David Thomas: “I rise, too, in support of the Crapo amendment. Certainly for those of us in the West there is nothing more important…”

“I rise, too, in support of the Crapo amendment. Certainly for those of us in the West there is nothing more important than water rights and how we handle those water rights, nothing more important to us than to maintain the concept of State allocation of water adjudication. And this threatens that, it preempts State water rights. It has the possibility of doing that. That could result in permanent acquisition of the water rights, which is not something that any of us want to see happen. It extends authority of the Endangered Species Act to USDA. Certainly we have enough difficulties with the way the Endangered Species Act is handled now. This is the last one of the issues. It proposes radical changes to CRP without addressing the reform of the Endangered Species Act. These two issues do not fit together and are very inconsistent. Furthermore, it never was discussed in the committee. I happen to be a member of the Agriculture Committee. This was never debated during consideration of the bill. There are a number of us on the committee who certainly would have fought vigorously to keep this language out of the bill.”