Tom McClintock represents the people of California’s historic gold country and Sierra Nevada in a district that stretches from Lake Tahoe, through Yosemite Valley and on to Kings Canyon.
Often described as “the gold standard” for fiscal conservatism in Congress, the National Taxpayers Union rated him the best vote for taxpayers in the House four times, most recently in 2020. Citizens Against Government Waste recently named him as one of only two perfect votes in the House fighting wasteful government spending.
The principal problem with our immigration laws is that they are not being enforced. We already have a “pathway to citizenship” that is taken by millions of LEGAL immigrants who have obeyed our laws, respected our nation’s sovereignty, waited patiently in line and done everything our nation has asked of them, while 15 million ILLEGAL immigrants attempt to cut in line in front of them.
Our nation of immigrants is only possible because of assimilation: as immigrants come to America, they come with a sincere desire to be Americans – to acquire a common culture, a common language and a devotion to American constitutional principles. Our immigration laws were written to assure assimilation. ILLEGAL immigration undermines assimilation and makes a mockery of the rule of law.
I favor the strict enforcement of our current immigration law as a prerequisite for any other reform.
The fundamentals necessary for economic growth are a stable currency, the enforcement of contracts, the security of property rights, the accuracy of information in the market, and above all, the freedom of individuals to enjoy the fruit of their labor and to negotiate freely with others to exchange their goods and services under mutually acceptable terms.
We know how to fix an economy because we have done so many times before. Whenever we have reduced the tax and regulatory burdens on the economy, it has thrived and expanded. And whenever we have increased those burdens, the economy has withered and declined.
Our modern military should have the latest technology and best equipment our nation can produce. It should have the trained manpower necessary to repel an attack from wherever it may come, launch retaliatory strikes and make hot pursuit in response to provocations. Most of all, it must maintain the structure necessary to expand rapidly in time of actual, congressionally declared war. No less, but also no more.
Reagan rightly said that defense is not a budget issue – we spend what we must to defend our nation. But we should not spend in excess of what is required either, for it is equally true that we cannot provide for the common defense if we cannot pay for it. Nations that fail to maintain an adequate defense do not survive very long, but neither to those that maintain excessive forces, overextend their military and bankrupt themselves.
Traditionally, America has not attacked another country unless it has attacked us first. When we have faced hostile powers in the past, we instead have surrounded them with superior force and waited them out. Usually, this has proven sufficient, and when it hasn’t we have been prepared. When we have had war forced upon us and have placed our military in harm’s way, Congress has declared war, as the Constitution requires, and we have backed our troops with the full might and fury of the nation and gotten it over with as quickly as possible.
Excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other: it is either carried out or it burns out. From the inception of the U.S. Forest Service, we managed our public lands according to sound forest management principles. We prevented overcrowding by removing excess timber so that trees had room to grow healthy and strong. This assured not only resilient forests, but also a thriving economy throughout our mountain communities and an important revenue stream to the treasury that was available for additional improvements to the public lands.
But beginning in the 1970’s, Congress began enacting laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act that promised to improve the forest ecology. Routine forest management projects and timber sales became subject to cost prohibitive and endlessly time consuming environmental studies, accompanied by opportunistic litigation. Our once healthy and well maintainned federal forests were consigned to a policy of benign neglect. After 40 years of these laws – all predicated on the promise they would improve the forest environment – I believe we are entitled to ask, “How is the forest environment doing?”
I believe the single greatest peril to our nation is our national debt – now exceeding $19 trillion. That debt grew by $595 billion this year – think of that as more than $4,000 added to an average family’s credit card bill. Interest on the debt is now the fastest growing component of the federal budget and the Congressional Budget Office warns that on our current trajectory, interest costs will exceed what we are currently spending on our entire defense establishment in just six years.
Obviously, the current budget system is not working. We need a balanced budget amendment to constrain borrowing, while restoring budget procedures that will allow Congress to regain control of the purse strings. The explosion of mandatory spending – mainly entitlements over which Congress lacks direct control – are the crux of the problem, and I believe that two simple reforms in the budget process can go a long way to fixing it: placing mandatory spending programs under the same annual review as discretionary spending and forbidding appropriations not authorized by law.
Droughts are nature’s fault; water shortages are our fault. We have not built a major reservoir of more than a million acre feet since 1979. Meanwhile, the state’s population has nearly doubled. We will not solve our water shortages until we start building more dams, and we won’t build new dams until we overhaul the environmental regulations that are making their construction cost-prohibitive.
Obamacare has caused premiums to skyrocket for millions of Americans and, at the same time, denied them the health plans and doctors that they had, they liked, and they were promised they could keep. It has caused the equivalent of 2.5 million American lost jobs, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. It is, in short, an unmitigated disaster that I have opposed every step of the way. There is no substitute for its complete repeal.
Once we have done that, there are many reforms to improve access and affordability. We should provide the same tax advantages we currently give to employers to the employees themselves so that they can select and own a plan that best meets their own needs. We should provide the freedom to shop anywhere in the nation for the best plan. We should expand Health Savings Accounts, so that people can meet their health care needs with pre-tax dollars; reform cost drivers like malpractice; and strengthen assigned risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions.
Yosemite National Park is the crown jewel of the National Park System that includes some of the most beautiful natural splendors in all the world. It was also the cornerstone of the National Parks System, being the first public land set aside in 1864 by the United States government for “public use, resort and recreation…for all time.” One of the greatest honors of representing the Fourth Congressional District of California is to defend the original intent of the Yosemite Grant Act and all that it means for the millions of park visitors who come here each year and the many gateway communities whose economies depend directly on the tourism that the park generates.
Through the years, generations of Americans have come to Yosemite to take pleasure in those splendors while enjoying all varieties of outdoor activities amidst the park’s natural beauty, including camping and lodging, hiking and biking, horseback riding, river rafting, ice skating. Recent attempts to restrict access to the park and remove many of its amenities and activities undermines the original purpose of the Yosemite Grant Act.
Yosemite is also threatened by years of neglect of its surrounding forests, which are now dangerously overgrown and are falling victim to disease, pestilence and ultimately, catastrophic wild fire. The Rough Fire in 2015 burned into the periphery of the Park. The next major fire could decimate the valley itself, a matter I discuss in length under Forest Policy.
We once enjoyed the finest highway system in the world, built around the automobile, which offers efficient, economical, convenient, comfortable, adaptive, doorstep-to-doorstep, 24-hour per day on-call service. We financed this remarkably simple system through fees, taxes and bonds paid for by highway users in proportion to their use. But beginning in the 1970’s, we abandoned all these advantages for rigid, inefficient, inconvenient, bureaucratized mass transit systems. We diverted highway taxes for purposes unrelated to our highways and squandered billions of dollars on government transit. The result is crumbling and chronically congested highways and breathtakingly expensive mass transit systems that the masses don’t use.
I believe that we need to restore our highway taxes for our highways, and undertake the long-overdue modernization of our once vaunted highway system.