Continental Divide Trail Completion Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Chair, this is the Democratic equivalent of fiddling while our forests burn. They call it the Wildfire Response and Drought Resiliency Act, but while it spends lavishly, it accomplishes almost nothing.

For 14 years in Congress, I have dealt extensively with issues of fire and water, and here is what I have learned: Excess timber will always come out of the forest. Either we will carry it out or nature will burn it out. When we carried it out by logging, we enjoyed healthy forests and a thriving economy.

We stopped active forest management decades ago due to radical environmental laws that have made it impossible. Today our forests are now morbidly overgrown, and nature is again burning out the excess.

This bill does nothing to reform the laws that have made active forest management impossible, and instead it consigns us to fight a losing battle that will cost us our forests for generations to come.

When it comes to water, droughts are nature's fault. They happen. But water shortages are our fault. They are the choice we made when the same radical laws made new dam construction impossible. Dams save water for wet years so that we have plenty in the dry ones. We will not solve our water shortage until we build more dams, and we can't build more dams until we overhaul these same laws.

Instead, this bill pours hundreds of millions of dollars into desalination. The most successful desalination plant is in Carlsbad, California. At a time when we can't guarantee enough electricity to keep your lights on, Carlsbad consumes enough electricity to power 250 homes in order to produce enough water for one home.

This bill is pure folly. It will consume billions of dollars of our resources while condemning us to a dismal future of chronic forest fires and water shortages.

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