Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, just a short time ago, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton) gave a heartfelt speech about his time in Congress. I want to pass along my appreciation for him, especially his hard work in shepherding through the 21st Century Cures Act just a couple of terms ago.

I appreciate that and his strong work in the Congress. God bless Mr. Fred Upton.

Mr. Speaker, I get up here and speak a lot about the situation with food availability in this country, farming, the availability of food that comes from farming.

Just recently, President Biden basically promised food shortages around the world and even have effects here in the United States, the land of abundance with the capability of growing much more than our own food supply. There is no reason the United States should be running short of food in any fashion for our own people or in our ability to help other people around the world with exports or the food programs that aid those that are in poor, dire situations in some other countries.

Yet, indeed, my wife just told me a couple of days ago that she was in the market, and there was an entire freezer shelf that was empty in one of the large chains of grocery stores in northern California. How can this be? Why is it?

I know we are coming out of COVID. That caused some problems, but the essential workers were in there pretty much the whole time making it happen, making beef available to our store shelves, everything else.

The farmers probably never really left the fields. There is no reason we should be having shortages.

I still hearken back to the story about 30-something years ago when Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, came to this country. Along with President Bush at the time, he visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston. On the way out, they stopped at a grocery store there in Texas. Mr. Yeltsin just wanted to see that, I guess, and he was amazed by what was on the shelves of American stores, the bounty we have.

I think it moved him to become emotional about it, and it also moved him to give up his role in the Communist Party in Russia and try to start reforming his country.

Indeed, he was quoted as saying, If the Russian people could see what was on the shelves here, there would be a revolution. That is pretty amazing.

So, what are we doing here in this country? The regulatory agencies and policies that come out of this administration and, of course, the State of California are basically running agriculture off the map. Taking the water away from farmers in California is a big example.

Now, people around the country may be watching and wonder: ``Why does that affect me, man, a bunch of California problems? They are all messed up out there anyway.'' What is important, though, is that so many of these products we grow in California benefit the whole country. There are at least a dozen crops that 90 to 98 percent of them that Americans consume are grown in my home State.

I went to this irrigation district meeting just recently in my district. A whole bunch of farmers were gathered with the district managers there, their board. Indeed, the district is doing everything it can to make a bad situation work just a little bit better. They are using innovative ideas.

But the bottom line is, the water has been taken from them when you are talking Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville, the other projects we have in California, the State project, the Federal project.

How has it been taken? Well, of course, we are going through somewhat of a drought situation, but a lot of it is a man-enhanced drought because so much water has been let out of our storage systems into the delta, ostensibly to help fish, ostensibly to help with water quality.

One of the delta fish we are talking about is known as the delta smelt. It is gone. They go out and take what they call trawls, looking for this species. It isn't there anymore, so they have shifted much of the narrative away from the smelt now to water quality, salinity, such as that.

We get that because some of the bay area intakes for city use are in the delta, and they need to not have saltwater coming into those. So, the freshwater coming down, basically, from the mountains washes that water away. They need some of that flow.

According to statistics I have seen, because I can hardly get a straight answer, six times the flow has been pushed through there as what it would take to maintain that salinity--six times the flow.

So much water is not being captured. California still has a lot of rain and snowpack that falls upon it that is not being captured.

What are we down to? That water district I met with, those farmers are going to receive 7 percent of their flows, 0.4 acre-feet. If you had 100 acres, you would get to plant 7 acres. Can you imagine in any kind of business atmosphere where you get to operate 7 percent of it?

We have to get this right. The Federal Government needs to come in and do its job, not just worship the Endangered Species Act.

Mr. Speaker, last week, President Biden announced a decision to repeal one of the best tools our Nation has to deter illegal immigration, title 42.

Title 42 is a public health law that authorized U.S. border agents to promptly send back illegal immigrants if they pose a health risk to Americans

and are from a country with a communicable disease outbreak.

This reckless decision comes as U.S. Customs and Border Patrol warned the historic surge at our border is already worsening, now even more so in anticipation of the rollback of this title.

The U.S. will soon hit 1 million illegal crossings of our borders in just the first half of this fiscal year, which began in October.

Last week, Customs and Border Patrol confirmed that over 300,000 illegal immigrants have illegally entered in just the last 6 months-- 300,000. This is known as the known got-aways, and the true number is most likely much higher.

Title 42 expulsions account for over half of all expulsions; the ones with the health issues are half of expulsions. They will now be let in.

Where are the concerns about Americans' health? We are just coming off this COVID situation. Where are Americans' health concerns in this?

This is a crazy policy that is not putting Americans first.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Ranking Member Graves yielding me the time on this as well as the bipartisan effort with Chairman DeFazio and everybody on this important legislation.

The Resilient AMERICA Act really, indeed, is like the old adage, a stitch in time saves nine. When you can spend dollars upfront mitigating, such as this bill moves to do, to make a larger pool of money available under FEMA to do so, it just saves a lot of extra pain and suffering.

Mr. Garret Graves talked about the $100 billion year in, year out we are spending on disaster relief. It is good we do so, but we can nip a lot of this in the bud by applying this type of thinking toward all types of possible disasters.

In my home district, you know, last year the Dixie fire, right at a million acres; the Camp fire before that hit the town of Paradise. You all heard about that in the news, 85 people lost their lives, destroyed 90 percent of the town. Now, if we can get ahead of the curve on this, whatever is applicable for FEMA preassistance, prework, hardening power lines, having buildings that can be hardened with the right materials for their siding and for their roofs. The mitigation we need to be doing in forested areas, whatever is applicable, the more we can do, the better off we are.

We are also looking at flood situations. I have that, too, with the Sacramento River and Feather River in my area, as well as lesser areas, too, in size. Instead of fixing a levee on New Year's Eve in the middle of the night on soggy levees, doing that work ahead of time, upgrading them makes it safer for the workers, safer for the community, and is much less expensive.

This is, indeed, a great success for us in this time, and there is sometimes difficulty here in Congress to have legislation like this with strong bipartisan support that can help everybody. I am proud of the work this committee has been able to do.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Graves) for the time.

Here we have again another triumph of legislation coming together that can be beneficial at no great new cost to the process.

The Stafford Act has needed updating, certain aspects, for a long time. When you look at some of the difficulties when you are in a postdisaster situation of having to deal with some arcane legislation and laws, it just makes much more suffering than is necessary for people who have been victims, in my case, from many wildfires in northern California.

In adhering to the approximate 95 percent of projects being under the new threshold, that still keeps with what had been set in place way back in 1988. H.R. 5641 is a triumph in that.

Also, with it at 10 percent of total funding for disasters, we are not blowing the budget on this either.

It is, indeed, very important because when you are talking about my rural district or rural America, you don't have the wherewithal to be hassling your way through some of these processes in order to get things going again postdisaster.

In my area, for example, towns like Whiskeytown, Happy Camp, Hornbrook, Concow, Yankee Hill, Magalia, Paradise, Doyle, Canyondam,

Greenville, Indian Falls, and others I couldn't possibly all list here today, they are all going to be beneficiaries and appreciative of this effort because they don't have the ability, small counties like Plumas County and Lassen County, to have to deal with some of the restrictions previously under the Stafford Act.

This would be a big win for anybody facing disaster, a small town, or even large, around this country. This is another win for us legislatively, and I appreciate the effort of the committee.

Mr. Speaker, there has been a lot of talk about energy and energy costs in this country and, of course, in my home State of California, where you can easily find fuel over 6 bucks a gallon. Let me translate this conversation into what it means for farmers and what farmers mean for food supply.

Now, we know the United States farmer provides the best, the cleanest, the most efficient process, more grown per acre per unit than anywhere else in the world. So, it is amazing to me that, just a few days ago, President Biden announced that we are going to have food shortages in the world and even here. We are already seeing the empty shelves. We are already seeing the high prices--supply and demand for everything.

In the United States of America, food shortages make me ask: What are our priorities as a country and as a government here or in my home State, the government of California?

We are looking at energy costs. Everything requires energy when we have a product that goes from a field, from a mine, or from a manufacturer to your home, Mr. Speaker. The fuel costs to operate a tractor, a combine, the trucks that bring you fertilizer and that bring you seed, the trucks that take away the grown product to the processor, to the mill, and finally bringing it to your store shelf or even if you have it delivered to your house, Mr. Speaker. All those energy costs ripple through everything we do and have as citizens of this country.

What is being done about energy costs? Well, I just saw a blurb a minute ago that the President wants to tap into our energy reserve, the stored oil that we have someplace that always seems to be a political football around here to solve some problem when it is really supposed to be a reserve for very acute times of danger for our country. Now, they are using it as an economic flattener or what have you.

We have reserves in the ground in this country that we are not tapping, but our tone-deaf government here and our State of California won't do anything about that. Instead, let's export it from Venezuela, and let's export it from the Middle East. Maybe we will do something about Russia. We will see if that takes effect.

We are not doing anything to help our own people with the energy crisis and energy costs here. We are dancing around that collectively as a government in this administration. Why? What is their priority? When John Kerry says he hopes this thing Putin is doing in Ukraine doesn't stop our ability to reach our climate change goals, how tone- deaf are these people? Are you kidding me?

We are going to continue to enjoy even emptier shelves for our food, tires, and everything else because of high energy costs and a government in Washington and in Sacramento unwilling to do anything about it other than half measures or zero measures.

What does this do to our food supply, as we talked about? My colleagues in the State legislature proposed a sales tax holiday, a fuel tax holiday, which would knock about 51 cents off of a gallon of fuel. It is not the be-all or fix-all, but it can do something temporarily to help while we get our energy going again, supposedly. It would help. They turned that down. Instead, they proposed a tax increase on production of fuel in California. Unbelievable. Damn, who are you guys working for? Amazing.

In my home State, as we try to produce food, tens of millions of acre-feet of water and snow fall upon our State each year. We hear drought, drought, drought, record drought. Yes, it is lower than normal, but we are not capturing the water we can.

We could raise Shasta Dam, a Federal project, which Federal dollars were put toward. We could build Sites Reservoir in northern California and add 1.5 million-acre feet of stored water.

But no. They are letting the water get away out through the delta for salinity and for fish populations that don't even exist. The delta smelt is gone.

The Klamath Basin up in the north, zero allocation for agriculture last year and this year. Statewide, we are looking at probably 70 percent of irrigated acres by the time it is all added up. They are going to be idle this year.

What does that mean to the American people? That is California's problem; you guys don't know what you are doing out there anyway. Well, tomato production is going to be down quite a bit, so that means less tomato sauce for New York, less olives and olive oil for New York.

This is what we are doing to our food production. Fertilizer costs are going to drive costs even more, and we will not be farming in California much longer.

Mr. Speaker, President Biden has been promising recently empty shelves, food shortages in the United States of America.

American farmers are the most efficient and the best in the world at what they do, but they can't do it very well with these high energy costs.

Fertilizer takes energy to produce. It takes oil to produce. When you see the cost increasing 51 percent, this isn't just going to hit the farmers; it is going to hit all consumers.

Energy costs ripple through everything: planting, harvesting, delivering, everything. So what are we doing? What is our focus going to be?

In my home State of California, water is being taken away from agriculture. We need the Bureau of Reclamation and our own State water resources to be focused on producing food for people.

In Ukraine, those farmers are trying to plant amidst bombs from Putin and Russia. In our own country, in my own home State, the bombs are being dropped by the government on farmers, having their water taken away, having their energy costs go through the roof.

We have to focus on producing energy and food for Americans that is affordable instead of this direction that the Federal and my own State government are doing to the people and not for them.

Madam Speaker, with Americans facing higher prices everywhere--at the gas pump, the grocery store, car dealership, clothing stores, and even at hotels--Americans are paying more everywhere, thanks to incredible inflation brought on by President Biden's plan for spending.

Well, with the new budget now coming out, we are going to see an even bigger amount of deficit. American families are facing a $3,500 yearly inflation tax, the Biden administration wants to spend $73 trillion over the next 10 years--just in the budget year, not new spending, not COVID spending. This is what normal budgets will start to look like, which was $8 trillion more than what the CBO is predicting for the same period of time.

Under this budget, Biden can easily add $15 trillion more to the national debt, which would make it $45-$46 trillion by the year 2032. We can't manage this. If the price of interest goes up much more, it will completely eviscerate our ability to do anything besides mandatory spending in our budget.

More families are going to suffer and the things we care about in the budget that we can't control will suffer as well.

Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago, I went to the southern border, and I was shocked and appalled to hear about the humanitarian crisis, the violence, and the drug smuggling firsthand, on-site.

President Biden's and the Democrats' open border policies have allowed a record number of illegal immigrants and illegal drugs to enter our country.

There are staggering numbers of encounters at the border each month, and more illegal immigrants are, unfortunately, slipping past in areas without a fence or enough Border Patrol.

Now, the Biden administration is thinking about repealing one of the more effective methods of deporting illegal immigrants, title 42.

Title 42 is a public health law that authorizes U.S. border agents to promptly send back migrants and illegal immigrants if they pose a health risk to Americans and are from a country with a communicable disease outbreak.

During the height of the COVID crisis, they want to let them in by repealing title 42. It will mean even more illegal immigration into this country and eliminate one of the few tools that the administration has used to expel illegal immigrants.

The audacity of this administration that has tried to force vaccine mandates on Americans, force them to still wear masks on airplanes and at airports, and at the same time allowing unlimited illegal immigration. We must preserve title 42.

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Louisiana for leading this tonight. I really appreciate it.

There is so much that could be said about that. I think the really personal things about Don Young are what I would like to reflect around this place.

When I first got here almost 10 years ago, we had kind of a common kinship in that we are both actually from northern California. He was born in a town near Meridian, California, not far from Yuba City, which is my back yard too, part of a rice farming outfit there.

I knew his brother Doug from Woodland, part of Republican politics there. Both these guys are obviously characters.

So, for Don, though, you could tell he was just a pillar, just being around him. Of course, his portrait is on the wall in the committee room and such, his work on transportation, but it is the small things that really make a difference; his warmth, him and his wife Anne, for me and my staff that would be around him at various events going on around the district.

We talk a lot about that chair over there, right. And so I sat in the chair, not because I didn't know, because I did know, and I wanted to see what would happen.

So I am sitting there, and he walks in. I got this thumb on my ear here. He grabbed it, and I said oh, I guess it is time for me to go. Sir, I am just warming the chair up because you are from Alaska. You need the chair warm for you. He bought that, but I got right out of there too.

Now, just recently, I think it was last Wednesday, you know, he was in a wheelchair recently due to issues and such. And so we were heading to the elevator over here. And most of the time you might yield to that and let somebody with that issue going on have the elevator to themselves. Not this group.

Me and about four other guys, we all piled in there with him because we all wanted to be with Don Young, even just for a short elevator ride and see what he was going to say and what kind of things were going to go on.

That is the man we all love and are going to miss terribly and whose sweet

wife, Anne, God bless you. It has just been a pleasure knowing and being with you here.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to talk about the situation we have with agriculture and water in California and the President's acknowledgment just a couple of days ago that we are going to see a food shortage in the world but partially even in the United States of America.

That is unbelievable to me. How could we, the United States of America, be facing possible food shortages? Indeed, already on the store shelves is empty space.

I remember a story just a few years ago where Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, of all places, came over and was visiting. They took him to a grocery store in the United States, and he was amazed and blown away and even emotional by the variety we have here.

Yet, the priorities don't seem to be producing for Americans or even producing for those we help around the world. It seems to be based more on environmental needs, like in my home State of California where they are releasing more water out to the ocean than what is going to go to agriculture this year.

Why does this affect all Americans? Why does this affect you? Because so many of the crops that we grow in California supply somewhere between 90 and 98 percent of what Americans eat of those crops, and we are still doing this environmental stuff in California.

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Louisiana (Mr. Johnson) for faithfully helping us get the message out, facilitating that because what is really important is that we are talking to the American public about this situation that we don't have to be in.

Indeed, we have seen with the fairly new Biden administration that inflation has risen tremendously. Now, I don't get pleasure out of bagging on the President or anybody else in this, but we just have to go to the core of the issue. The policies that have been put into place have harmed the U.S. economy, harmed regular families.

The cost of fuel has been an especially noticeable part of this. In my home State of California, we always enjoy--enjoy--extra costs because of the way things are done there. If it is $4 for a gallon of gas in the rest of the country, it is $5.50 in my home State because of the dumb things we do out there.

So this recent surge, indeed, is affecting everybody, but it is an even greater burden on rural residents that have to drive longer distances. Maybe their jobs in agriculture or timber or mining are more based on the usage of fuel and other inputs that are fuel related. So that means that there are fewer exports of things that are produced in rural America, fewer services, there is going to be less employment as a result of this, too, because of the high cost of everything.

We are talking to some truckers. We are seeing there is a point where they can't deliver anymore because they can't afford the fuel and that will be soon. Imagine that, when you go to the retail level, and you can't get the normal things off the shelf you are used to. We are already seeing that. There are fewer food choices, fewer choices. You are waiting longer for parts to come to repair vehicles or do anything else.

When rural residents, especially, have to drive longer to do anything, whether it is to take kids to school, get to health services, pick up goods they need to do their job, it is just that much greater of a burden at these prices.

Take law enforcement, for example. Now, cops, especially rural ones, they have got a lot of driving to do to cover those rural areas, and their costs are going through the roof. That means counties, small cities are bearing a greater burden just to try and keep patrols out there. So that is indeed a detrimental effect on basic public safety.

Farmers, too. We are getting ready to plant our crop on our farm here. I don't even want to know what the fuel price is to top off my tanks, but I have to because it is so high. That is going to be passed on to the shelves for people to buy food all across the country or the farmer is going to go out of business if he can't get the price he needs to at the store.

Rural jobs are extremely important for our economy. They are producing things that people eat, the fiber they use to make clothes that people wear, the wood and paper products we use for our homes and our business.

It is really, really high time we take action and produce energy in this country because we can, we should, and we can affect the world market and make it where Russia is not making a killing off their energy because it is a supply-and-demand issue. If we fill the marketplace with low-cost energy, it will bring all this back in line. We will be in a better position as a Nation to help our colleagues, our neighbors in the western part of Europe, and cripple Putin's ability to make a killing off what he is doing.

Madam Speaker, last week, I joined several of my Republican colleagues on an official trip to view the southern border in Arizona.

We received an operational briefing from the Border Patrol stationed in Yuma and toured their processing center. We also went on field tours to see the halted construction of the border wall and a staging site used by cartels for smuggling children across the border.

I was horrified by what I saw. When President Biden halted construction of the border wall, he left giant strips of the border wide open for cartels to smuggle illegal drugs and even human trafficking victims into our country, women and children being abused in ways that are unimaginable.

I was appalled to learn how the cartel recycles the child victims so that they are basically the conduit to bring adults across. Then, when they are done with that child inside this country, they take them back and recycle them again through the process.

They prey on families by telling them what they think they owe to the cartel and use their children in such a way. The filth, the trash left behind, the containers of drugs and pills you find there in the arroyos, in the washes, it is horrific all the way around. We must control our border.

Mr. Speaker, it is time to focus on our energy crisis and our energy costs, but that also relates to food.

In our country, we are already seeing bare shelves of food items. You might recall years ago when Boris Yeltsin visited this country. They took him to a supermarket, and he was amazed by what was on American shelves. Now, we are moving in the direction of having shelves like in Russia.

In my home State of California, as they cut off the water supply, the Klamath Basin got zero water last year to farm crops, and in the San Joaquin Valley and part of the Sacramento Valley, zero water allocations.

As we look at conditions around the world, Russia is deciding to cut off some of the imports of fertilizer, which will make it harder to plant crops. Hungary has decided they are not going to export grain anymore this coming year. This is going to have a ripple effect through all food supplies and certainly on prices. The price of wheat is way up, maybe 100 percent--wheat futures. We are going to feel this at the stores if we are not planting our own food in this country.

We have the water to do it in California, but it is all going out in the ocean in order to support fish that no longer live there. And the salinity issue is misused.

We have to focus once again.

Madam Speaker, I am still trying to figure out what the priorities of this Biden administration are. When you look at the different world events going on--when John Kerry comes out and says: Oh, we hope this Ukraine intervention does not interfere with the progress the U.S. is making with Mr. Putin on climate change--you wonder what are the priorities?

Indeed, I would have to remind you that if CO2 is a priority of this administration, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it represents only .04 percent of our atmosphere. You see all the other gases in our atmosphere are represented by much larger percentages.

If indeed John Kerry and this administration's big priority is CO2, what are they doing to help remedy that for the energy this country needs? Well, my home State of California it shutting down both nuclear power plants that we had at one time in the State, Santa Onofre first and Diablo Canyon coming up pretty soon.

It is tearing up hydroelectric dams, like up in my district, on the Klamath River; both of those provide CO2-free electricity, if CO2 indeed is the big priority. No, it is something else. It is some other agenda. They are not doing much to help. If we had more nuclear power plants in this country, we wouldn't have the fuel for them.

We produce only 9,000 pounds of uranium, yet our needs in this country for our power plants, military ships, and even medical is about 45 million pounds. That is 9,000 versus 45 million. It doesn't seem to be the priority of this administration to have America's needs, the people of this country's needs, our energy independence when you look at just the production of electricity, let alone oil and gas, which are so critical for everyday needs for everyday Americans.

We need to really focus on what this country needs and we need to help steer this administration into that focus instead of the fruitless direction we are going.

Madam Speaker, today, the national average for a gallon of gas is a little over $4--$4.06 to be exact. Meanwhile, in my home State of California, the average gas price per gallon all across our State is $5.34. For the first time ever, the average gas price per gallon is over $5 in every single California county.

Now, I know California brings a lot of pain upon itself, self- inflicted, but I

have seen a lot of the mainstream media try to claim that these price increases are due to Russia's attack on Ukraine, not the Biden administration's anti-energy agenda. If that were true, how has the gas price per gallon increased by $1.60 over the last year, not just the last two weeks of the Ukraine conflict.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has frozen all new oil and gas projects on Federal lands and implemented extreme financial barriers on domestic oil and gas production. On day one, of course, we all know he killed the Keystone pipeline, which could be supplying 830,000 barrels of oil from Canada to U.S. refineries, more than what Russia imports to us.

In his first week, we had an executive order stopping new leases on Federal lands, so we need to replace Russian energy with our own production.