Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, this country faces an energy crisis of all types: fuel, gas, electricity. But what is the issue we are pursuing? It seems to be all about this little sliver right here on this chart: carbon dioxide.

Most people are surprised when told 0.04 percent composes the carbon dioxide part of our atmosphere. You see 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, trace gases. I had to break this out of trace gases so you can see it on the chart.

Yet, in my home State of California--where we had CO2-free power plants, two nuclear plants; the second one will be gone in 3 years--they want to remove hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in my district that make zero CO2.

So, is this really about CO2, or is it about some other political agenda? Because in my district, when the wind blows, they have to shut the power off because the trees the Forest Service are not managing might blow into the power lines coming from a hydroelectric dam.

I do not understand what the energy policy of this country is because I don't think there is one anymore. We need to get back to doing what we do well and not pursue this fruitless agenda.

Madam Speaker, I would like to point out to the Members here tonight once again that California had a very devastating fire season last year. The whole Western States of America have.

The Dixie fire alone was nearly 1 million acres in my district. Several other fires add up into the six-digit figures.

What we really need to do is have the United States Forest Service identify a fire within the first 24 hours of when a fire occurs and then pounce on it and put the fire out--no more monitoring fire.

Some other colleagues and I will be looking at legislation to put that in place. We were promised by the Forest Service that would be their policy. We need to enforce that. We need to have that be the dedication they have toward taking care of these Federal lands.

Indeed, there are multi-uses for people, for timber, for preservation. But when they go up in smoke, it just becomes a horrific environmental problem: first, air quality, and then the ash, the silt that is going to wash into our streams and oceans and water storage.

The Forest Service needs to get on the job.

Madam Speaker, I rise during this Special Order to offer thoughts on the real State of the Union.

Last night, the President addressed the Nation and attempted to rewrite the history of his first 14 months in office. The speech was short on solutions to our everyday challenges: record inflation, skyrocketing price of gas, and supply chain disruptions that are affecting everything from food to consumer goods.

This administration owns this energy crisis, which is a direct result of its crippling domestic production. When we don't produce our own energy, it makes us more vulnerable to global market fluctuations such as those caused by the Russian aggressions at Ukraine.

The Biden administration continues to ignore the national emergency at our southern border with unprecedented illegal immigration, millions of apprehensions, and limited deportations. It is a serious situation that continues to threaten our national security.

Let's focus for a moment here on U.S. energy. America's been feeling the ripple of skyrocketing energy prices. The average gallon of gas in my home State of California is up 70 percent from this time last year, and heating our homes is over 30 percent more expensive than winter last year.

Economic sanctions on Russia and the halting of the Nord Stream pipeline are sure to help increase the costs of energy, but they are necessary in order for to us to have independence. This reality will be a wake-up call for the Biden administration to reverse their current course and understand that American-produced energy is the best path forward.

After the President announced further sanctions on Russia due to the unprovoked attack on Ukraine, he promised to supply energy to our European allies that depend on Russian natural gas.

Since his first day in office, he has repeatedly stifled U.S. gas and oil production, increasing our dependence on all things Russian oil.

I am an adamant supporter of domestic oil and gas production, including building new pipelines. Right under our feet lies the largest untapped oil supply in the world, more than enough to drive down costs for American consumers and export liquefied natural gas to our European allies, removing our adversaries like Russia from their supply chain.

In last night's State of the Union, the President called to make Russia suffer

economic consequences for their unprovoked attack. He glossed over that he has repeatedly stifled U.S. energy production, halting the Keystone pipeline and suffocating domestic oil and gas leases.

Unfortunately, he did the opposite. Just this week, he announced he is once again halting all new leases for drilling on our vast Federal lands, which we know how to do well and ecologically soundly. His solution? Import more gas from other adversaries such as China and the Middle East.

Our Nation imports 7 percent of our oil from Russia. Although that may seem like not much, if they shut it off when we are not ready for it, that will cause a big ripple.

We can't just flip a switch and turn on our domestic energy supply. It will take time to do it. We know what we need to do. We need to get at it, to start now.

The American people are being crushed under the weight of these economic consequences from failed policies. We know what we need to do. Let's get after it.

Mr. Speaker, last week, Federal officials announced California water allocations for water year 2022--this one--this spring right now where growers are getting ready to plant--or would be.

Despite their hard work as growers, their productivity and responsibility of feeding the rest of the Nation being on their shoulders, they were put dead last in line for water allocations. That is right. Behind even the mindless dumping of freshwater into our oceans to save nonexistent fish.

Even though California farmers produce most of the Nation's fruit, nut, and vegetable crops, many received zero percent of their allocation--this at a time of many bare store shelves in the grocery stores, this time of crisis of an international proportion where we should be making our own energy and our own food crops.

We are going to become more reliant on imported food if we don't grow this 2022 crop year because we are growing next year's crop right now-- including on my rice farm at home.

These water allocations will indeed have drastic consequences for the farmers, their employees, and the small towns that they populate all up and down California and indeed other States as well.

So growers are at their wit's end. We need President Biden and others to reallocate and prioritize water for farmers, not for fish.

Mr. Speaker, California's high-speed rail has issued a new draft business plan for the year 2022 that was released yesterday. It shows now a new price tag of $105 billion, which is an increase of $5 billion over the last plan we just received not too long ago.

Now, the original price that voters agreed to back in 2008 when it was placed on the ballot in front of them was a $33 billion, not $105 billion, plan.

Notably, it will now install a second rail between the towns of Merced and Bakersfield. Two tracks; two tracks that won't actually travel at high speeds because they can't get up to speed in that amount of distance. Two tracks that will be calling, I guess, ghost passengers for people that aren't going to be using this project anyway between Bakersfield and Merced.

Every transit agency in the country ought to be looking at this plan to see how it works. We need to be building water storage; we need to be spending money on forestry, because our forests burn every year, instead of this boondoggle, which continues to be a rat hole of good money for a project that isn't helping anybody.

Mr. Speaker, in 2021, U.S. drug overdoses due to fentanyl skyrocketed, and it is now reported to be the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45. The leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45 is imported fentanyl, mostly coming across our open southern border.

Instead of combating this epidemic by prosecuting drug traffickers or banning molecularly altered fentanyl substances, the Biden administration is making America's drug problem worse by actually putting crack pipes into the hands of users--crack pipes distributed by the U.S. Government into the hands of drug users. Yes.

This has been already modeled in San Francisco, so I guess we want to do the Californication of the rest of the country with these crazy ideas coming from the Biden administration. Boy, we have gone from just don't do it to, hey, just hand it all out.

It is unbelievable that this is a policy at a time of drug problems in this country skyrocketing, harm coming to people, and the Biden administration wants to hand out free crack pipes in the name, I guess, of racial equity. Unbelievable.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for hosting this Special Order tonight and continuing to keep the effort up to put this in front of the American people and the Congress and the White House.

We have talked a couple times here this evening so far, and this is a statistic that I don't know if it is reaching across to enough people. The leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45 is fentanyl. It isn't car wrecks, it is not gun violence--which is usually people violence it takes people to run a gun, to clear up a term--it is not cancer, not some other form, it is a drug.

So what is this? It really boils down to it is a border problem.

So when the Biden administration decided to have a much more open, hands-off policy on our borders, the opposite of what the Trump Administration had been attempting to do, this problem has been exacerbated. The number of people coming across, some for asylum reasons, others for economic reasons, but the ones that are mixing in, that are coming with them are bringing this stuff with them.

Now, as a Californian we have prime examples of what that looks like on our streets, what it looks like for homelessness and for people literally dying on the street; San Francisco being a shining example of what most cities don't want to be with the problems they have on their streets with homelessness, with drug use, people dying on our streets.

Needle programs. We call it clean needle exchange programs. They are not even exchange programs. Even one of my district towns, Chico, California, a nice town, people bring these needles in. And they don't exchange them, as I mentioned, they just give them out until finally the city council changed, and they have moved in a direction to try and stop this sort of thing. It was killing a small valley town like Chico. And yet our administration is promoting an open border policy that is allowing in this fentanyl.

You heard some of my colleagues tonight talking about how small of an amount it takes to not only negatively affect people, but kill them. It is extremely potent. It doesn't take much of this stuff to cause a death. And it is coming across, pounds and pounds at a time, over our border.

Why are we allowing this to happen? It's coming freely over our borders, distributors without consequence putting it out, harming our people, harming this country.

If my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, if the Democrats, if the White House really cared about the health and safety of the American citizens, they would implement commonsense policies to combat this epidemic, increasing search and seizures at our border, prosecuting traffickers instead of letting them go.

It is just so unbelievable. People come up to me all the time as their Representative ``We just can't believe what is going on in our country lately.'' The prosecution letting people out of prison, right back to offend once again.

And this wide-open border that is just an open conduit to so much harm from terrorism. They picked up five Syrians the other day. It isn't just people coming from Central America wanting a better life or reuniting families when you have single young men coming across the border. This is a fraud that is being committed against the American people here, and fentanyl is just one example of harming not just economically but our open border, and so many people with an illegal drug because we have a terrible policy.

Our border control folks are so demoralized by what is going on here, and so are the people of this country. We have many crises these days, but this is one of the worst because we are losing the identity of our country with what has been going on.

President Biden's team needs to get on the job here and enforce our border and not allow this poison to keep coming across.

Madam Speaker, this last week, a 13-year-old young man was verbally berated in his school classroom in Grass Valley, California, in my district, by a substitute math teacher, all because he was wearing a mask that had the thin blue line on it, which is known all over the country and internationally as being the one symbol that supports law enforcement.

The flag--it is an American flag adapted to that--is a sign that just shows support for our law enforcement, who we know protect us from chaos and anarchy, and they help uphold ideals of justice, freedom, bravery, and solidarity.

The boy's father and stepmother are members of law enforcement, so it is natural that he would be wearing that mask, not only in general for law enforcement but for his parents. Then we have a grown adult in a classroom setting who attacks this boy because he says he wants to compare this to the new Confederate flag. It is ridiculous. He berated a child.

We are all raised to respect law enforcement, and this is what is going on in the classroom. I commend the school district for not bringing that substitute teacher back anymore.

Hang in there young man and your parents.

Mr. Speaker, under recent comments President Biden made about his first year, he talked about under-promising and over- delivering.

Given what the year looks like, please, Mr. President, under-deliver.

Mr. Speaker, our country has seen unprecedented crisis and record inflation, supply chain disruptions, price surges, gas and energy costs going through the roof, food supply shortages, empty shelves everywhere, higher prices.

Unfortunately, the failures of Biden's first year in office isn't limited to just the United States alone. No, he hastily evacuated our troops from Afghanistan, leaving behind as many as 14,000 U.S. citizens and legal residents and friends, as well as billions of dollars of countless weapons of ours that have fallen into the hands of the Taliban. So over 20 years of a record of Taliban and they get all these weapons to use against us or our friends in the neighborhood.

If this is not bad enough, the administration is now proposing to send over $300 million in foreign aid, basically, to the Taliban regime to do all the great things they have been doing. People in Afghanistan do need help, but we know the funds or food we send over there will go straight into the wrong hands.

We need to have a better chain of supply to help them than what the Biden administration is proposing. The nonprofit rescue group known as Save Our Allies has been working tirelessly to rescue those left behind by President Biden's disaster over there. They warn that the funds and supplies will not go into the hands of the average Afghan but, instead, straight into the hands of the Taliban. We need to rethink this.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend and colleague from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) for being a stalwart leader on this ever since I have been involved in this. I appreciate him for being courageous and strong on defending life.

Mr. Speaker, as we know, in the 49 years since the Supreme Court codified Roe v. Wade, the science behind pregnancy and its diagnosis, so to speak, has advanced exponentially. We know this year the Supreme Court will rule on a case called Dobbs v. Jackson to decide on limiting abortion access to 15 weeks of pregnancy.

As if there has been any doubt, really, of what a pregnancy means commonsense-wise, that it is a child developing--not a blob, a tissue mass, a clump of cells, or a baby giraffe. No, it is a human being.

Medical advancements like ultrasounds since that decision 49 years ago, prenatal surgeries, all these have shown the humanity of the unborn, which points to the value of life from the moment of conception, from that flash of light.

By 15 weeks in the womb, babies have fully developed hearts, can taste, can make facial expressions, and can feel pain. With today's medical advancements, a baby can survive outside the womb, incredibly, at 22 weeks and, in

some cases, even earlier with aggressive care and maybe a little bit of luck and God's blessing.

Roe v. Wade allows a baby to be born as late as 28 weeks. At 28 weeks, a baby is a living, breathing, developed person with thoughts and a future. We need revisions to Roe v. Wade. The future of our Nation, its morality, its outlook, it depends on it. Abortion is a gruesome act that destroys families, harms women's health, mentally and physically, and takes the life of the innocent.

I will always fight for the unborn, the sanctity of life, and our traditional family values this country is founded upon. It is truly a cornerstone, and it is abhorrent that lives like this can be taken needlessly when we have so many remedies.

Madam Speaker, concerned parents have a God-given right to make decisions for their child's best interests, not the Federal Government, the Biden administration, or teachers' unions.

Yet, Education Secretary Cardona colluded with private parties to get the FBI to investigate concerned parents and worked with the National School Boards Association to brand the concerned parents involved as domestic terrorists.

In the infamous letter which the Secretary solicited from the National School Boards Association, he suggested using the PATRIOT Act and that the FBI should begin investigating concerned parents at school board meetings. The letter had nothing to do with curriculum. The topic was how to vilify and target parents that disagreed with the narrative.

Secretary Cardona has repeatedly denied involvement in the letter, but recently released documents have exposed the truth. These actions show a clear pattern that puts politics over the interests of the parents and especially their children and their education.

Parents are right to be concerned about their kids being taught radical ideologies or being exposed to inappropriate materials. Every parent in the Nation, regardless of ideology, should be alarmed that the Federal Government is trying to strip away their rights and use these underhanded methods to try to silence them.

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, Mr. Johnson. I appreciate this Special Order.

Of course, this week does mark the first year of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, it was one of unprecedented crisis. Indeed, it is a target-rich environment for us to talk about here tonight.

Democrats have controlled the executive branch and both Chambers of Congress, allowing them to pass, so far, $2 trillion out of their $9 trillion plans. This act has also caused the highest inflation in decades, hitting the middle-class and lower income class hardest in this country.

This year, under Democrat leadership, Americans are paying more for just about everything, from housing, clothes, food, and gas--especially in energy. On the way to the airport in California, it was $5-plus, $5.39 at one place. Incredible.

In the dead of winter, people are seeing the cost of heating their homes skyrocket. When you stop all sorts of development of energy in this country, you are not going to have the supply. That sends a signal to the whole market to raise prices, including the Biden administration telling OPEC overseas to go ahead and send us more while cutting off our own pipelines and further development on Federal lands. This, of course, ripples through everything else in costs.

In my real life as a farmer, we are going to see our costs of energy--whether it is diesel fuel, gasoline, fertilizer--skyrocket. That is either going to have to be passed along to the consumer at the store or farmers go broke in this country. Small business owners face the same thing.

Everything is going up--more in costs, vaccine mandates, less employees. I mean, I wish we could paint a brighter picture and not have it appear to be a partisan one. It really isn't partisan. It is about having success as a country.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration doesn't seem to have a clue what that success would look like. Indeed, they are chasing their own mandates, putting us in a terrible position as a people and for the economy going forward. They need to change their thinking, or the voters need to change them out.

Madam Speaker, we have a lot of lofty goals in this country about green energy, renewable energy, and such. But we are not providing the ways in order to get there.

One of the important components is the mined products that we need to go into various equipment and vehicles, et cetera. We are not able to mine the critical minerals, the rare earths in this country.

For example, to get a permit to open a type of mine or expand a mine, it could be 15, 16, 18 years in this country while our neighbors just north of the border, a 2- or 3-year process to secure the permits to mine products that are desperately needed in this country if we are ever going to talk about meeting the goals you would have for renewable energy, electric cars, and all that in order to lower the carbon footprint.

So what is the hypocrisy here? In my home State of California, you can hardly get mining done. You can hardly even keep electricity flowing because of taking away power plants due to--those are power plants that would be zero CO2. I don't understand the hypocrisy. So we have to get smart about this.

Mr. Speaker, many areas in northern California and across my district have seen record snowfall due to recent winter storms. That is good in a lot of ways, but we have seen that tens of thousands of residents have been without power for several weeks in freezing temperatures, and our Governor has banned the use of gas- powered generators as a heat and electricity source.

Meanwhile, those who do still have power face all-time high energy costs as they try to heat their homes, thanks to President Biden's anti-domestic energy policies.

On President Biden's first day of office, he canceled the Keystone pipeline, effectively killing 11,000 American energy jobs and stopping new exploration for oil, which has driven up energy prices and increased our dependence on foreign oil from China, Russia, and the Middle East.

The cost of having our homes heated has increased 30 percent since last winter, and more than one in four Americans reported they were forced to forgo other basic expenses to pay their energy bill in this last year.

Under the climate agenda President Biden has, gas prices are up nearly 60 percent. The cost of propane, kerosene, firewood, and energy are all up over 30 percent from this time last year.

We must reverse these damaging and unnecessary policies and reduce our reliance on foreign oil before more harm can be done to the American people and our economy.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize a great American hero, World War II triple ace fighter pilot and a man I am lucky to know and call a friend, Colonel Bud Anderson.

Colonel Anderson will be turning 100 on January 13, just a few days from now.

Bud is a California native, born in Oakland, California, and he grew up on a farm near Newcastle in Placer County in north California. He learned to fly when he was only 19 years old and joined the U.S. Army as an aviation cadet shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Bud was decorated 25 times during his successful 30-year military career. He is the highest scoring living U.S. fighter ace and the only surviving U.S. triple ace.

Bud has certainly impacted me and my staff as a friend and as a person in the community in Placer County with his leadership and his all-around kindness as a person of such heroic status.

I met him over a decade ago and had a chance to do various events with him, including a statue dedication for him. I watched him receive the Congressional Gold Medal as an elite group of American fighter aces. One of my favorite memories was with him at an air show when a P- 51 Mustang, which he flew in World War II in Europe, flew by. Really, it is the sound of freedom.

Congratulations and happy birthday, Colonel Bud. God bless you.