Political Quotes

“There is always the rest of the story. And while this amendment deals with one of the pernicious parts of the legislation that would have been a perpetual contract, it does not deal with the remaining pieces of the Central Valley Improvement Act, which dealt with the issue of how those contracts were to be renegotiated at the end of 40 years. In fact, those parts of the Central Valley Improvement Act said that, in the renegotiation process, the Federal Government needed to take into account the issues of water availability. You know, maybe there's not that much water available and we need to downgrade, or maybe we need to increase the amount of water, take into account the environmental issues. So those very, very important qualifications on how the contracts would be renegotiated disappeared in the underlying bill. You did deal with one of the problems, and that is the perpetuity issue, and we understand that. But, nonetheless, there is a very, very serious problem that remains in the negotiation or the renegotiation of the contracts; and, therefore, the amendment, while dealing with one problem, allows the remaining problems to exist. And those remaining problems are how and under what circumstances is the Federal Government to carry out the negotiations; that is, do we take into account environmental issues, fish in the river or not, and availability of water or not. Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr.…”