Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, the Communist Party is afraid. They are seeing their ideas collapse. They are seeing that people will no longer wait for the countless empty promises of the Castro years to be fulfilled.

This is why we are seeing thousands of unarmed protesters being arrested, beaten, and killed all across the island of Cuba.

If the Communist Party of Cuba had their way, if they were successful in blocking the communications of their people as they intended to do with their power outages and censorship, then we wouldn't even be able to see these abuses.

Cuba's Communist Government has had 62 years to prove that it could provide health, housing, education, work, food, and security to its people. Instead, we see buildings collapsing on the heads of Cuban citizens. We see that the government provided food full of gravel. We see security forces firing live rounds into crowds that are not allowed to be armed.

The White House needs to act soon to help the Cuban people organize and communicate freely, and let the rest of the world know what is really happening only 90 miles from our border.

Where is the United Nations?

I call on President Biden to unblock and expand uncensored internet access. We have the technology to do it now and guarantee cellular service to their island.

The embargo is not the problem. People need to be liberated. They are political prisoners. Provide independent and free press.

Madam Speaker, which of these do the Cuban people not deserve?

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to see that this week we are taking up H.R. 678, the PHONE Act.

This bipartisan piece of legislation is common sense and helps real people after natural disasters.

This bill would place a moratorium on phone companies reassigning people's landline phone numbers when their house is destroyed by a natural disaster, such as forest fires, which I am having so many of in my district.

I have heard countless stories of people whose houses are burned down in wildfires that continue to get charged for their landline phone number, or their number is reassigned to a new customer.

This bill would help alleviate some stress and give people one less thing they have to deal with.

I am proud to cosponsor a bill that is stepping up and providing a solution to help out wildfire victims and other natural disaster victims.

The goal of recovery is to bring back a sense of normalcy, and helping people maintain their phone number is a good step.

Madam Speaker, I want to speak with the body here about the situation in the West with wildfire and drought.

As so many of you know from the news, there is wildfire breaking out all over in the western States. My home State of California has several going on right now. I represent the very north part of the State, the First Congressional District, and we have fires routinely reaching now the five-digit mark, including the newest one known as the Dixie fire; it is over 30,000 acres. My understanding is, there are 11,000 new acres just last night burning up in the area of Feather River Canyon.

But this is not, unfortunately, news this time of year in the West. Anything west of the Rocky Mountains pretty much seems to be on the line.

What is going on is that for many years we in this country value the Smokey the Bear principle of putting out fires when they occur in the forest. And I think we still do value that. But what we haven't done on the back side of that is to manage our forest lands.

And so what we have seen in the decades since, a good-minded policy, a good-intended policy, is that the forests have built up so much fuel. So much damage gets done from all this fuel being built up from fire season. It kind of creates its own drought situation inside the forest there when you have more inventory per acre than what the forest can sustain, especially during a drought period. And so in the West, in California, it is known you are going to have drought years, you're going to have wet years. And it kind of goes with the program there.

So I am disturbed that we can't advance the ball more on really the type of forest management we need to be doing. We can sustain X amount of trees per acre, and this is depending on tree type, tree age, particular landscape, the particular weather pattern in a micro area, but if we are not doing that then we are going to see this year after year.

So the U.S. Forest Service has kind of transitioned from--not that many years ago--about one-third of their budget would go for fire suppression and two-thirds for the good green work we call it, green harvest, permits, maintenance of forest roads and all the other things you do in the off season in order to make the asset protected from fire and also usable to the people, Because this is indeed the people's asset. And they are getting less and less access to it because of fire, but also just flat being closed down because of other environmental concerns that have been brought up.

That is a key part of the argument here is that we have had hundreds of thousands of acres burned. I will just stick with California for a moment here. And simple projects after the fact when we are talking salvage, salvage timber that needs to be removed after a fire, if you do that within a reasonably soon amount of time after a fire then you can still get value out of that timber. If you do it soon. No more than a year would be ideal.

But what happens is that when Forest Service goes to try and contract or do some of the work post fire to remove trees that will be dead or are already dead but still have a salvage value, you can make a timber product out of that, they get sued. The environmental groups come in and sue them saying, oh, we think you are going to take away habitat for the black-backed woodpecker or something like that. And indeed, what has already happened is the environment has already been ruined for quite a few years where the spotted owl might have been, where other owls might have been, or other wildlife had been.

You should see some of the horrific pictures of how the wildlife is affected in a fire like this. And these are not just a slow-moving fire, but these conflagrations that we have these days that move from treetop to treetop across the whole landscape.

And one of the saddest stories you will see is a rancher just right in my home county of Butte on the east side who wrote the story about how their family had been there for at least five generations and long- time ranchers there, and a fire whipped through there and took out so many of their livestock, but also the legacy, the land that they love has been ruined by fire in eastern Butte County, California, last year.

So what are we going to do? Are we going to continue to watch this go on year after year after year?

I have run legislation to try and make it just a little bit simpler to do basic, I think, commonsense idea of trimming around power lines, moving hazardous trees and foliage away from power lines. But that means you are going to have to cut some trees. That

means you are going to have to do some trimming. You are going to have to do some actual work. The environmental groups even sue over that.

I am hearing reports that one of the latest fires might have been where a hazardous tree fell into a power line. Why can't we create a zone around all power lines? The lines are already there--it is not like we are putting in new ones--to make it where there is enough distance around power lines so that if a tree does fall, it doesn't fall into them, and you get two bad things: a fire and blackouts.

So we will continue in Congress here to try and legislate that way. And I want to convince my colleagues on both sides of the aisle that this is very important, because we are losing millions of acres every year to wildfire, losing millions of acres of habitat for wildlife, millions of acres of wood products. As you see with wood products, spiraling--through the roof. It has added $30,000 to $40,000 easily to the cost of a new home because of the high cost of wood products. Anybody that has been to any of the vendors to buy a piece of plywood or two-by-four, it affects everybody. It isn't just those building homes.

I mean think about the folks that need--for other disasters, our friends that have to suffer hurricanes down there. Where do they get the plywood to be able to board up for that? We have to produce these products. We have to produce them domestically. We can't import everything in this country.

In my real life, I am a farmer. And we can't continue to have the situation where we are going to rely on imported food or somehow replace our wood products. For some reason, the United States is the number two importer of wood of all countries. Why are we importing wood when we have so much of an overload and over-inventory in our western States? So we should be employing our people and getting that material out.

Now, people are going to be fearful that, Oh, you are talking about clear-cutting. No, it isn't clear-cutting. That is the first thing they want to ask you when you have a press conference or something about it: ``So you want to clear-cut everything.'' No. We do this in zones. We do this with thinning. You do areas where you might do a 30-acre spot but then you plant it back, especially on private land. And you can tell what the private land is versus the Federal land that is basically almost not managed by flying over it after a fire or especially 5 years after a fire when you can see the checkerboard pattern you find so frequently of land ownership in forested areas. The private lands have already reclaimed. They have already salvaged. They have already started planting back. You can see the green; you can see order coming back to those forests there.

In the Federal land, you can still see the same snags. The same ghost trees--they call them--are there, left behind to--who knows when they will ever get around to it.

And what does that mean? It propagates the next fire, the next time lightning strikes, or the next flame blows through, or the next time there might be some kind of an accident.

So I really, really want to get the attention of my colleagues here in Congress, those that regulate the forest, those in the U.S. Forest Service, and those of the American people, their attention to what is going on, because this is not sustainable. It is not good. It is not good for anything I have talked about with wildlife, the asset the American people own in these Federal lands.

And we must do something to address some things that might be inconvenient: cutting some trees--not all of the trees--you might have control burns during the correct time of the year to get rid of some of the slash. But on the positive side, why aren't we using this biomass, taking this wooded material out here that doesn't turn into a two-by- four or baseball bat, or what have you, and turning that into something useful that we can use to generate electricity.

Heaven knows, we don't have an oversupply of electricity generated in California. We even saw Texas was a problem last winter. So we are going to need to develop these sources, and that means jobs in these rural communities, jobs cleaning up the forests, any dependable 24/7 electricity supply because you could control the fuel. Solar, you don't control the fuel. You have to have a sunny day without clouds or have it not be nighttime.

The wind machines, you can't control them either. 24/7 fuel sources, whether it is hydro, whether it is new, whether it is natural gas, or biomass using these wooded products, we need to use for something positive anyway, we need to put them to work so we have a stable grid.

Heaven knows, with all the new demands that are being made by environmental-minded people on more electric cars, getting rid of gas stoves, getting rid of gas water heaters--all for electricity. Where is all this electricity going to come from? We can be generating it with things that come from our forests with these byproducts, so we need to be putting them to work.

So I just implore everybody that has a role in making a decision around here, in Congress, with our Federal agencies, environmental groups, could you please back off a little bit and let some of this good work happen. And the American people, listen to what we are talking about and encourage those folks that may be timid or not inclined to want to do the type of forest management, encourage your Member of Congress this has got to be done, because this air quality affects all the west. Last year, some of it even blew back all the way to the East Coast from fires that were happening in California and the West. So we can do a heck of a lot better.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the time here tonight. I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Comer), my good colleague.

In Recognition of John ``Bam'' Carney

Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Comer for his tribute to the good people of Kentucky and the service you do there. They are served well by him and the work he does here in Washington, D.C.

Madam Speaker, I would like to resume for a few moments to what I was mentioning beforehand on forestry and the effects on our natural resources. Year after year, as I was mentioning, there are tens and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of acres of wildfire affecting our habitat and air quality. What I didn't get to touch on was water quality as well.

You will find, when you burn these mountainsides, you burn those slopes, and indeed, with so much inventory on hand there of trees per acre and brush and other dead vegetative materials, when this all burns, it burns catastrophically. In a lot of cases, you get a moonscape that is left behind. With that, there is a great amount of ash and other material that, because it is on a mountainside and hillside, it eventually is picked up by the next rainfall and/or snowpack and washes down the whole watershed into our brooks, creeks, streams, rivers, and, eventually, the lakes that we have.

This also creates a toxic environment, when you have that much ash material going down and almost actually plugging the lakes, for example.

I talked to folks in the hydroelectric business there. With all that ash and soil erosion--really, the soil erosion is a big, big part of that, too--they have to go in and clear the bottom of the lakes in some cases to keep their hydro projects running. Otherwise, you have less and less electricity being generated and the cost of all that to the taxpayers and to those water rights holders, et cetera.

When we talk about wildfire in the West, it isn't just, yes, we lost a few trees and some deer got burned, some mountain lions and bear, and all that, which is all really important, but there is a lot more than meets the eye with all this.

If we talk about the electricity grid for a moment, if the hydroelectric plants can't operate--and we are already stretched the way we are for electricity in the country and in the West because the shift has been pushed, with so much emphasis on doing it all with solar or wind power because we want to fulfill these renewable ideals. They are fine. They are fine in their own segment, what have you, but they are not fulfilling that big of a percentage of our grid yet.

We are still reliant upon a big part of our grid coming even as legacy from coal, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear. We are not just going to replace that overnight, and we are not going to do it, certainly, cost-effectively with these expensive forms of electricity.

Everything still needs to remain on the table. It is very important that we are domestically in charge of our electricity generation, our energy, and our energy policy not relying on imported.

The wildfire effects do have a wide ripple across a lot of our lives. It gets back to: Are we going to manage our forests, or are we going to watch them burn?

Manage it means jobs for us. It means wood products that are grown domestically, paper products. Heaven knows, we use plenty of paper around here. Why not have that product come from something that is going to employ somebody and help make our forest a better place?

For the power grid, we always seem to be on the edge, in the hot summer, of having to shut off. Indeed, they call it Flex Alert in California, where they are asking people to shut down the usage of electricity. They already contract ahead of time with large manufacturers like the cement manufacturers and others to say that we might need you--they are contracted ahead of time to shut down at a phone call, basically, saying: We are going to have to shut you off for the rest of the afternoon. Stop that production and stop that work because the rest of our power grid is going to be in trouble if we don't get these voluntary, precontracted sign-ups shut down.

They are asking regular households to do that. I saw an alert the other day--it is almost hysterical--asking people to not charge their electric cars between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. This is at the same time we are getting the bum's rush to say: Hey, convert to electric cars.

California has a mandate to eliminate new combustion engine cars by, I think, 2035. Just make it up out of nowhere, no more of those cars.

Are we going to have a power grid that can do that? And then, do people want to buy these cars? Is it more than

just idealists who want to purchase these vehicles or more who want to just drive in the special high-occupancy vehicle lane that has a sticker on it in California so you can use your car there?

Is this what vehicle choice looks like for folks? I am not against them, but I don't like having things crammed down people's throats like that either.

So, what are we going to do? Our forests, our energy grid, all of these things work together. I was talking about the fires that break out because the trees and other foliage can come in contact with power lines, or a downed power line might light up a forest as well.

We have to be wise about how we are managing these things. Forestry is required that takes that into account.

Our power lines, we still need to deliver the power from where it is generated. We have so much hydroelectric power up in my area, yet they want to remove dams. They want to remove the dams that are making this clean, 100 percent renewable power up in the Klamath Basin, where farmers this year are getting zero percent of their allocation of water--zero.

How do you do that to a group of people, just taking that away? Especially in the Klamath Basin, these farmers own the water rights for that Klamath Project that was built by the Federal Government, and Oregon, of course, has upheld that water right. Yet, the Federal Government muscles the water away anyhow, just muscles it away because it thinks it can.

Agriculture in California has taken devastating hits on water supply this year. Some districts are as low as 5 percent, and even others getting zero. Others are getting smaller cuts but still getting cut.

In our State, we have many crops that we grow over 90 percent of what the United States uses. In my area, there are a lot of olives grown, table olives and olive oil. Imagine not being able to get that commodity and having to rely on imports totally for that because we don't have a heads-up plan in this country that accounts for what we produce and should be producing.

Our wood products need to come from the U.S. Our ag products need to come from the U.S. Our energy, so we can be self-sufficient, needs to come from the U.S.

We need to store more water in the Western States so we can produce these things, so we can produce hydroelectric power, so we can produce these ag products. We have environmental groups pushing to tear dams out that are already in place, stretching our power grid, stretching the food that comes to your table.

Just look them up. How many crops come from California that you rely on nationally that you wouldn't get if they weren't grown there, or we can turn to other countries to import from?

There was kind of a popular saying or a bumper sticker amongst agriculture some years ago: If you like imported oil, you will love imported food.

At what point are we going to wake up to this? Environmental groups are doing a lot of winning on this. Yet, at the end of the day, what they are pushing for doesn't actually do much to help the species they claim to be saving.

The delta smelt, which is part of the delta just east of the bay area in northern California, since 1992, I think they have been usurping and taking away more and more water from agriculture, from human use, to run through the delta to try to keep the salinity level low, with the theory that will help the delta smelt.

The population has continually decreased since that time to where, when they are out there doing surveys--they call them trawls. The last several surveys, they haven't found any. They are not finding the species. Yet, hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water and more are just being flushed through the delta because they still have the biological opinions put out by somebody in government and somebody willing to sue to stop the ability of that water to be used properly, for people use or even a purpose that would be helpful for the economy.

Why does it have to be this way? There is a page on Facebook that I would invite everybody to look at and to watch if you are interested at all in where your food comes from and why our resources in California and the West are being managed the way they are but especially with the intent being on our water supply in California.

California water supply isn't just important to California. It is important to the whole country for these fresh fruit and vegetable products, the nut crops, and other things that are produced there that are not produced anywhere in this country otherwise or in very, very tiny percentages elsewhere.

All of your almonds pretty much come from California. Yet, there is all this rhetoric out there, like the almonds are using all the water, that we are exporting all the water. No, the water doesn't actually leave the State. Each almond nut doesn't have that much water in it. It goes back into recharging the groundwater. It goes back into keeping the local economy growing those trees that replace CO2 with oxygen.

Madam Speaker, I would like for you to check out this page on Facebook. It is called the California Water for Food and People Movement. A young lady named Kristi Diener on there puts out excellent information all the time on all the different aspects of California water and why that is important to everybody.

We have the possibility of adding more water supply to our States. We could raise the Shasta Dam located in Shasta County near Redding, California, far up north. You could raise it 18 feet and augment it by about 630,000 acre-feet of additional water supply when you fill the lake.

Also, another one called Sites Reservoir in the western part of the Sacramento Valley, it is about 70 to 80 miles south of the Shasta Dam. That would mean up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water that could be stored there when you fill that project.

Those chunks of water would go a long way toward helping to keep the crops growing, as well as people's needs and cities.

It is my view, as low as the lakes are getting right now, Lake Shasta, Lake Oroville, Lake Folsom, San Luis Reservoir, where water is transferred to after having been pumped through the delta--except they can't because the State pumps and the Federal pumps are hardly running because they think they are helping the delta smelt. If these reservoirs are all full, we can go up to 5 years if we are not wasting the water on biological things that don't make sense.

We need to do a lot more to augment our water supply so we can keep growing the crops and have an economy of domestically grown products that are high quality and that people enjoy. And they won't know they are missing it until you can't get it.

For seeing good information, on this Facebook page, the California Water for Food and People Movement, check into that because it is at least a counterargument to what you hear all the time in the press and in the news about what farmers are doing or how water storage is bad and how dams are bad.

Dams, you get several good things by their existence. You get stored water for people in ag, as well as water that would not exist in summertime or in the fall that you could help with fish flows. Imagine that? You get hydroelectric generation. You get prevention against floods because you can store this water during the wild rainy season and keep that.

The Army Corps of Engineers runs those operations for flood control around the country. Imagine the flooding you would have in those regions that can have that high flow during extraordinary rain events.

You get recreation. You get a lot of good things from storing water, and we used to do that. We used to think ahead to do that. Now, we think we are getting ahead by tearing out this infrastructure that people need and actually can be beneficial and is beneficial to nature as well.

We have to start thinking soundly and logically about what we are doing. That is why I have spent so much time on the Agriculture Committee, the Natural Resources Committee, and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee talking about these issues. We have an opportunity with an infrastructure bill or two or three coming up here to do some real things in that.

I think most people when they think of infrastructure are thinking of our

highways, the basic transportation they use every day. They are thinking of things like levies, whether that is in my area of northern California or Louisiana or all around the country, that help prevent floods and keep water where we want it instead of where we don't want it, and water storage itself, the dams that make so much possible, as I mentioned, hydroelectric power, stored water, recreation, and flood control. It just makes sense.

Why aren't we getting back to a sensible way of thinking about that?

We are just letting the environmental groups and the press--they seem to want to cozy up to their argument and not get the counter side to this.

Meanwhile, I have many constituents who aren't farming at all this year, not growing crops and doing that honest, good work that they have done for generations. These are good, hardworking people. Sometimes I wonder why they keep doing it because they don't seem to be appreciated for what they are doing. It is always a fight. They always have got to be heading into town to defend something, defend their water supply, defend their land uses, or defend against some more regulations thought up by somebody in Sacramento or in Washington, D.C., who really doesn't understand or seem to care about why they do what they do.

It makes this hard sometimes because as a Representative I go back home, and I tell them: We are not having any really great answers coming out of Washington, D.C., lately.

Under the Biden administration they are talking about pushing to reinstall the WOTUS regulations, the Waters of the United States. There are those in the Federal Government and environmental movements who think that every drop of rainfall somehow belongs to the Federal Government or State government for them to regulate.

Madam Speaker, you have people trying to collect rainwater off their roofs into rain barrels and getting in trouble for that sometimes. The water running off their driveway, they can't corral that water. They can't build a stock pond to keep water for their stock because somehow that is affecting the whole water table or the whole water system. That is how far they want to interpret things--Waters of the United States.

I tell you what, Madam Speaker, not everything belongs to the government. We have operated agriculture in this country for 200 years and done pretty well for the most part, and we are always working to improve and have better, more efficient water usage, better fertilizers, developing herbicides and things that leave less of a footprint behind or zero footprint behind and still produce a safe crop.

People really should be asking questions. Ask these questions of the Biden administration. Ask them of the EPA. Ask them in your home State, Madam Speaker, as you see this stuff going on.

Where are we going to get our food supply?

Where are we going to get our electricity supply?

Where are we going to get our wood supply?

Where are we getting our fuel from?

Enjoy this $4 fuel--almost $5 as I saw on the way to the airport today in Sacramento.

It doesn't have to be this way.

We need pipelines, we need domestically produced energy, and we can do it ecologically soundly. This isn't new ground. This isn't the 1850s or the 1860s when they hydraulic mined old mountain sides and they killed all the buffalo and cut all the trees. We are way smarter than that.

Yet, Madam Speaker, you would still think that from the way the media covers it and the way the environmentalists talk about it in their groups and their fundraising pushes that it is the 1860s all over again. It isn't. We are pretty wise about how we manage our resources for our farms.

These are our families' legacies.

Why would we not take care of them?

Why would we not take care of the soil?

We do. We can do it better than any of those folks with their wide- eyed ideas who come around saying: ``We could put your land into a long-term legacy that we help control,'' and pretty soon you are eating from their hand on how you manage your own farm, how you manage your own land, or maybe you decide to manage not to farm it for a while. You might be required to farm it anyway because it is now a habitat.

Where did all this come from?

Don't we trust rural people anymore to make good decisions?

Don't we trust these people who work from sunup to sundown who provide for us from their heart and from their soul?

Don't we trust them?

Do we trust bureaucrats in D.C. or Sacramento or other State capitals?

I don't. Not anymore.

We have got to do better, and it is going to take the American public getting behind this, not just politicians here and not just ones locally because sometimes they are hesitant, and they are afraid to. We have to be bold. We have to be loud about this. And we have to speak up every 2 years at election time if they are not doing it because we are in big trouble right now.

If California doesn't get above average rainfall next year, I don't know how much of agriculture is going to be in business. The lakes are getting to be at record low pretty soon. If California is not farming nearly to the percentage of what it does, it will affect everybody in this country. They will see it in prices, and they will see it in availability.

Look at the store shelves already, how hard it is to keep certain things on the shelf when you go in and ask for it and it is not there, Madam Speaker. In restaurants if you ask for certain menu items, they are not even there.

I went through a drive-through the other day, and half the items weren't available.

What is going on in production?

Yes, we know it has been a year of COVID, but production of basic hard items, car parts, any other manufactured item, nobody is going to work, or nobody can get the resources mined and shipped and made into an end product that people need.

We have to wake up here.

What is going on that the means of production we are either exporting it or we are shutting it down and we are putting the clamps on it?

Heaven knows $6 trillion out of thin air spending last year because of the COVID mess, and yet trillions and trillions more are being proposed and sought to be spent upcoming on things that are not going to produce a rebounding, stronger economy but instead fulfill political goals.

What are we doing?

They are still pursuing high-speed rail in California--something the voters were told would cost $33 billion when it was voted on, I think in 2008, $33 billion the voters were told. That price now is over $120 billion. It is only partially done. It is going to stop in an orchard somewhere around Bakersfield and go to another town in the northern part of the valley there where it will be a full rail line. For a $120 billion price tag we could build three large dams and lakes, and California would not be worried about water supply once those were built and filled.

Yet we chase these boondoggle things, either to fulfill campaign promises or some kind of idea of that something will be green and environmental. We are not going to have the resources we need the way we are going to fulfill the power grid for the amount of electricity that needs to be produced. We are not going to have it. We are going to wake up someday with electric cars that won't go and appliances that won't turn on because of shortsighted thinking.

Do the math, Madam Speaker. We have got to do the math and hold accountable the people who are spreading this misinformation. If it just doesn't seem right or sensible to you, Madam Speaker, trust your little voice. Trust your instinct on that because when this stuff doesn't add up, you are probably right. It doesn't. I have seen it enough around here to know it doesn't add up long-term.

I don't normally do this open mic business here, but I am watching my constituents being burned out of where they live. I am watching them being pushed out by an economy that doesn't support what they used to produce of things that people need and people used to need and still will need. I am watching normal, hardworking Americans feeling a little hopeless right now, and I don't feel great about it because there is not more I can do as one of 435 in this room to help fix it.

But we get up every day, and we try and get this message out. That is why I use this microphone, because we can't let this fall on our watch.

I ask the people to dig in, pay attention, and hold accountable those who are putting the noose around the neck of our rural economy and things that all Americans rely on.

Help us out. We desperately need it.

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

Mr. Speaker, here we go again. The laughable attempt by senior White House officials to cast Republicans as those that want to defund the police is completely ridiculous.

They put up this fig leaf concept because we didn't support an irresponsible, nearly $2 trillion spending package, which had a tiny portion of it--$350 million out of $2 trillion--possibly to be able to go for local government to decide its own use for police. That is what the whole premise is on. So somehow, Republicans are defunding the police.

Well, I think that is the mantra we have seen come from the Democrats, some in this Chamber and many at the local government level.

In New York, for example, one Member from this Chamber said: ``Defunding police means defunding police.'' New York City proceeded to cut $1 billion from the NYPD.

In Minneapolis, another Member said that it is time to ``reimagine public safety in Minneapolis.'' They went on to cut over $6 million. But after seeing the error of their ways, they are now restoring the money.

In Los Angeles, for example, there were calls for a cut of $100 million, and now they are restoring that. Amazing.

Madam Speaker, radical environmentalists have weaponized the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, and are using frivolous lawsuits to block nearly every management project or salvage sale after fire that the U.S. Forest Service proposes.

This has helped result in over 68 million acres of forest land burned in the last decade and over 10 million acres just in 2020 alone.

I am pleased to see President Biden today is speaking about how to address wildfires. One important component I hope he will look into and help rectify is we desperately need to rectify the litigation and the amount of stoppage of forest management that is the result of environmental groups.

These groups have worked very hard to advance the false scenario that climate change is somehow responsible for the increasing vulnerability of forests. This is flatout false. The truth is that the decline of responsible timber harvesting and the lack of active management are undeniably the real culprits.

In California, most forest types historically had, in the past, about 64 trees per acre. They now sit at an average of over 300 trees per acre. Indeed, too much inventory.

We need to get back to basics and manage our forests and help prevent this fire problem.

Mr. Speaker, I do have to clear up one point made earlier. The sales of gas Mustangs are double that of the so-called four-door electric Mustang in the month of May, and the gas Mustang is triple that of the electric Mustang for the year. As a Mustang driver, I had to get that out.

So when we had the Biden administration announcing an over $2 trillion spending package, but we only end up with 6 percent in expenditures for roads and bridges, it is a bait and switch.

Indeed, it seems like the Democrats are trying to take this miniscule investment in infrastructure and challenge themselves to waste it on something else in Green New Deal programs.

It is already a big enough challenge to get money and keep money in infrastructure these days and keep it from being siphoned off.

This bill does nothing to reform or fix the 30 percent of overhead costs that go towards frivolous regulation, et cetera. That means they are planning to waste right off the top $160 billion of their own proposal.

In California, with the high-speed rail boondoggle, they are setting aside $25 billion for a program that originally was going to cost $33 billion, according to how it was sold to the voters. So this needs to be stopped and put into programs that people can actually use like their road system.

Mr. Speaker, after the 5-month deployment of the National Guard around our U.S. Capitol, after the fact of the January 6 break-in, the bill has come due now of over half a billion dollars-- $521 million--for the thousands of troops to guard this Capitol.

This was, again, after the big break-in of January 6. Of course, had the decisionmakers on hand here at the Capitol with their security intel used ahead of time decided to employ just a handful of those troops, we wouldn't have had the January 6 situation happen. But they did not want the bad optics of armed troops standing in front here at that time.

So, instead, we got 5 months' worth of it with two rows of fence, razor wire, and the inability for the people to come visit their Capitol. So now we have months of those optics and a half-a-billion- dollar bill instead.

Mr. Speaker, if that bill doesn't get paid, now our National Guard will not be able to do their training and have their other readiness needs met because Congress hasn't paid the bill for what they did not want ahead of time--bad optics.

Instead, the taxpayers get the bad optics of that bill and a possibly decimated National Guard.

Madam Speaker, recently, the National Archives released a report in which they concluded a structural nature of racism permeates all aspects of work and workplace culture at the National Archives. Unbelievable.

Among other things, they claim that the rotunda where our founding documents--the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights--are housed are displayed as an example of structural racism. Also, they called out the praise of our Founders that constructed those documents as being somehow triggering of people.

The report recommends that we reimagine--a buzzword, these days--the rotunda at the National Archives, including staging dance and performance art in the space that invites dialogue about the ways the United States has mythologized the Founding era.

So rather than celebrating our independence, like we will in a few days, we will be focused on the U.S. failures or flaws. It seems we have enough bashing of our country, our flag, even our National Anthem, as we saw at a track and field event of a would-be Olympian who turned away from our anthem.

The report also calls for putting in place trigger warnings for those who would view and see the display there.

We are losing our minds, folks. These are our founding documents.

Mr. Speaker, China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, has inflicted more damage and suffering on the world and even its own people than is even calculable.

Accountability for its action, or timely inactions, on the Wuhan virus is necessary. Transparency in how research labs conduct business is essential in holding those responsible that allowed the leak of extremely dangerous byproducts that have cost multitudes of lives and inflicted many trillions in economic harm upon the world.

The U.S. must zero out its dependence on China for so much of what we use and need in everyday life. We must produce our own pharmaceutical products, our own rare-earth products from our own mines, our own manufacturing.

We must prohibit the gain-of-function research that likely led to the Wuhan virus being unleashed on the world.

Overhaul the World Health Organization and our relationship with it.

Prohibit National Institutes of Health funding to those who don't have the United States and American peoples' best interests and wellness at heart.

Reimpose visa sanctions on China.

And, certainly, why give China a legitimate stage to the world via the Olympics?

The Olympics rightly should be rebid and moved in time for 2022 to countries that respect and revere human rights and right to basic freedoms from oppression. Otherwise, we give it all a green light and a tacit stamp of approval.

Mr. Speaker, environmental protection of species revolves around the use of indicator species. But what has been lost in recent years is the impact also on humans and their needs.

The indicator, for example, for farmers in California is very grave in the great Central Valley and up at the Klamath Basin.

Up on the Klamath, you have one environmental management plan that says more water is needed for salmon, for example, under a biological opinion, and another management plan that says more water is needed to be stored in the lake for suckerfish. You can't do both at the same time, and the result is the salmon are not more plentiful and the suckerfish are not recovering as a species.

But the rural areas in Klamath and Siskiyou Counties are being cut off from their main economic driver. The farms up there are suffering badly because of water that has been taken by the Federal Government that does not belong to the Federal Government.

The stored water in that lake was created for agriculture solely, and yet it is being used as more or less a slush fund for Federal agencies that want to take this water and somehow try and make a difference in the river. This has got to come to a stop, because we need agriculture in California.

Mr. Speaker, access to our public lands is being cut off by road closures throughout the national forests in Region 5. The U.S. Forest Service is citing public safety concerns due to hazardous trees from past fire seasons.

But this blocks the public from accessing the public lands, and it also prevents those roads being used as evacuation routes or access points to fight fires in coming seasons.

One road that has been closed, the Greyback Road in the Rogue River- Siskiyou National Forest in northern California, is a California Office of Emergency Services designated evacuation route for the town of Happy Camp, California. If Highway 96 is blocked, this is the only other way out of Happy Camp.

Litigation is preventing the U.S. Forest Service from working with private-sector partners to clean up the forests. For example, in the Mendocino National Forest, 300,000 acres burned in 2018. The Forest Service wanted to do 4,700 acres, a tiny 2 percent of that, yet it was blocked by a lawsuit from doing that cleanup work.

Without offering the salvage timber sale, that means it is going to cost taxpayers $5.5 million instead of being able to recover some of the money.

This litigation harms the public by leaving hazardous trees and snags out in the forest, which create safety issues and become fuel for the next fire season.

We must reform NEPA and ESA.

Mr. Speaker, we talk a lot about infrastructure around here. The American people wonder what is that actually going to mean coming out here. Well, it really needs to be focused on things that we are short of, but would be fixing our highways, fixing our bridges, things like that.

In California, where I come from, the subject is water. Water storage is desperately needed. We have had some years of drought, but we also have not added to our water storage in a significant way in 40 years. With a growing population, there is a growing need.

For example, what does that mean to all Americans, not just Californians?

The food we eat. The top crops in California that are grown approximately 99 percent or more in California are almonds, artichokes, celery, figs, garlic, raisins, kiwis, honeydew, nectarines, olives, cling peaches, pistachios, plums, sweet rice, and walnuts.

If California is not growing those items, where do we intend to get those?

For almonds especially, California grows all the domestic production Americans use and 77 percent of the global production. We also produce 92 percent of the Nation's avocados, grapes, lemons, and mandarins. No avocados? No guacamole.

What are we going to do, import all this? We have to be producing this stuff in the State of California.

What does that mean? We need to invest in water infrastructure. We can be raising Shasta Dam, which is a Federal project. Eighteen feet yields over 600,000 new acre-feet for these crops. We could be building Sites Reservoir. Both of these have been invested in slightly by the Federal Government lately. We need to do much more because we are the leading State in so

many of the important products that Americans actually use.

So, we have to talk a lot more about water storage.

Madam Speaker, in June of last year, the city of Portland, Oregon, cut $16 million from their police budget, and shut down a unit of the police which was designed to reduce violence in the city.

As Republicans predicted--and a lot of others--this has not led to peaceful streets. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has been forced to ask for more funding for police.

This is not unique to Portland. Major cities across the U.S. have seen a spike in violent crime as they cut police budgets. Last year, New York City defunded their police department budget by about $1 billion, or 9.2 percent. The result? Murder is up 17 percent; shooting incidents are up 77 percent. In Los Angeles, homicides are now up 23 percent after a defunding.

How much more evidence will the defund the police movement need before they admit they were wrong and innocent people are indeed being killed? On top of this, prosecutors in some areas are refusing to charge perpetrators and putting criminals back on our streets to continue their crimes.

We must push back against these radicals who want to defund the police and stop this crime wave.

Madam Speaker, in California, we are known for having a lot of marijuana grows. But we have to

recognize this is still an illegal substance at the Federal level.

We have, in my district--it is amazing--many hundreds of illegal hothouses that have been planted in Siskiyou County full of marijuana grows.

Now, we haven't had many resources to help out up there until very recently, when a sheriff up there took it upon himself to eradicate these grows, to go against the county ordinances there, to go against other ordinances on water use, chemical use. They are using chemicals that are not even available to farmers that have long been made illegal in this country and in the State of California.

These grows cause irreparable damage to the environment and wildlife and are even dangerous to people who happen to traipse in there accidentally, with folks who are so heavily armed. They are cartels from out of the country that are in there doing this operation--all illegally. Why do we allow this to go on?

These marijuana grows are dangerous and are against the law. The Federal Government needs to be a stronger partner in backing the locals on eradicating these grows because of how much damage they do to the community, to the environment, to the wildlife, and to the overall feeling people have of their community up there. We need to help more.

Madam Speaker, today we celebrate the adoption of the stars and stripes as the official flag of our Nation. In 1777, six years before the end of the Revolutionary War, is when it was adopted by Congress.

Over the past year, however, we have seen a constant stream of disrespect for our stars and stripes.

We expect the flag to perhaps be beaten and burned on the streets of Beijing or in the Middle East or other cities of our global adversaries, but we do not expect that to happen within the United States.

This past year, we have all fought against the raising of political flags in military bases and atop our embassies and consulates. Our flag is the only flag that belongs above those buildings.

Our flag is a symbol of hope and unity.

I hope today, of all days, we can remember who fought to raise the flag and why.