Jared Huffman: “I thank the gentleman from Colorado. Like the gentleman from Alabama, I do represent a coastal district, a fishing…”

“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.…”