Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. This is always a difficult issue. It is a California issue, and I want to point out that the California delegation is not evenly split on this. It is unevenly split. The reason is the gentleman just talked about what he called ``facts.'' His points of what he was making are not true. As the ranking member indicated, the chair, she indicated that this is public water, public water that is transported in the State by publicly financed canals, both by the Federal Government and by the State government. This is water that is supposed to balance for all California. It is all publicly owned and distributed, mostly to the private sector in the San Joaquin Valley. Now, we have a drought. Everybody knows it. It is a disaster. The President declared it that. What we ought to be doing in Congress is paying for that disaster, like we pay for every other disaster. This bill doesn't do it. I was a coauthor of the original bill, but I am not cosponsoring this one, and I am not supporting this one because what this does is not deal with the problem of getting money to California to build the infrastructure that we need for off-stream storage and things like that. What it does is disrupt a balanced system that has flexibility. We have been through the worst drought, and there have been flexible releases given this year. We solved it administratively. But to put it in law I think is very harmful.…”