Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to the Department of Defense's vaccine mandate.

My district is home to the Sierra Army Depot in Lassen County, which uses a large contingent of civilian military contractors. Sierra Army Depot repairs equipment, salvages old tanks and armored carriers for platforms that are still serviceable.

Over the past year, the depot has served as the Army's global storage and distribution center for COVID-19 testing kits and personal protective equipment. As a Nation, we leaned on the Sierra Army Depot, and other similar ones around the country, to protect our servicemembers while they were busy protecting us. They put it on the line during the worst of the pandemic and didn't question it.

Now, the Biden administration is planning to fire hundreds of these contractors because they have not made the personal choice to be vaccinated with emergency-use vaccines, two of which are still under emergency-use authorization.

After a year, putting the weight of the Army on this workforce, asking them to work overtime and get the job done, and take the risks we did not know about a year and a half ago, the President is going to fire them? Is that really the kind of message we want to send to our military?

Mr. Speaker, today I rise in actually complete outrage at the unbelievable consideration that the Biden administration is putting forward of--get this--awarding $450,000 per person to illegal immigrants that have broken our laws in this country.

$450,000. How is it even rational that someone who took an illegal action in order to get to our soil, how can that lead to an outcome where the perpetrator would receive a $450,000 payday?

There are American citizens whose families don't even make half a million dollars in 10 years. The President doesn't even make $450,000 a year.

We have already seen that illegal immigrants use children basically as shields--not even their own children--to avoid deportation in order to come across the border.

Democrats in Congress are trying their best to give illegal immigrants citizenship, and the White House wants to give them a very large check.

When I see proposals like this, I have to ask: Whose side are they on? It certainly doesn't look like this administration is on the side of the hardworking American citizens who are trying to make ends meet, put their kids through school, pay their bills, when they hand out $450,000 checks to people who came here illegally.

Mr. Speaker, as with any massive spending package, the Democrats' $3.5 trillion--it may be getting smaller--reconciliation bill does have some good items in it that we could agree on in a better package, such as critically important disaster relief funds for fires, flood, and other recovery efforts.

Unfortunately, tucked amongst this are some necessary programs but also attempts by the Democrats to once again circumvent the Hyde amendment, originally passed in the House in 1976, and which would force American taxpayers to fund elective abortions.

In the reconciliation bill, there are millions of dollars worth of public health grants not Hyde-protected. This bill also mandates abortion coverage in the Affordable Care Act for plans covering individuals above the poverty line.

Additionally, it sets aside $1.75 billion for public health activities that would allow the CDC to construct facilities that perform elective abortion and trains others to do so.

If this bill is adopted as currently written, violating the Hyde amendment, all Americans will have to pay for abortions regardless of their State's policies or their own moral or religious convictions.

Madam Speaker, it is an honor today to highlight the work of Senator K. Maurice Johannessen in northern California who is still working hard at helping our veterans.

He was born in Norway many years ago, emigrated to the United States, and joined the Army in 1953 during the Korean war, serving our Nation for over 12 years. In 1960 Senator Johannessen moved to Redding, California, where he met his wife, Marianne, and raised a family.

After several years in local government, he was elected to the California State Senate where he remained for 9 years. In the State senate, he chaired the Senate Veterans Committee and authored over 47 veterans' bill and notably created the Northern California Veterans Cemetery in Igo, California, and five new veterans homes around the United States. Noticing his commitment to improving support for veterans, in 2002 Governor Grey Davis appointed him Secretary of the California Department of Veterans Affairs.

Upon retiring from the senate, Senator Johannessen didn't stop serving our region. He is still using his own resources and community support to get a veterans memorial chapel and a state-of-the-art veterans medical clinic in Shasta County.

On behalf of northern California, I appreciate Senator Johannessen's service, and I want to thank him for all his devotion to our region.

Madam Speaker, I just wanted to point out, as a result of the over 2 million acres of fire that have happened in California, the next thing that happens is when the winter comes, and the rains come--like we are having so much now--the deluge of rain caused after the forest fires because of unmanaged forests the erosion that we are seeing here.

This example here is Highway 70 running through Butte County and Plumas County. The rockslide you see here is part of the fire scar. So when we lose all that foliage, you get erosion.

What does erosion mean? Not just the highway being closed, but this washes into, in this case Feather River, on down into Lake Oroville, which is a water source for 25 million people in California.

So why is this important? Because we have to do a much better job of managing our Federal forests, our Federal lands, and we are not doing that. We are not doing it speedily enough because we have so much to catch up on, yet every year millions of acres of forest land burn. This is just one of the results here.

The lost transportation. The water quality that affects so many people is going to be negatively affected by this lack of action. We need the Forest Service to move rapidly towards not only mitigating the fires from this year with erosion, but also manage these lands so we don't have these horrific fires.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with bittersweet sentiments.

I recognize the departure of my legislative assistant, Riley Scott, of Petaluma, California, to an amazing, new adventure.

Riley has been, in addition to her strong work in my office for 2 years, a lifetime swimmer and received a full ride out of high school to USC where she won several PAC-12 championships and competed at the top level in the NCAA's.

I point out this impressive record because Riley's new opportunity will be competing to represent our country in the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Riley will be training for the women's pentathlon, which consists of, of course, swimming, horsemanship, a combination of running, pistol shooting, and fencing.

Now, I told Riley that there is a lot of fencing around our ranch that needed to be repaired, but she said that wasn't the same thing.

I told Riley early on if she ever had this type of opportunity post college, she had to go out and take that chance and do it, and so she is.

It is a loss for our office and here in Congress, but watch as Riley goes for the gold as Californians are known to do.

Fight on to victory, Riley Coyote.

Madam Speaker, any trust that Dr. Fauci might have gained over the course of the pandemic is now completely out the window. He must resign and his case be referred for prosecution for perjury.

For the past year and a half, critical decisions for the whole country have hinged off of Dr. Fauci's advice and decrees. Two Presidents have used his advice as the basis for our Nation's response to COVID-19. Yet, here we have clear proof that he has been intentionally lying to Congress.

How can any American trust his judgment or that he will tell them the truth when he can look Members of Congress in the eye and boldly lie about the gain-of-function research?

Dr. Fauci has repeatedly testified in the House and Senate that the National Institutes of Health did not fund research that was gain of function, and he had a heated exchange over the specific claim with Senator Rand Paul.

The NIH notified Congress that it was aware, as of 2018 and 2020, that EcoHealth Alliance did conduct gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. This research was not allowed under the grant's rules.

EcoHealth Alliance had also sought a grant from DARPA in 2018 but was denied funding because they were worried that it might be potentially gain-of-function research.

Dr. Fauci must resign and must be prosecuted.

Mr. Speaker, the Biden proposed surveillance scheme is an ill-advised power grab, which is turning trusted local financial institutions into IRS reporting agents infringing upon the privacy of everyday Americans.

The IRS already knows how much you earn. Now they want to know exactly how you spend it. This is a total breach of personal financial privacy with a presumption of guilt that I am not okay with.

How can we expect our citizens to place trust in their government when their government is keeping tabs on their every single transaction?

A lot of people wonder how people come to Congress and become millionaires while they are serving in Congress.

This is just another push by the government to exercise control over our everyday lives. It is also a disincentive for people to save and keep money in banks and credit unions because they don't want to have every single thing tracked. Do we want to have our savings kept in coffee cans or mattresses? That is a pretty bad way to go.

Whether it is $600 per transaction or up to $10,000 per year cumulative, it is an invasion of privacy. We don't need another 80,000 IRS agents tracking us when we have a border that is like a sieve and other problems of much greater magnitude than what you or I are saving or spending our personal wealth on.

It is a wrongheaded policy. The Biden administration and this House needs to take back such ideas.

Madam Speaker, historically, under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, covered employers were required to maintain an annual log of all work-related illnesses and injuries.

An illness or injury is recordable if it is work-related, a new case, and the incident involves days away from work or medical treatment beyond first aid, among other things.

On May 21, OSHA changed these requirements. This new OSHA policy effectively removes legal liability from employers that require a vaccine at least through May 2022. Now, if a worker decides to get a vaccine to keep their job and experiences an adverse reaction, the employer is not responsible for this injury.

OSHA stated it changed this requirement only because they do not want to give any suggestion of discouraging workers from receiving the COVID-19 vaccinations or to disincentivize employers' vaccination efforts.

Why are they trying to hide statistics related to the vaccine? While this policy change appears to be a mere sidenote for OSHA's lengthy guidelines, we have to ask President Biden and OSHA: Why is the ethical burden on the workers and not on the government?

Madam Speaker, today marks exactly 9 months in of the Biden administration. The motto was Build Back Better. So, where do we stand? What have we built back better on behalf of the real American people out there?

He talked about unity in his inauguration speech. It only seems to be that he has unified the American people in anger at the cost of doing business. Everything has gone up for American families, as you see from this chart here.

In my home State of California, everything is going up. We see fuel. We heard the national average is $3.30. In my home State, it is anywhere from $4.20 to $5. Now, it is not the rest of the country's problem how the State runs itself, but it kind of underlines that we have big problems.

What is the focus going to be? The Biden administration is going to make it where farming in California is even more difficult. We are going to have fewer of the crops California grows, therefore driving inflation even more on everything when these crops have to be replaced with foreign imports.

I mean, come on. The inflation is being caused by this government, when you pull just $4 trillion or $5 trillion of spending out of midair. Now they are threatening to have tax increases on certain people, whether it is corporations or the rich or whoever. But then they back off on that, and they say no tax increases on those under $400,000.

It is going to be impossible to pay for this without doing that. Show us how you are going to do it. The inflation is going to kill the American worker, especially middle- and lower-income folks.

It is irresponsible what is going on. Just throwing these terms, trillions of spending--stimulus spending is basically what it is because it isn't infrastructure. Trying to sneak it through in budget reconciliation by getting a mere 50 votes over in the Senate is really a sleight of hand that is going to hurt this country.

This country is already hurting compared to a year, year and a half ago, the way our economy is right now, our energy reliability, our food reliability. You want to talk supply chain? All the ships are sitting off California, waiting to be unloaded.

There is one thing about it: If we were building it here, if we were producing it here, manufacturing it here, we wouldn't have to be worried about unloading ships. But when you chase the jobs out of the country with horrendous regulations and the taxation

that is going to be upon business, farmers, timber fallers, you don't get a good result.

The Biden administration needs to take a real good hard look at how economics actually work and quit doing this to the American people because, I will tell you what, we are not going to have much left after 4 years of all this.

I appreciate my friend here from Louisiana trying to bring this to the American people with the time here tonight on seeing how this 9 months in of the Biden administration is costing and hurting regular Americans.

Madam Speaker, this debt ceiling increase being contemplated isn't just about paying off things we have already committed for. It is actually a blank check for unlimited spending until December of 2022.

Our collective national debt is somewhere around $28 trillion now, or about $85,000 per person. Every American.

Now, in 2013 the lie of the year was named, ``If you like your health plan, you can keep it.'' In the Biden campaign, it was, ``Nobody making under $400,000 would have their taxes raised, period.'' That is setting up to be the next lie of the year.

The effects we see of this legislation will be 5 percent of taxpayers earning between $40,000 and $50,000 and 59 percent of those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 would be affected greatly by increased taxes.

Let that sink in. The President's plan will raise taxes on people making as low as $40,000, not the $400,000 he promised.

We should be talking about hard caps on spending and getting our fiscal house in order instead of spending on the Green New Deal that is coming up.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to point out to the American public and my colleagues in this Chamber and the U.S. Forest Service, the extreme importance of all the fire devastation we have had in Northern California and the need to immediately get upon the effort to cover up the erosion that we are going to have there.

We need to mitigate the erosion that has a great potential to be there. This fire here, the Dixie fire--currently almost put out--has reached, finally, nearly a million acres, on top of the fire last year and another 2 years before that.

We have over 1.5 million acres that have burned and are now a repository for ash and erosion that is going to affect what is known as the Feather River watershed, an extremely important watershed to the California State Water Project whose customers number about 25 million people in California, as well as much of agriculture.

We need that erosion control to happen immediately, especially on the heels of the Beckwourth fire, the Dixie fire, so that we don't have our streams, our rivers, our lakes, plugged up with ash, with soil that makes it impossible for our water supply this coming year to be delivered to people in agriculture.

Madam Speaker, the other day, we saw the press secretary for President Biden, Jen Psaki. She was complaining and tired of Republicans talking about the border and not having any ideas.

Well, we have ideas. They don't always get publicized. Here are some of them right here: enforce our laws; enforce our laws as written; complete the border fence and complete all border construction; the remain in Mexico policy, why don't we reinstate that? It worked pretty well without people rushing the border before.

Require negative COVID tests before entering our country. Wouldn't that be something since we are telling all of our citizens we have to do the same to go to a simple thing like a restaurant or a ballpark?

Maybe we could shut off the green light inviting people and sending people the message, incentivizing the dangerous trek to come to America.

Lastly, stop the benefits from hardworking U.S. taxpayers. Stop promising amnesty, tax remittances, healthcare, and sanctuary cities to illegal immigrants.

These are the messages Republicans have been conveying all along, so I invite Jen Psaki to listen up.

Madam Speaker, while climate catastrophists claim that our climate is less livable than ever because of fossil fuels, it is actually more livable than ever, thanks to our fossil fuel powered climate protection systems.

When you hear the scary claims about a climate crisis, keep in mind that climate catastrophists, or alarmists as they are now known, have been claiming climate crisis for about 40 years.

If America tries to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use through a Green New Deal or Biden climate plan, we will not prevent a crisis. We will cause a crisis by making energy completely unreliable and unaffordable for American industry and American consumers, especially the middle- income and lower income folks.

Now, what isn't pointed out very often in all this talk about carbon dioxide being a pollutant is that carbon dioxide is 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. Most people think it is some big number like 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of our atmosphere. Nitrogen, number one, is 78 percent; oxygen, number two, 21 percent. CO2 is not even in third place. Argon is, 0.93 of 1 percent.

Some of these pie charts you would look at on the internet would have carbon dioxide mixed in with other trace gases--other, okay?

So, we are at 0.04 percent. It is an extremely small amount of our atmosphere. Now, you would think, again, with the alarmism going on, that it is a high percentage that is poisoning all of us. Carbon is a building block of most of what we have on this planet, carbon life forms, right?

We are chasing down this path, I think, because of an agenda that is a lot different than the climate itself, especially when you see the folks that are pushing it the hardest still flying to all their Paris rallies and this and that in private jets, not living their lives any different, other than what normal people do.

Coming back to the fossil fuel portion of it, it would be worth it, so the alarmists say, to lower CO2 levels and avoid a crisis. But the U.S. causes less than one-sixth of all global emissions, and that number is even going lower.

President Trump pulled us out of the Paris accord, yet the United States is still leading the way on lowering its CO2 production anyway. It has a lower net number than before, without an accord. The other countries in the developing world, in the Third World, in the Eastern Bloc, whatever, are still increasing their numbers, building new coal-powered plants in China--one a week, some crazy number like that.

We are supposed to adhere to that in this country and curb our production and curb our economy, even though we are leading the way in cleaner technology, cleaner-burning automobiles and trucks, cleaner- burning power plants.

It is so crazy that in my home State of California, for example, when we look at the type of electricity production that comes from green power sources, the environmentalists are trying to get rid of them. We had two nuclear-powered plants in California. They already closed one, San Onofre, down by San Diego, and then one in San Luis Obispo. Those two themselves are responsible, at their peak production, for somewhere around 16, 18, even 20 percent of the whole grid of California. Imagine knocking out 20 percent of the grid in that short amount of time and trying to replace it with more politically correct green power.

It is hard to get the permits to do the politically correct green power, such as making tens of thousands of acres covered with solar cells or windmills, but nonetheless, we are hellbent on that direction.

At the same time, they want to get rid of the use of natural gas and propane to power people's stoves, power people's water heaters, things like that, and have them go electric. They are hellbent on changing cars into being electric powered by 2035, no more combustion engine cars, all because of this 0.04 percent.

What are we doing here? It is a political agenda.

Indeed, every committee in this new Congress has to spend a good portion of their time not talking about whether it is childcare, agriculture, or finance. They have to run it all through a climate change filter before we can move on to the work that needs to be done.

Coming back to California, we sometimes have public safety power shutoffs, they call it, because we have an issue of trees that might fall onto power lines or branches that the wind might catch and blow into power lines. Right here is an example of three fires that have happened in northern California in the last couple of years.

This one here is the current Dixie fire. I am using an older poster, because I am cheap, but this is now, instead of 100,000 acres, a million acres. It would come all the way up here past Mount Lassen.

What is the CO2 equation here of unmanaged forests? We need to manage

forests, so we don't make all the CO2 and have all the fire and soot and ash that blows all the way back to the East Coast. This CO2 this is deceptive, and we need to think differently.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Missouri for yielding.

I would like to use this time to highlight a concern that pops up when we are debating bills that pay for water storage and conveyance in the Western United States, especially given the severity of the drought we face.

Often my colleagues, understandably, wonder why the Federal Government is still helping fund the California water system. Why California water? It is rather simple. Our 77,000 farms and ranches top the production charts in at least 77 different goods, from dairy to fruits to vegetables.

California is actually the only producer of almonds, artichokes, celery, figs, garlic, raisins, kiwis, honeydew, nectarines, olives, cling peaches, pistachios, plums, sweet rice, and walnuts in the United States. If it isn't made there, you are not going to get it from this country; it will be imported.

This incredible system was set up as a partnership between the Federal and State governments. Although $1 billion in this program is a decent start, when we are talking $100 billion to keep supporting the high-speed rail boondoggle in California, we see our priorities are misplaced.

More money needs to be put in for water storage to help all Americans and less for all these other things that do not help.