing all this stuff, ostensibly, is because of CO2. You see right here, carbon dioxide represents 0.04 percent of our atmosphere, okay.

People think from all the hype over CO2: Oh my gosh, climate change, climate change. It is a religion being pounded away in our schools and in our society, in ESG, and these corporations all day long. It is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere.

So they would have us all live in caves eating crickets because of 0.01 percent and take away our stoves on top of that right now.

We have to fight back on the DOE regulation.

Mr. Speaker, many Americans have raised concerns over the safety and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines.

We were told these shots were safe and effective. Now, we have information that raises serious doubts.

One pharmaceutical company asked that its research and safety data be hidden from the public for 75 years. What is to hide if these shots are safe and effective?

The Twitter files have shown that pharma companies and government agencies encouraged that social media giant to censor that information that raised doubts over the shots.

The vaccine information report that lists the potential side effects of the shot has been censored and left blank. This is what comes with the vials--censored, intentionally left blank. Amazing.

One company's representative even admitted they had no idea if their injections even worked before introducing them to the market. Several of these shots have already been pulled from the market, and others have had warning labels attached for young children and pregnant women, who were pushed into taking these injections.

Americans deserve the truth. Given the number of deaths from COVID-19 among vaccinated people, it is very questionable and worth asking these questions. Are they effective? The next question is, are they even safe?

Mr. Speaker, I might be an oddity here. Why is a guy from California standing here tonight?

First of all, as a friend to my great Texas colleagues and neighbors, so to speak.

Congratulations to the State of Texas, the people of Texas, on their anniversary, and also all that goes with that independence, that spirit that I admire of the people of Texas and its long, great history.

I think we need a lot more of that across the whole country, because you can always, I think, trust a Texan to stand up for this country.

So as a Californian, we used to have a lot of that same spirit, as pioneers of the West, going back to the gold rush, and we have, indeed, a lot of great things to point toward in my home State. But we are on harder times, self-inflicted.

I think the spirit of patriotism, of America first that is exhibited by Texans, is indeed one the whole country can use.

It was interesting when we were talking about annexation a little bit earlier here, where Texas might look like it might take over the world sometimes. I wouldn't doubt it; it is possible. But in my home State of California, there is kind of a mass exodus from my State to others, escaping the cost of living, the regulations, some of the other crazy things that are going on in my home State. Indeed, the recipient of a lot of those good folks that are leaving is the State of Texas. So I am not sure if California is trying to annex Texas or if Texas is annexing California a little bit here. But I hope at least it is to the benefit of Texas as we try and sort through our issues and getting back on track, such as growing so much of the Nation's food supply that comes from my State and conserving the water to do so. But I am getting off on a tangent here.

Indeed, there is much to admire. Every chance I get to be in the State, it feels like an extension of home to me. I come from a very rural part of northern California, and we listen to a lot of the same music and eat similar food and farm and ranch maybe in a similar way.

So hats off, literally, to the people of Texas. The only thing I can't get along with, as a 49ers fan, is the Dallas Cowboys. That is about the only thing, but we will leave that aside.

I am indeed glad to stand here with you tonight and wish the best and a happy anniversary of Texas independence.

Please keep leading the way. You are going to lead our Nation through difficult times with your spirit.

God bless Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the career of my friend, Lieutenant Nuno Tavares with the Placer County District Attorney's Office. Nuno has over 26 years of service in law enforcement and has had an exemplary career. I met Nuno 13 years ago when he was on the Board of Directors of the Placer County Deputy Sheriff's Association. We have had a great friendship over the years based on respect of the law, compassion and justice for victims, and public service. It was great to have Nuno and the DSA come by the California State Capitol when I was there. Later on, it was our pleasure to have Nuno and his family here to our Nation's Capital in Washington DC. I always enjoyed the times Nuno and I had to catch up, and to hear what our investigators and law enforcement deal with.

Nuno has worked in law enforcement since 1995. He spent 10 years on a Narcotics Task Force and oversaw areas like Cold Cases, Homicides, Special Investigations, and the Special Projects Unit.

It has been a pleasure knowing Nuno over the years. My congratulations to him in his retirement. I look forward to hearing what his plans are next. My best to Nuno and Jessica, and their children as they start this new chapter in their lives. God Bless Nuno and his family. God Bless the work he has done and the justice for victims he ensured. I thank him for his service to Placer County.