Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I know I speak for all of my Republican colleagues on the Water and Power Subcommittee when I say that we are excited and eager to undertake the mission outlined in House Resolution 72 to identify the Federal regulations in this field that are impeding job creation and that are slowing the economy. The only problem we have got is deciding where to start.

A generation ago, the principal objective of our water and power policy was to create an abundance of both. It was an era when vast reservoirs and hydroelectric facilities produced a cornucopia of clean and plentiful water and electricity, on a scale so vast that many communities didn't even bother to measure the stuff. But that objective of abundance has been abandoned in favor of the rationing of shortages that have been caused by government. The result is increasingly scarce and expensive water and power that now undermines our prosperity as a Nation. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Central Valley of California.

This last Congress sat idly by as this administration deliberately diverted 200 billion gallons of water away from the most abundant agricultural region of our Nation, all to satisfy the environmental left and its pet cause, a 3-inch minnow called the delta smelt. This willful diversion cost over 20,000 farm workers their jobs. It inflicted up to 40 percent unemployment rates in the region. It destroyed more than a quarter-million acres of the most fertile farmland in America. And it forced up the price of groceries for us all.

Or we could start with the Klamath, where this administration is pushing to tear down four perfectly good hydroelectric dams that generate 155 megawatts of the cleanest and cheapest electricity on the planet, enough to power over 150,000 homes, because we are told of catastrophic declines of salmon.

When I suggested building a salmon hatchery instead, I was informed there already is one. It produces 5 million salmon molt a year, 17,000 of which return to that river as fully grown adults to spawn. But they are deliberately ignored in the population counts. To add insult to insanity, as they tear down these dams in the name of saving the salmon, they are also tearing down the fish hatchery that actually is saving the salmon.

Or we could begin in Colorado, where they have sacrificed over 1,000 megawatts from the Glen Canyon Dam for the humpback chub--at the expense of a long-neglected species called homo sapiens.

Mr. Speaker, Ronald Reagan was right: In this crisis, government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem. The good news is that it's entirely within our power to correct, and it was clearly the mandate of the American people last fall, and we will act on that mandate beginning with a series of hearings and actions directly related to this much-needed resolution.

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