George P. Kazen Federal Building and United States Courthouse

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, as my colleague said, I definitely have a voice challenge so I am not going to speak long. I do want to join my colleague in urging Members of the Senate to vote no on this legislation.
As she just described, it is a bill that has some great attributes, but it has one major fatal flaw, and that fatal flaw is that the U.S. Senate is being asked tonight to negotiate and decide a water settlement for the State of California that has been fought over, litigated, and is still in discussion of how to resolve it in a balanced way among all of the interests, not just in California but in the region. Oh, no, because someone has a mighty pen and can in the House of Representatives drop an earmark of over half a billion dollars into a bill as a poison pill--I think the newspapers had it right: Stop the midnight rider. How ironic that it is almost midnight, and we are going to be voting on such legislation.

My colleagues who bring us decided-upon water agreements that have been worked out and want us to bless them so that the agencies can fund them--I have no problems with that. We have tried to move similar legislation in regular order, but this is usurping the individuals who are trying to balance water and fish and river rights and community issues and regional issues and saying that we are going to kill fish as a way to balance the water and drought of the future. If we are going to decide to kill fish tonight for California, for Delta almond growers, are you going to show up tomorrow and say let's kill northwest salmon because someone else in California wants our water? I can tell you the answer to that is hell no; we are not going to let you attack northwest salmon for California water. It is not going to happen.

To our colleagues who are facing the same issue in Arizona, which didn't get a fair hearing, or our colleagues from Florida, Alabama, or in a dispute with Georgia, tonight is about whether you are going to say we are going to have collaborative stewardship to solve our water issues or whether we are going to let the interest of political groups come and lobby here and have us decide based on poison pill riders.

Our colleagues over here are frustrated that the other side of the aisle would never live up to a Flint agreement, and the consequence is they are cynical enough to put Flint in this bill as a way to get votes for something they know they should not bring to the floor of the U.S. Senate. And to boot, they think the only bill I could come up with to get this deal passed is one in which individual Members have individual projects that are important to clean water in their States, and that is how they are going to get this poison pill rider passed.

It is no surprise that within 24 hours of this passing the House, the L.A. Times editorialized it as a bad deal. The San Jose Mercury News calls it a sellout. The San Francisco Chronicle says stop the rider. Do not think for 1 second that people are not watching because they are watching. The unfortunate situation for everyone involved who wants water is this. You are going to get litigation. You are going to get litigation because you cannot do water deals this way.

For the San Joaquin, which argued and litigated for 18 years and then came to the table, this is the same situation. You are not going to get water for your growers, you are going to get litigation. As a country that has already spent billions of dollars dealing with drought--and I have news for you, we are going to be spending more because the climate is going to continue to change. This is an issue whose day has come to the United States Senate. It is not going to go away.

We can deal with it in regular order, we can deal with it without jamming people with earmarks, and we can deal with it without giving away a sweetheart deal to the builders of dams. Oh, yes. I forgot to mention, the bill authorizes dams to be built in 17 States without any further action by us as a body. I hope you don't have a river in your State where you would like to see the wild and scenic nature of it or go trout fishing because it may not be there if it is all dammed up due to this legislation.

I hope our colleagues realize the way to solve our drought problems is to work together in a fair and open manner, a manner in which everyone can see the transparency and not the dark of night at midnight right before we adjourn for the rest of the year. We will not solve these problems nor will we provide the collaborative stewardship this issue needs. Instead, we are going to put a cynical stamp of a political gamesmanship on an issue that is important to every community in the West.

I thank the Presiding Officer and the Senator from California.

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