Wayne Gilchrest: “I also want to reemphasize the participation of the gentleman from California, Duke Cunningham, in this legislation. His…”

“I also want to reemphasize the participation of the gentleman from California, Duke Cunningham, in this legislation. His efforts started back in 1992. It has been mentioned on the floor here a number of times that the United States only has a small fishing fleet related to tuna fish. The reason for that is that our fishing fleet virtually became extinct because of the embargo that we have placed on importing tuna using encirclement of dolphins. Now while we want to protect the dolphins, and this legislation will in fact protect the dolphins, Duke Cunningham and a number of other people along the southern coast of southern California also wanted to protect the livelihood of individuals that fished throughout the Pacific Ocean, especially the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, to pay their mortgages and raise their children and have a quality of life and standard of living that all of us would want to achieve. And because of the mismanagement of the legislation and because of the lack of ability to come to an international agreement, most of those people lost their jobs. So what happens? Do we ignore that? I think we, as human beings, are intelligent enough to do two things: Provide jobs for people that need to extract natural resources and, also, protect those natural resources. And that is exactly what this legislation does.”