Peter DeFazio

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I certainly don't know what is best for the Mark Twain Forest. And you had five Members sign your letter, so that would leave 430 who probably don't think they have any clue either about what would be appropriate in your forest. We do have a committee of jurisdiction. There are times when the Forest Service bureaucracy is doing things that I do not approve of. I don't believe that the committee has done any oversight on this issue. I don't know if the issue was brought to the chairman before it was offered as an amendment here on the floor. This amendment wasn't offered in committee, nor was--I was there, there was no discussion of this in committee. It's a very, very localized problem. I would suggest again, as we did earlier, that, first off, this bill is not going to become law before they're going to burn this winter--which is when they burn in the Northwest. I assume they do the same thing in your district, when the risk of fire is down because of other vegetation and when the moisture levels are higher. This isn't going to be law by then--if it ever became law. If you're doing it to get their attention, perhaps you will get their attention if they're listening. But I would suggest that the gentleman initiate a process through the committee. Ask for a meeting with the Forest Service under the auspices of the chair and attempt to get answers to the questions he has. Doing it through this particular amendment is really not going to accomplish those goals in time if indeed there are immediate plans to go forward this winter. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I'm prepared to close.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, actually, this wouldn't apply just to the Rim fire, as I read it. The gentleman can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe it applies to any area that burned in 2013 anywhere in the United States of America, which would certainly include both Democratic and Republican districts. Fires are not very partisan in their destruction. So that is an incredibly broad brush. That would mean there could be no analysis done by the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, or anybody else, before salvage efforts might begin on forests all across America. If you're bidding on a salvage sale, it isn't your job to care about whether or not the road you're going to build in or the area you're going to access is subject to the slope slumping when the rain starts in a couple of months or the snows come in the inner mountain regions or up in the Northwest. So this is extraordinarily and overly broad. We've already exempted things up to 10,000 acres. I believe there's a better way to approach this. The other gentleman from California talked about getting in there and then we would have the money for strike teams. I would say that's just a little bit backwards. These are public assets. This fire is a disaster not only for the people of your district, the people of California, but the people of the Nation, particularly with the proximity to one of the Nation's most loved parks. If we did have a strike team, we could have areas like that surveyed by spring and plans in place by spring to know where it might be appropriate to salvage and where it isn't appropriate to salvage, and it would still be valuable. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time a I may consume. Again, this is an area where we do have some grounds for potential agreement. Part of the problem is the Forest Service budget. Not only are they spending half their budget on fighting fires, they've had a brain drain because of cuts in personnel and staffing, and they really don't have the personnel to go out. I suggested a number of years ago, the last time we had a salvage rider, that a great alternative would be to have the Forest Service establish a strike team to go out to major fires--in fact, while they're probably still burning--and begin to map out a recovery effort--where it might be appropriate to go in and do some salvage, where there are critical watersheds at risk and there's going to have to be some immediate mitigation with the planting of grass or other efforts to mitigate problems that will come with the rainy season in a few months in California. I believe there is a better way to get there. But there's a new kind of current trend online. It's called throw-back Thursday. To me, this is really throw-back Thursday to one of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever adopted by this body back in the 1990s, which was a massive salvage rider. I have participated in a much more discrete, individual process when I was first here as a sophomore Member of Congress with Senator Mark Hatfield from Oregon. We sat down with an area that had been burned and we negotiated and legislated a salvage which preserved the areas that needed to be preserved. There was a potential for 186 million board feet. We ended up legislating somewhere around 70 million board feet. The industry was disappointed. The environmentalists were appalled. But in the end, we got no additional sedimentation, we didn't get any slope slumping, and we did get 70 million board feet of timber out of there. We didn't build a road into a sensitive, roadless area. We did it with helicopter logging. And the Forest Service still made money. So there are ways to do this. But this, I don't think, is the best way to go forward. The underlying legislation already allows significant waivers of NEPA. Any project less than 10,000 acres is not required to go through an analysis. But this would allow a project to move forward no matter what the size or where it's located, without judicial review, if the project is salvaged, dead, damaged, or downed timber in an area impacted by fire this year. We don't really know yet. I don't think a lot of the areas of Rim fire have yet been surveyed. Certainly, the Forest Service doesn't have the assets to do and find out what the impacts were--where the spot burns are, where the through burns are, what the conditions are, what areas would be critical to surviving wildlife, what areas are critical to watersheds and how we will deal with those areas, how we're going to recover the recreation in that area in the future, what would happen with building of roads and logging and salvage logging in those areas. So I believe that this is a bridge too far in terms of expediting recovery and/or potentially salvage efforts, and I would oppose the amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. I thank the gentleman. Great name. We're really good at messaging around here, particularly on the Republican side. It's got a great name: National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2013. Now we've heard just earlier that this is about things that are in critical short supply, vital for our national security and for emergencies. None of those things are true. They could be a miniscule part of this. But what this bill does is say that any mining project anywhere on any public lands in the United States of America does not constitute a significant Federal action. No matter how large, no matter how sensitive the area, no matter how proximate to the Grand Canyon and national treasures or how proximate to Yellowstone or how proximate to some critical watershed, that's not a major Federal action. So it's exempt from NEPA. That's one very big problem with this legislation. I think there's a lot of members of the public even living in very conservative areas of the country who would find that a little bit of overreach. And then, again, these critical minerals are not critical. Sand and gravel are now critical. Anything is critical that you can find on public land. Any dirt of any sort, you are going to get an expedited process. That's a little bit of overreach. We're going to have a great amendment by Mr. Lowenthal, who will use an actual definition from the National Research Council for strategic and critical minerals. So if this is on the up-and-up, the other side will accept that amendment and we will have these expedited processes, which still cause us some anxiety; but they will only be for truly strategic and critical materials, not everything and anything on any public land. Secondly, most Americans would be appalled--those who don't already know--to learn that we give away all of the minerals on our public lands: gold, uranium, platinum. No matter what it is, we give it away. We do not charge. Unlike many western States, unlike Native American tribal lands, unlike private lands, unlike most foreign countries, we don't charge a royalty for extracting minerals from our lands, no matter how valuable, no matter how many billions of dollars that that load might be worth of platinum or gold or uranium. No charge. Give it away. Twice this body has passed, on a bipartisan basis, historically, a modest royalty on the extraction of depletable valuable minerals from Federal lands. I've been very involved in that in the past. In the summer, I went to the Rules Committee when this bill was first going to come up.

Mr. DeFAZIO. They admit there are no parliamentary issues, no scoring issues. In fact, with my amendment, an 8 percent royalty would raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And those hundreds of millions of dollars would be used to remediate hundreds of thousands of mines in the West that are polluting the environment, polluting our rivers. I have a foreign company in my district that, yeah, they put up their million-dollar bond. Unfortunately, they left the country, and it's a $14 million cleanup. The public is going to get stuck with that. It's polluting the river, killing fish, and the taxpayers are going to have to pay for it. My amendment would have raised the resources necessary to deal with hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines in the western United States that need remediation and mitigation, but the Republicans were afraid to vote on that amendment. Some in the West know it's a problem. They didn't want to vote against fixing the problem. Others just say you should run the government like a business, except when it comes to valuable minerals. We want to give them away. We don't really care about the deficit.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, the President has come to Congress, as he should, to ask authority for a discretionary military action. The sad fact is he doesn't have to because of a defective law passed by Congress in reaction to Nixon's bombing of Cambodia in 1973. The bill that Congress passed is a shadow of our constitutional authority regarding war and peace. This President has come to us. That's good. The result is not yet known. It has already resulted perhaps in a diplomatic breakthrough. That is also good. But in the future we need to make certain that each and every President comes to us when we're not defending against immediate interests of the United States or against imminent or real attack of our troops or our citizens. So I'll be reintroducing legislation to fix the war power authority. In the future, in circumstances such as this, it will require that the President come to the Congress before launching a discretionary military action. We must fix this law. This is a good precedent this President has set. Let's make it the law of the United States of America.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today I will vote for H.R. 1911, the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013. Due to congressional inaction student loan rates doubled to 6.8% on July 1st. This is not the bill I would've written but it was necessary to come to an agreement so that today's students don't see their interest rates double. It would have been my preference to pass the legislation introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren that gives students the same low interest rates that the Federal Reserve grants Wall Street banks. With passage of H.R. 1911, this year's students will only pay a 3.8% interest rate when they go back to school in the fall. This rate will be locked in for the entire life of their loan. Although the interest rates will likely increase for future students under this bill, they should remain below the current 6.8% for the next few years. This is a short term solution to the long term problem of rising college costs and increasing student debt. I stand ready to work with my colleagues to address the issue of college affordability including student loan interest rates in the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is to remove from the bill provisions that would mandate leasing off of the fabulous Bristol Bay area of Alaska. Now, I've said this bill is a little bit like Groundhog Day because we have passed it before, and we talked about that yesterday, but this is about a bizarre version of Groundhog Day and why I am forced to offer this amendment. Actually, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, I traveled up to the spill with then-Subcommittee Chairman George Miller and saw what an extraordinary mess had been created, something that in those cold waters is very difficult to deal with and very persistent and caused tremendous damage to the fisheries. Congress chose then, in 1989, under President George H.W. Bush, to revoke the leases in the Bristol Bay area in order to protect this $2 billion a year fishery. In fact, the American people, the taxpayers of the United States of America, paid $100 million to buy back those leases that had been sold in the 1980s. That moratorium remained in place until then-President George W. Bush lifted the moratorium. The Obama administration has done the right thing and reversed George W. Bush's decision and excluded Bristol Bay from drilling in the 2012- 2017 OCS leasing program. So we had the first President Bush agree that a permanent protection of that area was warranted because of the $2- billion-a-year renewable fishery and other precious resources, the cold water, the difficult conditions. George W. Bush then reversed that, and President Obama has reinstated a moratorium. Now this bill would mandate leasing off of Bristol Bay. Obviously, there's always division over these issues, but there is strong public opposition to drilling in Bristol Bay--55 tribes, Native Alaskan associations, and fishing organizations are opposed to the drilling in that area. National environmental groups like Trout Unlimited, Wild Salmon Center, and Natural Resources Defense Council also support this amendment. This is a precious and irreplaceable area. One major spill in that area would devastate the environment, the fishery that supports thousands of jobs in Alaska. Actually jobs all up and down the west coast of the United States are dependent upon the fabulous fishery of Bristol Bay, both the commercial and the sport fishing. I have guides in Oregon who spend their summers in Alaska guiding in the Bristol Bay area. It attracts people from around the world. We should not put this extraordinary resource at risk in this bill for some possible, potential future oil revenues in a State which is already quite rich in oil, where the former Naval Petroleum Reserve has been leased but, as in the case of many leases that the oil industry holds, is not developed. That is why it was the Naval Petroleum Reserve. There are known and large resources under that area of Alaska. The balance is clearly in favor of protecting this area, not another area to drill given the resources already available in Alaska. I had to do a so-called ``pay-for.'' Last night we passed the Cassidy amendment, which increases the Federal deficit by $15 billion--excuse me, $14,999,999,970--over 30 years by lifting the cap on revenue sharing with the Gulf States. That's costing, they say, $1 less than $500 million a year. That didn't have to be paid for. They waived the rules. But because I want to protect this fabulous resource, they're saying you're forgoing potential possible future revenues for the government, you must pay for it. So unfortunately, given that, I had to move to strike title III so we could protect this resource. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. DeFAZIO

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. If the gentleman would go to the microphone, I would like to ask the gentleman a question, and I will yield to him. Your assertion is that Mexico asked the Government of the United States to include a waiver of our financial services reform provisions in section 105 in this agreement, and the Obama administration didn't agree to that but Mexico signed the agreement anyway, and now you're trying to help out the government of Mexico to get something that you claim they wanted but didn't get from this administration; is that correct? I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, that's what you just said.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, please clarify.

Mr. DeFAZIO. I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters)

Mr. DeFAZIO. Okay. With that, I would reclaim my time. I could ask to have the record read back, but I won't because it would delay things. But you said this is what Mexico wanted. You did say that just before as you spoke. Now you're saying that you believe that this is reflecting the spirit of the agreement. Now I will accept that. You believe that changing the agreement by waiving our financial services law is in the spirit of the agreement. I don't believe that. Maxine Waters, who serves on the Committee on Financial Services, doesn't agree with that. And, unfortunately, the President of the United States doesn't agree with that, so this bill is going nowhere. It's not going to get out of the Senate. They have a bipartisan bill over there that doesn't waive Dodd-Frank that they could pass by unanimous consent. We could be done with this. But no, we're not going to do that; we're going to play games. So here's what the President said. He's got something to say about this in the end, he really does: The administration cannot support H.R. 1613, as reported by the House Committee on Natural Resources because of the unnecessary, extraneous provisions that seriously detract from the bill. Most significantly, the administration strongly objects to exempting actions taken by public companies in accordance with the transboundary hydrocarbon agreements from requirements section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act and the Securities and Exchange Commission's natural resource extraction disclosure rule. As a practical matter, this provision would waive the requirement for the disclosure of any payments made by resource extraction companies to the United States or foreign governments in accordance with a transboundary hydrocarbon agreement. The provision directly and negatively impacts U.S. efforts to increase transparency and accountability, particularly in the oil, gas, and minerals sectors. So if we proceed with this bill in this form, the President will veto the bill, and we'll be back again. And how many months that'll take, I don't know. But to assert that somehow Mexico wanted this, or the administration wanted it, and they just kind of forgot to put it in the agreement, and now we're helping them out, even though the administration says they don't want it, and I don't know what the government of Mexico says--and then there was another issue raised about confidentiality provisions. In fact, the SEC has more than adequate capabilities to do general exemptions in sections 12(h) and 36 of the Securities and Exchange Act. They could issue exemptions from this disclosure requirement under this authority, should it be warranted. In fact, the SEC today confirmed with us that there is nothing that would prevent the SEC from issuing exemptions should they be warranted. Now, the objection here is to waiving any and all future agreements from any public disclosure of payments to foreign governments. That's what you're doing here today. It's not about this one agreement or problems that might crop up with Mexico. That could be accommodated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It's about doing away with a critical section of Dodd- Frank. And if you want to do that, why not bring it up in the Financial Services Committee, have a hearing, have a debate, send us a bill and repeal it. But don't try and do it in the dark of night in the hope that if you attach it to this agreement, which we all agree should be entered into, Mexico wants, U.S. wants, that you're doing anybody a favor. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Further reserving the right to object, if you're going to waive the rules of the House to create $15 billion in new deficit, I don't know why we need unanimous consent to waive the rules yet again to create $14,999,999,970 in deficit. I guess that makes a difference somewhere to someone, so I would not object. I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. DeFAZIO. Continuing to reserve the right to object, so the bottom line here, if I can define it for our colleagues in simple language, is the net difference in waiving the rules of the House of $30, apparently the total waiving of the rules of the House to allow additional deficit spending. In contradiction of what the other side of the aisle normally proposes, there is somehow a dramatic difference between $14,999,999,970 of new debt and deficit and $15 billion, which requires a substitution of this amendment, because it's my understanding it would somehow then violate the Budget Act twice. Is that accurate? Even though you've waived the rule and we can go ahead with the amendment, you would be violating the Budget Act twice. So we just want to say we're only violating the Budget Act once; is that the difference?

Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We could have done this bill as a suspension bill 2 days ago. That is, it probably could have passed the House by unanimous consent, which is very rare, if this provision had not been added. There is consensus on both sides of the aisle that it's critical that we move forward with this agreement with Mexico to deal with shared resources in the western Gulf of Mexico. However, the Republicans have chosen to use this as a vehicle to launch yet another attack on Wall Street reform, on the Dodd-Frank reforms, which is totally unnecessary. Obviously, it was presented as: it's potentially, possibly, maybe a future problem for American oil companies if the Mexicans change their law. Under their existing law, there is no problem. We're going to see disclosure, and it will be disclosure by Mexican companies that are bidding or by American companies that are bidding or by any other foreign company that is bidding in the gulf. You will see full disclosure, so no one would be at a commercial or at an economic disadvantage. But the premise here is that, someday, Mexico might change their law, and therefore our companies would have to disclose and theirs wouldn't. If that did happen at some potential possible future date by some potential possible future Mexican Government, then the Securities and Exchange Commission has adequate authority, even under the Dodd-Frank reforms, to waive that requirement because it would be in the public interest and commercial interest of the United States of America to waive that provision in this instance. Now, that's dealing with Mexico. The second problem with what they're proposing here is that they actually want to totally repeal this section of Dodd-Frank for any future agreements with any other nations on a transboundary basis, which could certainly include Canada and, likely, with the conflicts that are looming over the Arctic Ocean and the resources up there, with Russia. Now, I get pretty nervous when I start thinking that U.S. companies are going to be negotiating secret agreements with Russia and that somehow these are going to protect our taxpayers, that they're going to protect our shareholders, that they're going to protect our public interest. That, I think, is really a very, very, very disturbing trend with this bill. So the issue is: do we want to get this done? If we want to get it done, this is not the way to do it, because this bill, as amended by the Republicans to change the agreement and waive the rules for oil companies so they can make secret payments to the Government of Mexico, that will not pass the Senate. So we'll have yet another one-House bill, and we will further delay what the Republican side wants to expedite, which is offshore oil and gas development. I would suggest that, rather than expediting things here, we're messing them up, and I would suggest to my colleagues that we oppose this bill in this form, that we bring it back as a clean authorization with the existing agreement with Mexico, and that we move forward and get it done. I expect, if we got it done here, we could bring it up again and get it done in a day or under suspension or perhaps, I think, with unanimous consent, even between today and tomorrow. Then the Senate would pass it with unanimous consent, and we'd be done with it. Instead, we're going to have yet another example of the dysfunction of the Congress because we're going to pass a version here that cannot pass in the United States Senate, and then, I guess, the Republicans will try and blame the Senate for not wanting to waive the rules and allow oil companies to make secret payments to the Government of Mexico in order to garner commercial deals. With that, I reserve the balance of my time.