Jared Huffman: “Regrettably, I rise in opposition to the amendment offered by my friend, Mr. Graves. This amendment requires the…”

“Regrettably, I rise in opposition to the amendment offered by my friend, Mr. Graves. This amendment requires the Comptroller General to submit a report to Congress, but it is unclear what the overall purpose of this report would be. In fact, because of the vagueness of that purpose, there has been concern that it may be about identifying what would happen if the overall value of the red snapper fishery commercial quota was completely taken away or given to private anglers. Would this report be used to make the argument that the red snapper quota should be reallocated to recreational fishermen? I can't support either of those propositions, nor a reporting requirement with such ambiguous goals and potentially significant impacts on the fishery. When it comes to setting these allocations, picking winners and losers from among commercial and recreational fishing interests, that should be the job of regional councils, not of Congress. In fact, the entire structure of Magnuson and the council system is designed to encourage stakeholder participation on the councils, from a regional perspective. We need to let the fishery management councils do their job and not have Congress micromanaging these type of decisions. It is unclear, also, why this amendment only targets limited access privilege permits.…”