Duncan Hunter

Is the Coast Guard scared to back one of these? I mean what is...

So you load ballast water in a port. There are many, many more critters in a port environment than there is in mid-ocean.

Then why are you here?

Let's just go slow. I am a slow Marine, all right?

U.S. law doesn't give you a number.

There is no technology right now that the Coast Guard says, 'Hey, guys, go with this.'

Rendered harmless, have you heard of that term before?

Then why would a private company install something if they don't--why would they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for no reason?

Yes, sir, so that is a very----

It is about national security because when you have to start making ships and crewing those ships in times of war, when we go to war, you have to have U.S. crews to do that.

And method two, again, is weighing your products outside of the container, right? And then adding that----

So what is required by law? What does the law say?

And the U.S. economy, the U.S. businesses, and the people that are actually making things and exporting them, which is very--that is very few.

I think actually, Mr. Chairman, that is not correct.

So why should we here put a burden on our shippers when it is more of an international issue than it is our issue?

Thank you. The ranking member of the full committee is here. If we knew he was coming, we would have gotten a bigger room.

I think what we established today is it is not Descartes, 'I think; therefore I am,' it is, 'I procreate, therefore I am.'

Chairman Hunter, thank you for sponsoring this much-needed legislation, and we urge every member of the subcommittee to cosponsor H.R. 980.

But how many ships do we have in the U.S.-flag fleet? I am just asking.

So up to the early 2000s they did nothing. And then around the early 2000s they started doing ballast water exchanges, right--1996?

So we allow ships to simply dump and mix their ballast water in the middle of the ocean, as opposed to setting guidelines for saying, 'Hey, we hope--we think that this works, we are pretty sure it works, but we are not going to count that.'

If you control the ocean, you control the world.

We want to do fewer things that impede the flow of commerce and the ability for the American people to keep their jobs, maintain their livability in the United States and make money.

Does it make sense, in your point of view, to test every cargo box on a ship prior to it being loaded, or when it is offloaded?

But you wouldn't do a block buy unless you had the money appropriated to do it.