Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, on Monday, classified documents were discovered at President Biden's think tank in Washington, D.C. These documents were at least 6 years old, meaning the President had them and took them while he was Vice President, and lacked the authority at the time to declassify them.

Yesterday, a second batch of documents has been found. The timing of these discoveries right after the November midterm elections is, I am sure, coincidental.

Knowing the history of the Biden family's shady dealings with China and others, this raises serious national security concerns.

Mishandling classified information is a serious offense, yet the Democrats, from Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden, seem to get a pass.

When Republicans are accused of doing far less, we get special prosecutions and political witch hunts for a long time.

This breach of national security should be immediately investigated by Congress and the DOJ to determine the magnitude of this offense. If the DOJ wants to claim to be non-partisan, it must start enforcing with equity across party lines.

Who has seen these documents?

Who has had access to them with the sloppy storage that we saw in Pennsylvania or wherever else they are?

This is a very dangerous precedent, and the Vice President or the President need to be held accountable.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at 11 a.m. tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 26.

Madam Speaker, in September of 2022, President Biden declared the pandemic is over. Despite this, he has continued to extend his public health emergency declaration.

Declaring an emergency gives the President overreaching authority over Congress and the State health departments.

While this emergency is in place, the Federal Government can keep States from removing ineligible people--that the rolls should be cleaned up--from the Medicaid rolls, and the welfare state will keep growing unchecked.

This declaration has enabled the emergency use of vaccines and allowed the President to mandate involuntarily those vaccines to vast swaths of the public with little input or debate from Congress and the courts. It has also given him legal cover to buy votes with attempts at student loan debt forgiveness, rent freezes, and eviction moratoriums.

Under the cover of this declaration, the President attempted to change laws, impose decrees, and has altered the economic life of millions of Americans very negatively.

This is setting a terrible precedent by allowing the executive branch to rule by decree with no oversight or input from Congress. He is replacing Congress' speech and debate with his own Presidential pen.

This gross overreach of authority must end and move back to a debate and an open process.

Mr. Speaker, as we have observed, Western States are receiving much welcomed rainfall and snowpack. Indeed, some of the side effects are flooding and there are many mudslides that are affecting communities and transportation corridors.

This is on the heels of short rainfall years for at least the last 3 years. This year, rainfall numbers are good. They are at a pace where they are at their historical average or a little above in some areas. This is historical average long-term over non-drought years.

The last 3 years have seen dire water supplies for many people and allocations for farmers. In 2019, our lakes in California were basically full. You may recall in 2017, in my district, Lake Oroville had the spillway collapse due to lack of maintenance and checking its integrity over the years, but it was plumb full, 101 percent full, in 2017.

Our water projects in California were designed with the idea that they withstand 5 years of drought. With Lake Oroville being full as recently as 2019 and Lake Shasta nearly full as well, how is it that our State water projects and our Central Valley projects which are run by the Bureau of Reclamation--being at these high levels--that Lake Oroville, for example, in 2021, only 2 years after being full, was basically so low on water that for the first time in the history of that lake it did not make hydroelectric power because the water levels were so low.

Lake Shasta, in 2022, an unprecedented cut in water supply, including to its neighbor right there in Shasta County, Anderson-Cottonwood Irrigation District, received zero allocation because they couldn't deliver enough water to make it worth their while. In over 100 years of the existence of that district, this is the first time that they did not get to irrigate it.

These two dams were designed to withstand 5 years of drought, being full as recently as 2019. We had one running out in 2021 and the other basically being useless almost to agriculture in 2022, with drastic cuts all up and down the Sacramento River system.

What is going on here?

What is the State Water Project doing on the Feather River side, et cetera?

What is the Federal Bureau of Reclamation and CDP doing on the Sacramento River side that has changed?

They are not doing everything they can to hold water, even in drought years, that they could be holding. Why?

It is a mystery. We have the opportunity right now with these high flows. We have areas of California right in the Sacramento Valley that are being flooded out. They are running the pumps that are at the south end of the delta at about 18 percent on the State side and about 67 percent--not so bad--on the Federal level instead of taking full advantage of running those pumps as hard as they can and taking this excess water and relieving some of the flooding and putting it into a reservoir that will help our whole State withstand possible drought in the future.

Is this a drought year?

No, not as defined by lack of rainfall, as indeed we are at average, or we are above average in some areas. With the projection in January for a lot more rain coming, we might have a full normal water year or above. That would be good.

Our leaders in government in the agencies don't seem to feel the same urgency. At the same time they are talking that we have flood emergencies, they are still maintaining we have drought emergencies-- not with this kind of rainfall.

Yes, we have low-lake problems, but that isn't how you define a drought. That is how you define lake management. That is how you define water management. It is not helping. We need to be running, at least, those two sets of pumps at 99 percent or 100 percent at the delta and filling up the San Luis Reservoir and allocating water to those recharge basins so the subsidence we are having in the San Joaquin Valley that everybody is worried about wouldn't be happening.

No, they want to just keep chugging along the way they are doing, especially on the State side. This is a disservice to all water users in California. At the same time, they don't really see a whole lot of need to cut back on environmental water that is very dubious in nature, if it is helping fish in the delta or anywhere else.

Indeed, they need a change of attitude at all of these levels of water management. These agencies don't seem to be on the side of growing food. I always bring this poster along so people can understand how much of their food is grown in California, a high percentage of these crops that only come from California that Americans consume.

If it is not grown in California, either you are not going to have it or you are going to have to import it from somewhere else.

Look at this: walnuts. Walnuts are having a devil of a time right now in their market. Tomatoes. If you want tomato paste for your pizza and your pasta, where is it going to come from? We are going to have to import all this stuff.

We need to have a much stronger and much smarter water policy, and that starts right in California, and it benefits the whole country.

Mr. Speaker, victims of disaster don't need to be hassled by government, especially by new taxes.

The 2018 Camp fire in California was the deadliest and most destructive in our State's history. The Fire Victim Trust was set up to compensate these people for their loss and help them rebuild their homes and their lives. However, these fire victims had to deal with the possibility that some of their settlement money and money for attorney's fees that they would pay would be taxed as income by the

Mr. Speaker, not that long ago, the President declared COVID to be pretty much over with. So I rise today in support of H.J. Res. 46, which would basically end the fantasy that our current understanding of COVID-19 and its present spread in the United States requires Congress to still give extraordinary powers to the President. It is time to end the emergency.

Similar resolutions have passed the Senate twice. Here in the House, they have been blocked twice by the Democrats.

Mr. Speaker, this is no longer a new virus or a new pandemic. It is well past time for the House to follow the Senate's lead and bring a joint resolution to the floor to end this charade.

With the President wanting to end title 42, so that tens of thousands of illegal immigrants can come across our border with little to no health check, why in the world are we still painted into a corner as American citizens with emergency powers granted to the executive? It is time to pass H.J. Res. 46.

Madam Speaker, I have had a chance on several occasions to visit our southern border between the U.S. and Mexico. Of course, I wish our people in the White House would take the time. It is a very important thing. There are not more important things for the President and the Vice President to do than to see firsthand the mess we have among our four border States, but truly the effect it has, as every State is a border State because they flow so far into our country.

What are we looking at here? Four million encounters with illegal immigrants crossing our southern border in the last 2 years; an amazing amount.

Under President Trump, we had the most secure border we had in years. It wasn't perfect, but strides were being made with the many, many miles of fence that had been put up.

Since the Biden administration kicked in, the effort to continue to build the fence was frozen. We have stacks and stacks of materials lying there, many millions of dollars' worth of materials just laying there in the various spots across the border staged to be completed.

When I visited the Arizona portion, you could see where there were maybe 50 or 100 feet of fence, and there would be an area that would be contained where it would be much, much easier for the Border Patrol to do their jobs and keep whatever problems there are funneled in fewer areas, making their task much simpler to keep track.

Instead, with the deluge of immigrants, really an invasion that is happening, their job is much, much more difficult and less about patrolling the border and more about processing.

Indeed, when I was there, they have vans to go pick people up and bring them even faster to the processing center and then turn them loose in our country.

This is a really backwards policy, and it makes me really wonder whose side is this administration on.

The needs of the American people, or some kind of political gain by having a wide-open border?

I do not understand it. The numbers are huge.

Of course, it is the numbers of people coming across as well as the illegal drugs; the fentanyl. You have heard time and time and time again the stories. I guess the press doesn't really want to report a lot of that; we hear it here and there. But the amount of people being harmed by the fentanyl getting to everything is amazing. Yet, the border remains porous.

The only State doing something about it is Texas. All those States don't really have the rights to do Federal border patrol or closure. They are at least making an effort down there to stem the tide.

We are in a state of crisis along the border. Millions cross every year with no consequence. We expect them maybe to come back for a hearing, if indeed they are eligible for an asylum hearing, but that is really naive.

So there are plenty of tools already in the law to stop it. We don't really need reform on immigration. We need to enforce the rules we have.

Yet, what is the direction we are going?

We are going to see title 42, which is able to make limitations due to the healthcare crisis because of COVID. They want to let that go to the sidelines now, getting rid of title 42.

We already have a crisis. We already have a giant wave coming in. This is just going to exacerbate it. We already have gigantic problems that will be added to by letting title 42 expire.

Every country that is a country has borders and laws on that. Why is the U.S. different now under the Biden administration and under Democrat rule that we are not allowed to enforce our borders?

And indeed, the issue, as you squish the balloon, now we are seeing an effect on the Canadian border, something that hasn't been talked about a lot.

Mexican nationals are finding that it is easier with the backlog we have on the southern border to be able to take a flight up into Canada, because they have lifted most of their restrictions on entry and exit, and come through from Canada into the United States. Those numbers are increasing dramatically.

The data reflects a 91 percent increase from the prior fiscal year, and going higher. So if it is easier to come as a Mexican national through Canada, then that is just going to continue to be a larger problem. But we already have enough to deal with on the southern border; if we would just do the job.

As President Biden said last spring, let's fill the gaps that we have. At least fill just the gaps, if you don't want to make miles and miles of fence. It will make the Border Patrol job much easier. But truly, we need to do the whole job because we are not a sovereign nation if we don't have a border, if we don't enforce it.

Now, we will get called racist. We will get called hateful. Because those are just the standard arguments these days for just about anything.

It is not that. We have a right and an obligation to enforce that and bring people over that want to come legally, with visas. That is the way to do things, not just a wide-open, porous border.

Mr. Speaker, nuclear power, hydropower, biofuels, solar, and wind are all positive sources of energy. They take advantage of available resources and bring high-paying technical jobs to rural areas, especially.

However, forcing people into renewable sources of energy only will not help families immediately heat their homes this winter or next.

Right now, in California, renewable energy accounts for roughly one- third of our power grid, depending on whether or not you count hydroelectric power, which large power plants aren't counted, for some arbitrary reason in our State.

Each summer, we face rolling blackouts throughout the State. Each winter, mountain towns face power shortages due to snowstorms knocking down power lines.

At this moment, natural gas and oil remain by far the most efficient and affordable sources of energy, a fact that the Biden administration must accept.

Renewable energy won't do the whole job. Yet, what are they doing? They are attacking oil and gas, which is based on some idea of CO2. I remind you that CO2 is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. It is dwarfed by all the others. Even trace gases are about equal.

Yet, we are hell-bent on getting rid of CO2 and making people unable to use the energy they need, do their jobs, heat their homes, et cetera.

Mr. Speaker, first, I want to congratulate northern California's Orland High School. Their boys' football team just won the California State championship with a grueling 20-7 win, on a very muddy field at Orland Stadium, over Shafter High School.

Indeed, the muddy field affects both teams equally, and Orland was able to dig it out with a great running effort--159 yards by the quarterback in order to pull the victory off. He scored all three touchdowns.

It was, indeed, the first in many years of a State championship for Orland as they pulled this off in an amazing fashion after a lot of rain in northern California.

Congratulations to Orland High School boys for a great effort, going 15 and 0, and winning the CIF championship for all of California.

California's Water Supply

Mr. Speaker, this is a topic I have spent a lot of time on here on this floor talking about. It is where our food supply comes from in this Nation. With the shortsighted efforts we have had by our regulators at the Federal and State levels, food is shorter in this country than it ever has been in quite a few years, and for no good reason.

As I point out on this chart here, my home State of California, many of our food products are grown in California that the U.S. relies upon. These products you see here, over 90 percent, some of them 100 percent, come from California.

If they weren't grown in California, they would have to come from somewhere else. We would have to import them. We would have to do without. We would have to switch to some other type of food product that we didn't like as well, or just have less choice.

Why is this happening? In part because the water supply for these farms has been around for decades and, indeed, the water systems in California, the Central Valley Project, which is Federal, the State water project, which is State level, were developed with harnessing the water that we have so plentiful in the north and using it throughout the State.

Indeed, in drought periods, these systems were designed to hold us through drought for up to 5 years when the dam was full beforehand in order to do what people need to farm their crops and take care of the needs of the cities, manufacturing, et cetera.

In California, of the 100 percent water pie, 50 percent goes for environmental needs. Fifty percent goes to keep fish colder and wetter, to let water run out to the Pacific, to keep the saltwater intrusion in the delta at bay, so to speak. Forty percent, traditionally, has gone to agriculture, and 10 percent is what has gone to urban and domestic use.

That 40 percent that agriculture has received has had a big bite taken out of it. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been idled in California, just in my area, in the north. At least 250,000 acres of rice crops alone, as well as other water supply that goes toward almonds, walnuts, prunes, and many other crops, has been taken away.

We want to blame the drought. Yes, we have had some level of drought. But in 2021, I would also remind you, we had a huge amount of rainfall in October and a vast snowpack in December 2021.

This year, we are enjoying a good amount of rainfall already in November and December, which will help replenish our lakes.

But what are the water managers, so to speak, in the Federal and State governments doing? Are they indeed keeping the water in the lakes so that we would have the ability to draw upon that water and continue farming crops in California?

Again, this isn't just for California farmers, for the California economy. This is something all Americans rely upon for these food products that are more numerous than I can even list on this chart here.

What is happening in my northern part of the State, the Klamath Basin that I also share on the Oregon side with my good colleague, Mr. Bentz?

The last few years they have taken the water supply from the farmers up

there in that basin, in the Klamath Basin project--this is a project that was built over 100 years ago to make more water available solely for agriculture from the Klamath Lake. That is the original lake with an additional supply.

Yet, the Bureau of Reclamation and environmental organizations and agencies believe that is their water to take and try to mitigate fish issues in the Klamath River. This kind of attitude has shifted all the way through the Klamath, on down to the Sacramento River.

The Bureau of Reclamation needs to get its act together and be reminded, again and again, that the Klamath project was developed for agriculture, not to help mitigate fish issues that, truly, probably can't really be solved.

On top of that, another thing the people of Klamath and the Siskiyou and northern California area are suffering is that they want to remove the dams that make hydroelectric power on the Klamath River by making a regulatory scheme that is almost impossible for them to renew the licenses.

That is how government does it. They make it too costly, too impossible to continue to stay in business via the permit process.

So, hydroelectric power is going to be less in California, which is already a tough thing on our power grid.

What is the big thing against the people of Klamath Basin? I don't understand. We need food. We need electricity.

Mr. Speaker, from the beginning, our Nation's founding was based upon the idea of defending our borders and defending our people within it.

Yet, in a complete 180 from the original purpose, our top government officials want our tax dollars to fund irreversible gender reassignment surgery for children.

Chemical castrations, mastectomies, and hysterectomies for sex reassignment on minors are life-altering decisions that are permanent and should not be taken lightly. Moreover, the government has no business paying for them with our tax dollars. It is not only irresponsible but also flat-out dangerous and encourages irreversible and sterilizing procedures on young people.

Mr. Speaker, 80 percent of young people who experience gender dysphoria move on from that when they become adults.

Some doctors and teachers--sometimes even parents--pressure vulnerable children into these invasive surgeries to keep in line with their woke agenda. Adults have no business forcing these decisions upon young people or making them themselves. Indeed, we have run legislation here saying that this should not be a discussion for minors, they must be at least 18 years old if they want to go through these procedures.

It is unacceptable the way adults, media, and government are putting children entrusted in their care in these situations directly in harm's way with irreversible, life-changing, and even suicide-inducing decisions.

In Northern California, thousands of residents have reported having their credit card information stolen by these sneaky credit card skimmers. One skimmer alone at a Walmart in Redding, California, captured the information of over 4,000 cards.

In the first 6 months of 2022, credit card skimming fraud grew by 700 percent in this country. This scheme can deplete bank accounts before unsuspecting consumers even realized that their card information has been stolen.

Skimming costs financial institutions and consumers at least $1 billion a year, a figure that will only increase. As rates of skimming increase, as well as the U.S. moving more and more to digital-type transactions, the opportunity for fraud will grow exponentially.

We must crack down on all types of this crime and create a society that doesn't tolerate or defend these individuals who engage in these behaviors.

We must continue to equip law enforcement with the tools needed to investigate and prosecute these types of financial crimes.

Mr. Speaker, in 2019, Hunter Biden foolishly abandoned a laptop at a computer repair store, a laptop that revealed Joe Biden was fully aware of his son's foreign corrupt business dealings. Not only that, but Hunter's business also profited President Biden financially and influenced foreign policy.

But the American people weren't allowed to know this before electing Joe Biden to the Presidency. Why? Because Twitter, one of the most influential distributors of content in the world, deliberately and arbitrarily suppressed news coverage to suit the political persuasions of its employees.

We have undeniable proof that Big Tech censored bad press for the Biden administration right before the 2020 election and may have even profited from doing so. This despicable collusion between liberal politics and social media, put on full display in the Twitter files, must end.

Informed voters, not biased Twitter truth manipulators, must decide the outcomes of elections.

We will never know how many voters would have changed their mind if they knew of the corruption of the Biden family and their activities. Suppression of information is the real threat to our republic, not asking questions.

Now that Republicans are back in the majority in the House, we will investigate this interference and hold Big Tech, the FBI, and the Biden family accountable.

Throughout California there are tens of thousands of residents who lost their homes, their belongings, and, for some, even their loved ones due to wildfires.

In 2020, the fire victims trust was established to compensate survivors of the 2015 Butte, the 2017 North Bay, and the 2018 Camp fires with a total of $13.5 billion of settlement award money.

Survivors have waited years for compensation to rebuild their lives, and they have long awaited these funds. Instead, to add insult, many of them are facing immense tax burdens and navigating the uncertainty of our ambiguous tax code trying to find concrete answers of how much they may or may not owe the Government in taxes.

We should not force survivors to pay Federal taxes on compensation they would otherwise use to rebuild their lives, and we certainly should not be forcing them to pay taxes on funds that are going to the lawyers involved as well.

Congressman Mike Thompson and I have introduced H.R. 7305 to correct this injustice. I am urging all my colleagues in the House to support this bipartisan legislation and bring much-needed financial reprieve to these wildfire survivors.

They shouldn't have to live with this uncertainty over their heads. This needs to be passed by the end of this year.

Mr. Speaker, it is raining in California, finally.

I know that song from the 1970s would say otherwise, but we are seeing some relief from the drought. It is partially man-made, partially government-made, by letting all of our water run to the ocean instead of to farms and to people. That said, our fire season is also over for a while in most of the State.

Let me just remind you: This map here is just a portion of northern California. This half of this fire area is about 1 million acres from last year called the Dixie fire. Many other fires in just the last 4 years represent about 2 million acres, just in one section of one State.

This calls out the need--even though it is the off-season, and we have forgotten about the fire now because it is raining--to have forest management that is actually effective.

We need the U.S. Forest Service to take this issue head-on instead of more talk, more mealymouth, more plans, treating maybe 1 million acres a year,

2 million acres per year, when the Forest Service has under its charge 200 million acres.

We need to bring in the private sector and everybody we can to get ahead on forest thinning and forest management so we don't keep burning our communities down and causing all the air pollution, water quality issues, loss of wildlife. Meanwhile, we are the second-leading importer of lumber in the world.

What are we doing here? It is time for action.