Rick Crawford

I feel it necessary to remind Amtrak that while I strongly support our nation's passenger railroad, Amtrak must heed, and not ignore, Congress' desire that it work well with others.

Amtrak should not be spending its taxpayer-provided bailout money on foreign goods, while cutting American jobs and services.

I am troubled that Amtrak is receiving and requesting record amounts of funding, while cutting services of thousands and thousands of jobs.

Our great Veterans deserve the best care and should have never been exposed to the personal tragedies that resulted from Mr. Levy's malpractice.

I do not really want to go back home to my constituents in Arkansas and say that their Federal tax dollars went to help a state-owned enterprise of China to access mass transit projects in places like Los Angeles.

I was proud to join 390 of my colleagues in passing H.R. 1616, the European Energy Security and Diversification Act, to facilitate the export of U.S. energy resources to Central and Eastern European countries.

I want to commend you on the regulatory reform that you are undertaking.

We have a responsibility to exercise oversight over federal agencies and DOJ and FBI are not exempt from that.

If there's wrongdoing in any federal agency, we have a responsibility to expose that and take the appropriate action.

The President has indicated that private dollars can be leveraged with public funds to repair crumbling infrastructure.

I don't think we are acting like Canada, I don't think we are acting like France, we need to be acting like the United States.

It is not that difficult for us to look at this in a different light, understanding that 55 years hence, nothing positive has been yielded by the current posture.

There is a path forward. It is going to take wisdom and discernment, and nobody has the exact right answer.

I am concerned that if we are not actively engaged in Cuba at this point, that there is a void of American leadership.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service used an approach in the past for many years that measured the true cost of designating particular areas in terms of lost use, increased cost and loss of jobs.

The Federal Government would not examine how this broad designation could cost the people and businesses of my district the loss of the use of their land, the loss of their jobs, or the very real threat of new, burdensome, and unexpected…

I think what we have seen here today is a demonstration of a marked contrast between environmental activism versus active environmentalism.

They derive their livelihood from the land, and I believe they can be trusted because of that to be good stewards of that land without an overreach of the Federal Government.

Should the Federal Government measure the actual cost to lives and livelihoods of designating a particular area as critical habitat?

Despite what some say, these policies do have costs.

A process that allows a full and complete economic impact study before critical habitat areas are declared would clearly be a better approach.

Its implementation through critical habitat designation should not go without considering the true economic impacts to the human species, in other words our lives and livelihoods.

To address this issue, Representative Crawford's bill, H.R. 4319, will mandate the exclusion of property from a critical habitat designation where the economic impacts analysis shows that the benefits of the parcel's exclusion outweigh the…

I believe the analysis put forward for these proposed mussel designations vastly understates the costs to the citizens of Arkansas and other States.

Their absence says a lot.