The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“CALIFORNIA'S WATER CRISIS” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the in the House section section on pages H1320-H1323 on March 22.
The Department provides billions in unemployment insurance, which peaked around 2011 though spending had declined before the pandemic. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, claimed the Department funds "ineffective and duplicative services" and overregulates the workplace.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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CALIFORNIA'S WATER CRISIS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Kiggans of Virginia). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 9, 2023, the gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, we have had a series of very heavy storms in California. We have gotten a lot of water, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about what is happening to that water.
This is a photo I took a few days ago at the Folsom Dam; 20,000 cubic feet is being released per second where it is sent on its way to the Pacific Ocean. That staggering amount of water is not available to California farmers, businesses, or residents.
Meanwhile, State-sponsored billboards tell people to put a bucket in their shower so they can save that water for gardening. Restaurants are prohibited from serving their customers drinking water unless the customer specifically asks for it.
Here are some of the other emergency drought restrictions that have been in effect: Turn off decorative water fountains. Use an automatic shutoff nozzle on your water hose. Use a broom, not water to clean sidewalks and driveways. Commercial, industrial, and institutional decorative grass should not be watered; same for the common areas in homeowner associations.
Down here you can see all the enforcement, all the penalties if you don't follow this. It says here, for local jurisdictions, for urban water suppliers, if needed, exercise authority to adopt more stringent local conservation measures. Some local authorities have done just that.
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District began sending government employees into residents' homes to install flow restrictors. Once installed, you are also barred from watering anything outside, and you are not able to use two appliances needing water at once.
One resident said: ``You have to take what's called a Navy shower . .
. 2 minutes. . . .''
In Los Angeles, they have the water police, where municipalities pay individuals to drive around and check for leaky swimming pools, green lawns, or other signs of water use.
This is just the beginning. In 2018, the California Legislature adopted a statewide limit of 55 gallons of indoor water use per person per day; so a single person living alone can't take a shower and do a load of laundry in the same day. Yet, last year, the legislature decided even this was too generous and reduced the allotted water to 42 gallons per day.
Then, of course, there is the impact on farmers. For both 2021 and 2022, surface water deliveries dropped by 43 percent. An estimated 752,000 acres lay idle in 2022.
The general manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District said:
``We typically plant 100,000 acres of rice in our district. And this last year we planted 1,000 acres. It is just a massive, massive impact,'' he said.
As a result, $1.7 billion in crop revenues were lost in 2022, and an estimated 19,400 jobs.
These drastic sacrifices have been required of Californians because of a supposed lack of water. We prayed for rain, and then the rain comes, and this happens.
Here is the overall impact of this image and others like it throughout the State. So far this year, October through mid-March, the net outflow, this is after pumping, from the delta into the San Francisco Bay is 11.6 million acre-feet.
Meanwhile, the State has only pumped 1.0 million acre-feet into the California Aqueduct, and the Federal Bureau of Reclamation has only pumped 826,000 acre-feet into the Delta Mendota Canal.
With this record precipitation, that means 13 percent of delta outflows have been captured. The rest is squandered.
If we were able to capture this water, we wouldn't have to worry about floods, and we wouldn't have to worry about droughts. Communities wouldn't be put at risk. Farmers wouldn't have to fallow their fields. Citizens wouldn't have to take shorter showers.
The reason we aren't capturing it isn't because this water is somehow inherently elusive. It is because there is simply no place to put it.
California has not seen a new water storage project in at least 30 years, despite many promising potential projects that have been in the planning stages since the 1950s.
In 2014, California voters said enough is enough and passed a $7.5 billion water bond. Build water storage, the voters said. Yet, nothing has been built. In the 9 years since, no significant project has materialized. Endless litigation, mind-numbing bureaucracy and, most of all, a lack of political will have been a recipe for inaction.
The executive director of the most significant project, Sites Reservoir, said: My experience is that for every 1 year of construction, you have about 3 years of permitting.
It doesn't need to be this way. The massive Folsom Dam, of which this is the auxiliary spillway, holds about a million acre-feet of water and took less than a decade in the late 1940s and early 1950s to build.
In addition to failing to build any new in-stream or off-stream reservoirs, California has also rejected all but one proposed desalination plant, and is taking advantage of a small fraction of the potential for water treatment.
Even now, amidst the current record precipitation, our State and Federal pumps still aren't operating at full capacity.
In short, this uniquely Californian absurdity of alternating or even simultaneous floods and droughts is not some inevitable by-product of our climate or geography. It is the direct product of political failure. We have more than enough tools at our disposal to have a sustainable, secure supply of water for all users.
This image needs to be a wake-up call for California's leaders at the State and Federal level. No more excuses. Let's solve this problem now. Let's end this era of floods and droughts, of shorter showers, and fallow fields. Let's liberate our constituents from this regime of enforced scarcity and give Californians the abundant supply of water they deserve.
This is California's problem, but it affects the entire country. California agriculture feeds the Nation and the world, and we could never have become the State that we are, or at least once were, a State that used to lead the country in so many good ways, without the dams, aqueducts, pipes, tunnels, canals, plants, pumping stations built by previous generations.
We need to summon the can-do spirit of our forebearers, and we don't even need their ingenuity. We just need basic competence.
Effective water management was indispensable to California's 20th century rise and is just as indispensable to reversing its 21st century decline.
Recent Court Decisions
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, this last week, two court decisions in California delivered a near-fatal blow to one of the worst laws that has ever been passed, the California law known as AB 5, that destroyed the livelihoods of countless people, wiping out hundreds of professions in our State.
These court decisions have significant ramifications for three matters of national importance: First, the recently re-introduced PRO Act, which seeks to nationalize California's ban on independent work; second, a proposed Department of Labor rule that seeks to do much the same thing through the bureaucracy; and third, the upcoming confirmation hearings for President Biden's nominee for Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, who, as California's Labor Secretary, was an architect and lead enforcer of AB 5.
The PRO Act, the Labor rule, Julie Su: It is a multi-pronged assault on the right to earn a living in America, a concerted strategy to limit or eliminate the gig economy, freelancing, independent contracting, self-employment, and other alternate work arrangements that entire careers are based on and entire industries have been built around.
If this strategy is successful, it will be devastating for the American economy and American workers. We know that because of the devastation California has already experienced.
When he signed AB 5 in late 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom rendered countless Californians, spanning hundreds of professions, unable to earn a living in our State. Videographers and caricaturists, transcriptionists and interpreters, technicians and engineers, analysts and consultants, musicians and conductors, artists and dancers, writers and editors, coaches and trainers, teachers and tutors, nurses and doulas, hardly an industry or profession is unscathed.
The consequences go well beyond just the affected professions. To take one example, thousands and thousands of truckers are at risk of being taken off the road, throwing supply chains into chaos.
AB 5 is a law so bad that California voters have repudiated it, and the legislature has granted over 100 exemptions to professions with enough influence at the Capitol.
These two developments, the clearly expressed will of California voters, and the scattershot exemption process, were the subjects of last week's court decisions.
In the first decision, the California Court of Appeal unanimously upheld Proposition 22, an initiative passed by California voters in 2020. Prop 22 repealed AB 5 for one category of independent contractors, app-based drivers.
Uber, to take one example, was going to have to terminate up to 80 percent of its drivers because of AB 5, and nearly had to stop operating in our State altogether. Their drivers, who prize the flexibility of being able to switch on the app whenever they want to work, were appalled at the prospect of being assigned to fixed shifts, minimum work hour requirements, and more, if they were able to drive at all.
So Prop 22 was proposed to preserve the independent contracting model for these drivers and enable services like Uber and Lyft to continue in California.
In November of 2020, Prop 22 passed overwhelmingly with 59 percent of the vote. This is the one time that AB 5 has been subject to a direct vote of the people, and California voters decisively rejected it.
Yet, tellingly, the special interest groups behind AB 5 then tried to defy the will of voters, tying up the initiative in arcane legal challenges; but last Tuesday, a State Appellate Court put an end to this anti-democratic nonsense. The Court respected the will of voters and upheld the initiative.
The Justices acknowledged the people of California had chosen to overturn AB 5 and protect independent contracting. So, for the dozens of Democrat Members of Congress sponsoring the PRO Act, take notice: your position is at odds with the voters of even my own very blue State.
There was a second decision on AB 5 last week of perhaps even greater significance. This one, also a unanimous ruling, was from a Federal Appeals Court. Overruling a district court decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in favor of independent contractors who alleged AB 5 violates the United States Constitution.
Specifically, it is an Equal Protection violation. By granting over 100 exemptions to AB 5, the Court wrote, the legislature has not only refuted its own justification for the law, but it has picked and chosen who is allowed to work and who isn't, without any rational basis.
Indeed, the court referred to the ``. . . piecemeal fashion in which the exemptions were granted,'' saying this ``lends credence to Plaintiffs' allegations that the exemptions were the result of the
`lobbying' and `backroom dealing' as opposed to adherence to the stated purpose of the legislation.''
The court wrote that who is subject to the law, and who isn't, could plausibly be ``attributed to animus rather than reason,'' and that the State's policy of now enforcing AB 5 on some but not others, borders on corruption, pure spite, or naked favoritism.
For this reason, the court found that the constitutional case against AB 5 passes the rational-basis test, which is notoriously difficult to pass. Under that standard, a court will only strike down a law if there is not ``any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for'' it.
In this case, the court explained that ``even under this `fairly forgiving' standard of review, we conclude that . . . Plaintiffs plausibly alleged that AB 5 . . . violates the Equal Protection Clause.''
Why in the world would a law that, per the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, lacks any rational basis be transformed into national policy, ensnaring millions of Americans in its web of corruption, animus, and economic failure?
Why would we take a law so bad that legislatures felt the need to unconstitutionally award 100 exemptions to their friends and say this is our model for the American workforce?
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There is no good reason at all, no good reason why a law that the voters of deep-blue California rejected should be the template for national labor relations, as the PRO Act seeks to do.
There is no reason why a law that cannot be justified by any reasonably conceivable state of facts should be imposed by executive fiat nationwide, as the Biden administration's labor rule would do.
There is no reason why an architect and ruthless enforcer of that law, former California Labor Secretary Julie Su, should be elevated to the highest labor office in the land.
Julie Su's historic failure to deliver unemployment checks to millions of Californians, along with her allowance of the largest fraud of taxpayer dollars in history, are easily disqualifying from the standpoint of competence, but it is her mistreatment of California workers through the ruthless enforcement of AB 5 even during the COVID shutdowns that truly makes her unfit for this position.
The voters of California repudiated Julie Su with the passage of Prop. 22. Two separate appeals courts repudiated Su with last week's decisions.
It is time for President Biden to withdraw this nomination. If he refuses, I urge the United States Senate to join California voters, California judges, and Federal judges in rejecting this nominee.
Honoring the Life and Memory of Rex Hime
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, in recent weeks, my district has lost several of its most distinguished citizens. I want to share a few words about their lives and the legacy they have left in our communities.
Madam Speaker, I would like to take a moment to honor the life and memory of Rex Hime, a committed public servant, veteran, native Californian, and friend to many.
Rex's life was guided by a commitment to serving others and a work hard, play hard attitude that endeared him to people across California. In fact, Rex's habit of regularly walking the halls of the California State Capitol in Sacramento and testifying in a Hawaiian shirt rather than the customary suit and tie was by some accounts singlehandedly responsible for relaxing the dress code at the capitol building, which is appreciated by many.
Rarely would Rex let a meeting or conference call end without making everyone laugh and lightening the mood of the conversation. Rex also spread joy to others through serving as the chair, vice chair, and board member of the Cal Expo & State Fair for over 20 years. His passion for bringing joy to others through the fair was widely recognized, as five different Governors from both political parties continued to appoint Rex to the California State Fair Board.
Rex's service to his community and country extended far beyond the fair. He served in both the Army Reserve and California National Guard, retiring as a major in 1990. Rex was also a member of the California Task Force on Violence Prevention, a regent of the University of California, and president of the Cal Aggie Alumni Association.
Apart from his community work, Rex worked as president and CEO of the California Business Properties Association for 37 years and was often instrumental in protecting taxpayers and helping craft legislation that served as models for States across the country.
I am honored to have known Rex. He was a devoted husband and father, and our community and California will never forget the impact that Rex Hime had and continues to have on our lives through his service and advocacy work throughout his 75 years.
Honoring the Memory of Martin Harmon
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, I rise to honor the memory of Martin Harmon, a philanthropist, entrepreneur, and beloved member of the Roseville community who passed away in February at the age of 88.
Martin lifted the lives of thousands of members of the community through his charitable foundation, which supported hospitals, churches, cancer research, substance abuse recovery programs, the arts, disaster relief efforts, and children's programs throughout the Sacramento area.
He impressed upon his family the importance of making a positive difference and is survived by his cherished wife, Kathryn Harmon; 9 children; 33 grandchildren; and 29 great-grandchildren.
Martin also embodied the American entrepreneurial spirit. He started his career at age 9 by selling cookware door to door during World War II and later parlayed his experience working behind a butcher's counter into opening his own market and meat-packing company as a teenager.
At the age of 27, Martin purchased his first nursing home in Auburn, which presaged his future as a developer and contractor. Martin's wide-
ranging developments, from medical office buildings and shopping centers to subdivisions and apartments, leave behind a profound legacy for his children and grandchildren.
I was honored to know Martin, and our community will never forget the impact that Martin Harmon has had and will continue to have on our lives for many years to come.
Honoring the Life and Memory of Paul Dugan
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, I would like to take a moment to honor the life and memory of Dr. Paul Dugan, a committed physician and pillar of the Roseville community who sadly passed away in February at the age of 92.
Dr. Dugan served countless members of the Roseville community and Sacramento area through his work as a physician. His passion for caring for others through medicine, sparked by an early affliction of polio, is abundantly clear through his life's work. Ever since moving to Roseville in 1963, Dr. Dugan regularly spent weekends doing house calls, serving uninsured patients and friends of patients, and tirelessly advocating for public health awareness.
Paul and his wife, Olga, even started the first-ever mass CPR training program, Start-A-Heart, in 1978. The program ran continuously for 19 years and was later replicated as CPR Saturday across the country and internationally by the American Red Cross. Dr. Dugan doubtlessly saved countless lives through his leadership in organizing and executing the Start-A-Heart program and his service as a physician.
Dr. Dugan's passion for serving others extended beyond medicine and beyond Roseville. Dr. Dugan served on the Roseville Planning Commission, helping shape Roseville into the city it is today. He served as president of the Roseville Chamber of Commerce and was recognized by community members as Roseville's Citizen of the Year in 1978 and 1992. Dr. Dugan was also selected to serve on the California Board of Medical Examiners by both Governor Ronald Reagan and Governor Jerry Brown, and he assisted in credentialing the UC Davis School of Medicine.
I was honored to know Paul, and our community will never forget Dr. Paul Dugan and the tremendous impact he has had on his patients and residents of Roseville through his service as a physician and leader in the community.
Honoring the Memory of Greg Van Dusen
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, I rise to honor the memory of Greg Van Dusen, a pillar of the Sacramento-area community.
Greg was born in Sacramento in 1950 and, from an early age, had a passion for serving others and for sports. Greg's service and leadership were recognized by his peers after he served as student body president in 1968, and he later served a 12-month combat tour in Vietnam.
After returning from Vietnam, Greg combined his passion for service and sports by working tirelessly to facilitate the move of the Sacramento Kings from Kansas City to Sacramento in 1985. As a result of Greg's efforts, generations of Sacramento-area residents have become diehard Kings fans, although, admittedly, it has been pretty tough in many recent years. The team's somewhat unexpected success this season, I think, is a tremendous tribute to Greg.
Greg was also a devoted father and grandfather, helping shape his three sons into the men they are today. He always looked forward to visits from his grandkids, attending their sporting events and teaching them life lessons. His son Brett remembers him as ``a brilliant mind; a hardworking, compassionate father and grandfather; and always willing to help anyone who asked.''
I was truly honored to know Greg. He was a good friend. Our community will never forget the impact that Greg Van Dusen has had and will continue to have on our lives through his passion for serving others.
Honoring the Life and Memory of Allan Zaremberg
Mr. KILEY. Madam Speaker, I would like to take a moment to honor the life and memory of Allan Zaremberg, a beloved member of the Sacramento-
area community and a kindhearted public servant.
Allan's impact has been felt over 40 years at the California State Capitol, including for 23 years as president of the California Chamber of Commerce.
Allan held a deep commitment to forging constructive compromise with anyone willing to help deliver results for the people of California, listening respectfully and kindly to everyone's opinions and building trust through honest dealmaking, the very embodiment of how politics ought to be practiced.
His work, among many other results, helped ensure that significant investments were made in infrastructure and in caring for Californians' mental health. Allan also served several California Governors in a variety of roles, including Governor George Deukmejian and Governor Pete Wilson.
Allan also served our country as an Air Force officer during Vietnam. During the war, he was a captain and flight navigator in the KC-135, responsible for refueling spy planes. His time in the Air Force informed his approach throughout his life's work, from calmly managing a crisis to learning how to get the job done, no matter the obstacles at hand.
Apart from his service, Allan is also remembered as a kind individual, often making pizzas from scratch for friends at his home in Loomis.
I was truly honored to know Allan and to work with him. People throughout California will never forget the impact that he had and will continue to have for many, many years to come.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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