Political Quotes

“I am very pleased to yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. McClintock), the chairman of the subcommittee that developed this legislation on the Natural Resources Committee. Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I compliment the gentlelady from California on stating the opposite of this bill with remarkable precision. It does not repeal 20 years of California water law; it restores it by restoring the allocation that was agreed to by a broad bipartisan coalition in the Bay-Delta Accord of 1994. In fact, at that time, the Democratic Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, assured all parties that this agreement would be honored by the State and Federal governments. His promise was broken first by his own Department and most recently when a Federal court deemed the delta smelt to be more important than the livelihoods of thousands of Central Valley farmworkers. Hundreds of billions of gallons of water that these communities had already paid for and depended upon were simply expropriated and blissfully and cavalierly dumped into the Pacific Ocean, turning much of California's fertile Central Valley into a dust bowl. This bill redeems the promise made to the people of California and restores the allocations that were agreed to. We hear: Well, that was then and this is now, and the science has changed. What they are referring to is not science; it is ideology masquerading as science.…”