The newspaper recently sat down with Rep. Tom McClintock (R-El Dorado Hills) at his Modesto office to talk about the Republican-controlled Congress’ sweeping changes to the political and regulatory landscape. Below is Part 2 of that interview (Part 1 was published in the June 4 edition).
CC: Tell us about the Fix our Forests Act, and your Proven Forest Management Act that’s included in it, and why it’s important.
McClintock: It provides a categorical exclusion from (the Nation Environmental Policy Act) for forest thinning projects up to 10,000 acres. Within that, it allows 3,000 for mechanical thinning. We were able to get that into the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act) of 2016, but we had to limit it to the Tahoe Basin because of opposition from (former U.S. Senator) Barbara Boxer and the Green left in the senate. But we did get it for the Tahoe Basin. The foresters there implemented it brilliantly. They’ve taken the environmental review time from an average of five years down to a few months, and taken the environmental reports from more than 800 pages down to a few dozen. It’s increased the timber yield in the Tahoe Basin from a million board feet a year to 9 million board feet a year. It tripled the amount of treated acreage, and it’s what saved the city of South Lake Tahoe from the Caldor fire. The fire hit a track that had been treated under that authority. It laid down, and the firefighters were able to extinguish it. Right across the boundary line in the El Dorado National Forest in the town of Grizzly Flats there was the trestle project that we’ve been trying to get thinned for over a decade, and it’s been held up by environmental reviews and environmental litigation all that time. That fire hit the trestle track and exploded and took out the entire town of Grizzly Flats. We have now lost in the last decade 27% of our national forest to catastrophic fire, a quarter of our national forest gone. And if you’ve driven recently to Tahoe or driven up the coast to Oregon, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Beautiful forests are now scrub brush and dead trees. One of the things I’ve often said is that all of that excess timber that a forest produces is going to come out one way or the other. Either we’re going to carry it out or nature is going to burn it out. That’s the way nature gardens. Nature is a lousy gardener. If you doubt that for a moment, just leave your own garden alone for 50 years and see what it looks like.
We formed the Forest Service and the other land management agencies to take over the gardening of our National Forests because even though nature doesn’t care that it takes 100 years for a forest to grow back, we mortals do, and we want to pass those forests healthy and resilient onto our kids so that they can enjoy them too and not wait 100 years. The Forest Service did that brilliantly. Throughout the 20th century, we passed these environmental laws that have made the management of our forests endlessly time consuming and, ultimately, cost prohibitive. And the result is nature’s return to do the gardening. And she gardens by burning out the forest. And you look at the historical numbers, the paleontologists tell us that prior to the 20th century, we would lose up to 12 million acres a year in California to catastrophic fire, or between four and 12, depending upon the year. In the 20th century, we brought that down to a quarter million acres a year. Two years ago, we lost 4 million acres again. That’s not a new normal. That’s the old normal, coming back.
CC: You recently wrote an opinion piece praising the efforts of Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in creating a new reservation system for Yosemite National Park that allows more visitors to enter the park. Why is this an important topic for you?
McClintock: It’s important because of all of the businesses in the gateway communities that depend upon Yosemite tourism for their livelihoods. Not to mention, as I quote in the article, one of my favorite lines from John Muir, “The valley is filled with people, yet they do not annoy me.” He wanted to welcome people to Yosemite Valley. He said they might not come here with a full appreciation of the beauty of this valley, but they will leave as evangelists.
CC: Let’s move on to immigration. With Stanislaus County being very nearly 50 percent Hispanic, and farming being the lifeblood of our Valley, the immigration issue is also a workforce issue, and the need for immigration reform is obvious …
McClintock: Is it really obvious to everyone? I don’t think so. It was not obvious to the last administration, in fact, it was quite obscure to the last administration, who told us that there was nothing that they could do without an amnesty bill and that we just had to suck it up. So, no, I don’t think it’s obvious to everyone. I look at all of the Democrats that are opposing the efforts of this administration to secure our borders and wonder if it’s really obvious to them? I don’t think so … It’s not obvious to the people that I work with in Washington, D.C., who happen to have a ‘D’ after their names. I can tell you that from first hand experience, virtually all of them, certainly all of them on the Judiciary Committee. You should see some of the debates we have on the subject.
CC: Would you agree there seems to be a current of cruelty in this administration’s approach to immigration?
McClintock: Cruelty? How humanitarian was it to encourage eight and a half million illegal migrants to make the dangerous trip through the Darien Gap, through Mexico, placing unaccompanied minors in the tender care of the most violent and barbaric criminal cartels in the world? And then, having trafficked these unaccompanied minors into the United States, placing them in foster homes with virtually no vetting, and losing track of what 300,000 of them now have simply disappeared. Now you tell me what policy was cruel?
What this policy has done in simply restoring the integrity of our borders has stopped human trafficking dead in its tracks. We’ve had a 96% reduction in illegal border crossings, 99% reduction in traffic through the perilous Darien Gap, and a concomitant decrease in deaths that are associated with that perilous journey that was being entirely facilitated, and I would even say encouraged, by the Democratic administration of (President) Joe Biden, with the full support of the Democrats in the Congress.
CC: Certainly, two wrongs don’t make her right. How is it that we’re deporting people without due process?
McClintock: First of all, there are 1.4 million immigrants who have already had their day in court and have final deportation orders pending, and have refused to obey those orders. I asked one of the administration officials about the due process. He says, what do you think all the litigation is about? That is the due process, and it’s the biggest problem that I see is the fact that we have individual district court judges who are attempting to assert universal injunctions against executive orders. It takes at least five Supreme Court justices to issue a national injunction. Five. How can it be that a single district court judge can exercise that same authority?
CC: What type of legislation do you think we need addressing immigration?
McClintock: You know, I posed that question to the Border Patrol in Yuma (Arizona) when I visited. This was probably about 18 months, maybe two years ago now, and I said, ‘Look, we’re the Congress. We write laws. We can’t enforce them. What laws do you need us to write?’ And every one of them said the same thing, we don’t need new laws. We need to enforce our existing laws.
When I was at Eagle Pass (Texas), the Border Patrol chief there said, ‘Look, I am standing in front of an open fire hydrant with a bucket. I don’t need more buckets. I need somebody to turn off the faucet.’ And as President Trump said in his State of the Union address earlier this year, we didn’t need new laws. We needed a new president, and he proved that in the first 30 days of his administration, enforcing the existing laws secured our borders and brought this unprecedented mass illegal migration to a complete halt.
We now have eight and a half million illegal migrants who are allowed into this country, the largest illegal mass migration in history. It now has to be followed by the largest repatriation in history, and that’s what this administration is attempting to do right now, all within the law. Once that’s done, then we can assess our labor needs. And you know, I think the H-1B (visa, which allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations) is fine. But by that, I mean, so that it isn’t suppressing the labor market. You know, that’s one change that needs to be made. And I think if H-2B labor — agricultural labor — is necessary, the H-2B program needs to be revamped to essentially restore the Bracero Program, where seasonal labor was admitted legally into the United States, instead of having to pay coyotes thousands and thousands of dollars to be smuggled across the border.
CC: Earlier this year you suspended your office hours. Do you plan to open them back up?
McClintock: They were suspended because we had disruptive crowds that were threatening our staff. We had one woman who had been escorted to her car by a deputy because she was so scared of the intimidation she was seeing. The office hours are specifically so that our staff goes out into the various small communities, particularly in the mountain communities, so that people don’t have to drive all the way here to Modesto or El Dorado Hills, if they need to meet with a staff member. So our staff members go out to them. Starting about six months ago, these Indivisible groups began flooding the office hours, disrupting them and intimidating our staff. So, I said to stop it until this goes away. Make an appointment to come talk. They’re not looking for discussion; they’re looking for a confrontation.
Specifically, this is centrally directed by an organization largely funded by (George) Soros and Act Blue, and they’ve sent instructions to all their chapters, essentially to try to create confrontations. … They’ve been successful in other districts where members have attempted to hold town halls that have been disrupted by violence and arrests, I am not going to facilitate that in this community.
CC: There is a lot of noise right now in the media on both sides of the political spectrum. We’re interested to know if the noise on the perimeters is the minority? Because it seems you’ve got a handful of representatives who are always getting media attention and about 425 of you who are not always on TV.
McClintock: Somebody asked me about that one day. I said, ‘Well, I can say crazy things too, but I choose not to.’ I think that’s human nature. The most shrill voices tend to get undue attention, sure, but people can sort through that. I mean, we based our entire form of government on the assumption that when people are paying attention, more than half of them are going to be right more than half the time. And yes, those shrill voices are out there, but there are a lot of reasonable voices out there as well, and people can tell the difference. I guess that’s the point I would emphasize… that’s the whole idea of free speech.
How do you tell the difference between a truth and a lie, between wisdom and folly? How do you tell the difference between right and wrong? You allow all voices to be heard and trust the people to know the difference. And that assumption has served us well throughout the 250 years that our government has existed of, by, and for the people. And I think it will continue.
(Kristina Hacker and Joe Cortez conducted this Q&A session).
