Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1335, Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado.

Like the gentleman from Alabama, I do represent a coastal district, a fishing district. In fact, the Second District of California includes about one-third of the California coastline and many working harbors and ports where fishing men and women have been catching fish with their families for many, many generations, as well as the Native American tribes that I represent, who have been depending on healthy fisheries for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

So this is important to me. I share the gentleman's concern that we continue to make fishing available for ourselves and for future generations. We have some disagreements on how to get there, and we will talk about that.

I think the thing that we have to recognize at the outset of this debate is that the Magnuson-Stevens Act has been a great success by just about any measure. It succeeded initially in helping us protect and rebuild fisheries from the threat of foreign fleets that were coming into U.S. waters and overfishing and harming our American fishing communities and fishing families. It then went on to succeed in preventing overfishing by U.S. fishermen by a number of mechanisms in the bill that we will talk about in a moment.

The other way in which Magnuson-Stevens has been a huge success is that it has always been bipartisan. Both the original act and the subsequent reauthorizations of Magnuson-Stevens have always been strongly bipartisan. And unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, we are departing from that positive history with the bill we have before us today, and we need to get it back on track.

The keys to Magnuson-Stevens' success have included strict rules on rebuilding of fishery stocks and also very strict fishery specific quotas, so that we can make sure that we prevent overfishing and ensure a sustainable fishery population. This is not so that we stop fishing, quite the contrary. The purpose of these mechanisms is so that we can continue to fish for future generations by maintaining sustainable populations.

Absent these mechanisms, these very successful provisions in Magnuson-Stevens' history teaches us what would happen. We have a history that is played out over and over again in this country and, frankly, around the world--that, without strict protections for sustainable fish populations, we will overfish them, we will deplete them.

It puts us on a path where the tragedy of the commons plays out over and over again, and the end result of that is fisheries closures. We are not helping the folks who want to fish. When we don't manage these populations, we are actually hurting them in the long run.

Now, Democrats have put forward a substitute amendment that is much closer to a clean reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens. We think that is really the conversation we need to be having. What kind of clean reauthorization can we have? And are there consensus areas where we can actually improve Magnuson-Stevens?

The gentleman from Alabama might be surprised to find Democrats strongly agreeing with him, that we could benefit from additional science, better science. There may be better data available on the red snapper in the Gulf. We are also working with Republicans to try to get that science and make it available to the decisionmakers who set those rules for that fishery.

There is also more than meets the eye, even for that red snapper fishery because, while you are talking about a small number of days for recreational fishermen in Federal waters, you have got a much greater number of days in State waters.

You also can fish for red snapper and any other species just about any day you want. When you are in Federal waters, you can only keep them during those certain number of days. The reason for that is because approximately half the fish caught are reserved for commercial fishermen who have made their case to the regional council that it is only fair that about half the fish ought to be available to them and about half the fish are allocated to recreational fishermen.

In those small number of days, believe it or not, the recreational folks catch almost the same amount of fish that the commercial fishermen catch during a much greater number of days. There is always a little more than meets the eye. You hear sensational statistics perhaps about the very small number of days available. There is, frankly, much more to the story.

Where we do agree is, if we can get better data, better science, better monitoring, all of this should be subject to discussion and revision in the councils. That is the flexibility of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and that ought to be something that we can work on here together.

Unfortunately, though, Mr. Speaker, we have a Republican bill that is taking away some of the key provisions of the act that have actually been the very source of its great success over the years, so that heads in a wrong direction.

Then, unfortunately, we have the obligatory runs at NEPA and various environmental laws, including the Antiquities Act. This is no place to be carrying out that endless assault on America's environmental laws.

Let's get back to that point of consensus, sustainable management of our fisheries. If we can do that, I think we have something we can work on together in this House.

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