Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2954, Public Access and Lands Improvement Act, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 3964, Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, the last time California had a severe multiyear drought, something very different happened. Democrats and Republicans, people from the northern part of the State, the southern part, and inland came together around a historic bipartisan set of water reforms.

I was fortunate to help author some of that. I chaired the Water Committee in the State legislature. National newspapers like The New York Times called it the most important thing California had done for water in 60 years.

This bill repeals it. Full stop.

To offer this as a solution would be laughable if it weren't such a serious offense to real solutions in California water.

The Bay Delta Conservation Plan which my friend referenced is over if this bill passes because the premise of that plan is coequal goals for the environment and water supply reliability; and when you preempt that and repeal it, there is no basis for that plan to move forward at all.

You had better include, in fact, some funding for the Federal courts if this bill passes because, instead of a solution, you are going to be unleashing a wave of litigation unlike anything the State of California has ever seen.

It is going to hurt the San Joaquin Valley, and it is going to hurt every other part of the State that needs constructive solutions, not a new water war.

We have over 100 years, Mr. Speaker, of deference by the Federal Government to the State of California and to all other Western States in administering our water rights system. That was made very clear by Chief Justice Rehnquist in California v. The United States in the 1970s.

The principle of State administration of water rights under the public trust doctrine is part of the California Constitution, and the California Supreme Court has made it clear that that is a bedrock of California water law.

The California Legislature, in that historic 2009 package, called that the fundamental principle of California water, and it is repealed by this vastly overreaching expansion of Federal authority offered cynically today as a solution.

I know some people across the aisle like to talk about the 10th Amendment. They like to rail against expansion of Federal authority and Federal overreach. Well, we are living in a very glass house here today, Mr. Speaker, because this is the most overreaching expansion of Federal authority that I could ever imagine on something as basic as water rights in the Western United States.

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