Congressional Western Caucus

Floor Speech

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Mr. SMITH of Missouri. Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Newhouse for yielding and for organizing this Special Order. I thank him for presenting to this body this piece of legislation with all the reforms of the Endangered Species Act. It is something that is extremely important.

Coming from the State of Missouri, we have folks who come from all over the country to hike our trails and to float our rivers. We are also home to the first Ozark National Scenic Riverway designated by a national State park in southern Missouri. So we have many people who come to southeast and south central Missouri to look at our nature, to see the native plants and the native species, which several of them are designated within the Endangered Species Act.

Mr. Newhouse made a comment earlier about only 3 percent of the species come out of the Endangered Species Act, that they come back. By any other measure, that would be a complete failure, and that is why we need these reforms. That is why we need these revisions.

Nowhere is the pain of the Endangered Species Act regulations, no greater place are those burdens felt than in local communities, and that is why we have the legislation, the EMPOWERS Act. And it mandates--not mandates the communities, it mandates the Federal Government to make sure that they get local input from communities in any kind of designation for an Endangered Species Act.

It is common sense. It is an easy approach. It is something that I think we can all get behind since they know their area better.

When you talk about the Endangered Species Act, this is something that is very personal to me, and it is personal to the people that I represent in southern Missouri.

Just a few years ago, we had a young lady, 13 or 14 years old, who was floating with her family on the White River, and a very unfortunate event happened where she got caught up underneath a broken dam and she lost her life. That family outing turned into a day that they will never forget, a day that I won't forget.

The big issue here is that dam shouldn't have been there, or it should have been rebuilt or replaced. You see, the dam was broken in a flood several years earlier but was never replaced and couldn't be torn out, even with the local community wanting to tear out the dam, the reason being because of an endangered species, one called the Ozark hellbender. It is a salamander. It was found in the White River near the dam, so that could be a resting place for this endangered species.

Because of that, a young lady will never graduate high school. She will never go to college. She will never walk down the aisle.

That is unacceptable. We are fortunate now that dam no longer exists, but it shouldn't have taken the loss of a life for Federal bureaucrats to get their act together to get that dam removed.

So this is one example that is extremely personal to the people I represent and it is extremely personal to me why we need these reforms in the Endangered Species Act.

Government should not stand in the way of safety. An endangered species should not have more importance than a human life.

I am looking forward to these reforms. These reforms bring sanity back to the Endangered Species Act through commonsense reforms, Missouri commonsense reforms, reforms such as transparency of the rulemaking process.

It helps put a stop to nuisance lawsuits from extreme environmental groups, using the best science available and, critically, bringing local communities into the decision-making process through my bill, the EMPOWERS Act.

We all agree commonsense review is needed, but what we don't need is redundant and unnecessary paperwork that only serves to keep Washington bureaucrats employed.

Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Newhouse for having me here tonight. He is doing the Lord's work, and I appreciate the honor of being here with him.

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