Press Release: 500 Jobs in Jeopardy While “MoFo” Law Firm Packs-in the Cash

Members of Congress call for quick action by the Obama Administration to save jobs and halt activist judge and former partner at Morrison & Foerster (www.mofo.com)

Washington DC – Congressmen Devin Nunes and Jeff Denham, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and Chairman Rob Bishop, Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, today called on the Obama Administration to act to protect the jobs of backcountry horsemen who are being threatened by a liberal activist judge and a National Park Service decision to delay permits for commercial operators.

“There are approximately 500 jobs hanging in the balance.  The Obama Administration must act swiftly to seek permission from the courts to issue a one year permit to save these small businesses,” said Rep. Devin Nunes.  “I am working with Chairman Bishop and the House Natural Resources Committee in an effort to convince them to do just that.”

A recent federal court decision has resulted in alterations to the permitting process necessary for pack and saddle backcountry horsemen to enter the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. If commercial operating permits are not granted, backcountry operations will be suspended. Many of these family businesses cannot survive an economic blow of this magnitude. According to the Park Service, Judge Richard Seeborg denied a request to expedite a hearing on issuing permits. 

“The Obama Administration must issue these permits immediately. Issuing the permits would prevent the cancellation of tourism associated with the pack and saddle companies, and the subsequent revenue upon which so many jobs and businesses in this area rely,” said Chairman Bishop.  “Congress clearly intended for these family owned and operated companies to continue at these parks as they have for decades. This is another example of this Administration’s ongoing assault on access to public lands and further illustrates that they will always place radical special interest groups before hard-working Americans.”

“At a time of unacceptably high unemployment rates, refusing to act to save these jobs and preserve access to our public lands is intolerable. I will continue to fight against the Obama Administration's war on western jobs, and instead work for commonsense policies that help create jobs and preserve important access to our national treasures,” said Majority Whip McCarthy.

It is within the Obama Administration’s power to once again seek permission for a one year permit for commercial backcountry horsemen operations.

“Preventing access to federal lands harms small, rural communities that rely on tourism to bring dollars in to the community,” said Rep. Jeff Denham.  “There has been a concerted effort by this Administration to limit access to public lands without due consideration to the impacts on local communities. Federal lands are publicly owned and should be managed in the best interest of the public, not to their detriment.” 

“I don’t agree with the ruling by the newly appointed liberal activist judge. Federal law is clear. Congress intended that backcountry horsemen have access to the park,” said Rep. Nunes.  “The ruling in itself is not an excuse to shut down an entire season of commercial operations.  It defies common sense that officials have so far refused to actively protect jobs.”

This lawsuit, filed in late 2009 by the High Sierra Hikers Association, was bankrolled by Morrison & Foerster a politically connected San Francisco law firm. Judge Richard Seeborg, who presided over the case, is a former partner at Morrison & Foerster. The law firm, better known as “MoFo” as chided by Jay Leno (see video), has contributed more than $100,000 in campaign contributions to liberal Democrat Members of Congress and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.

Law firms such as “MoFo” claim to do this type of legal work “pro bono”.  In this case, “MoFo” who is reported to have a record $930 million in revenue last year, will see a big payday from the federal government as a result of the Equal Access to Justice Act.  This law stipulates that attorney’s fees be reimbursed by the taxpayers in successful cases.

“The conflict of interest in this case is appalling. At a minimum the judge should have recused himself,” said Rep. Nunes.

Job Killers Loose in our National Parks

Our jobs are under attack.

Rural mountain communities are once again in the cross-hairs of liberal politicians and regulators. Having already devastated California’s mining and timber industries with laws and regulations limiting access to public lands, environmental radicals have moved full speed into a new round of limitations that impact recreational use of our National Parks. They want to eliminate the backcountry horsemen, the only means left by which the vast majority of Americans, including those with disabilities, are able to gain access to the American wilderness.

Backcountry horsemen are part of the American story and have, since the settling of the West, been responsible for packing people and supplies into some of the most remote places. They are environmentalists, not in the modern sense, but in the true sense. These hardworking entrepreneurs understand that public access and conservation belong together and are sharply contrasted with the vast majority of urban activists who fund and support the modern environmental movement.  Unlike the urban zealots, backcountry horsemen actually understand the wilderness and are personally invested in its survival.

Despite these facts, well-funded radicals are working to put backcountry horsemen out of business. They filed and won a lawsuit which alleged that operating permits for these businesses required compliance with environmental laws related to wilderness areas. The activists and court would have us believe that horses and pack mules are a threat to the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, despite their longstanding presence in the area and despite a specific Congressional directive to the contrary (see here).

Ironically, the Obama Administration is pushing backcountry horsemen out of business at the same time it is urging Americans to “get outdoors.” The White House initiative is based on President Obama’s belief that government investments in outdoor activities are good for the economy.

The White House could demonstrate an interest in protecting these “outdoor” jobs with a simple act – one that it has so far refused to entertain. The Administration simply needs to ask the court for a one year extension of existing permits. A one year extension would allow adequate time for the permitting process to be updated in order to reflect new wilderness requirements and it may spare the small but time honored industry from the chopping block.

Obama High Priority: Killing San Joaquin Valley Jobs

President Obama claims to support jobs through investments in infrastructure. Yet his actions suggest his real priority is to deliver political favors to left-wing activists.

Here is what President Obama promised on November 2, 2011—

“no more earmarks, no more bridges to nowhere. We're going to stop the picking of projects based on political gain and start picking them based on two criteria: how badly they're needed out there and how much good they'll do for our economy.”

Today, the President announced 14 high priority federal infrastructure projects around the nation. According to the White House, “the President directed agencies to expedite environmental reviews and permit decisions for a selection of high priority infrastructure projects that will create a significant number of jobs” (see here).

One of the 14 projects is located in the San Joaquin Valley but it is expected to eliminate jobs, not create them. Conservative estimates of job losses, using the methodology of radical environmentalists, demonstrate that 3,000 jobs will be lost due to reduced water supplies (see explanation of reduced water supply and employment here). Also, due to the excessive cost of the project (more than $1 billion), taxpayers will be forced to shell out $21 million per fish for the “restored” salmon run.

With all of the significant challenges facing America today, including historic deficits, high unemployment and unprecedented debt, it is astounding that the President would view the job killing San Joaquin River restoration as a high national priority. However, it is not the first time we have witnessed politics and not policy rule the White House.

Less than two years ago the President offered a pre-election Halloween treat to Valley Democrats when he funded the infamous California high speed rail program in the Central Valley—an earmark that targeted assistance to one vulnerable Democratic Congressman. The project is a national disgrace and has been labeled the “train to nowhere” around the country (details here).

Today’s announcement has handed Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Natural Resources Defense Council and its allies an early Christmas treat by making the San Joaquin River restoration a high national priority. It will cost us precious water and thousands of jobs while damaging the environment by adding stress to a severely depleted aquifer.

For the people of the San Joaquin Valley, their communities and livelihoods, President Obama is likely to be remembered as the worst President in American history.

Got one of Obama's Green Jobs? Not likely...

SHOCKING FINDING BY THE DEPT OF LABOR IG

2% SUCCESS RATE FOR OBAMA GREEN JOBS PROGRAM

The Department of Labor’s Inspector General (IG) recently issued a report on the status of a $500 million “green jobs” program designed by the President and congressional Democrats in 2009.  The findings are disappointing, to say the least.

The program was funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – the President’s costly $1.2 trillion “stimulus” failure – and was designed to procure employment for approximately 80,000 people by providing grants for labor exchange and job training projects.  Two years after the program’s inception, $300 million remains unspent, a mere 15 percent of current participants have been provided with jobs, and only 2 percent of the targeted 69,717 participants have retained employment for at least 6 months.

These are underwhelming results.  According to the IG, “[W]ith 61 percent of the training grant periods elapsed and only 10 percent of participants entered employment, there is no evidence that grantees will effectively use the funds and deliver targeted employment outcomes by the end of the grant periods."  The IG further recommends that the bulk of the money allotted for the program be returned to the Treasury.

Salazar's Dishonest Agency Exposed

Earlier today, I transmitted the following letter to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in response to his dishonest attacks against the San Joaquin Valley's Congressional delegation:

The Honorable Ken Salazar
Secretary of the Interior
U.S. Department of the Interior
1849 C Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20240

Dear Secretary Salazar,

I recently had the opportunity to read your remarks delivered at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco and was shocked by your callous disregard for the people suffering in the San Joaquin Valley. In the future, I hope you will consider broadening your audience to communities in the San Joaquin Valley. There are many venues available, including food banks, foreclosed homes and vacant buildings for you to use for your speech.

During your remarks, you called attention to and lauded the people who worked together to build our nation’s infrastructure, such as California’s state and federal water projects. You suggested that these bygone visionaries are the predecessors of men like yourself. However, those prior leaders worked to increase California’s fresh water supplies. You are working to implement policies that reduce them.

The facts speak for themselves. Under your leadership, the Department of Interior has systematically attacked the very infrastructure you praise. Worse, your actions related to the Delta have been exposed as politically motivated and illegal. This scandal, as outlined by the U.S. District Court’s recent admonition of your agency, is damning and should be the subject of Congressional Oversight Hearings.

Mr. Secretary, despite your attempt to cloak your actions in pragmatism, you and your agency have developed a draconian record unparalleled in recent history. Not only have you implemented illegal policies, but you have aided and abetted the extortionist practices of radical groups whose “environmentalism” comes a distant second to left-wing politics. In short, yours has been a job killing, infrastructure crippling agency – one that delivers artificial water shortages where crops once grew.

You should be ashamed of your Department and truly embarrassed by the decision handed down to you by the U.S. District Court. The transcript from the Motion to Stay hearing on the Delta smelt cases reads in part:

“[The federal government] haven't just violated the Endangered Species Act in producing an unlawful BiOp and unlawful and reasonable and prudent alternatives, they've also violated NEPA, which, in effect, prevented any rational, any what the Court would believe to be informed, competent and considerate reflective analysis of the human health and safety impacts, impacts on the State of California water supply and related impacts by not performing a NEPA analysis, not preparing an EIS and not following the law in any regard to that extent.”

The court went on to challenge the credibility of the federal government’s expert witnesses. These are the same witnesses you have relied on to bring economic destruction to the families in the San Joaquin Valley.

The Court also on the Fish and Wildlife Service’s expert witness:

“The Court finds that Dr. Norris' testimony, as it has been presented in this courtroom and now in her subsequent declaration, she may be a very reasonable person and she may be a good scientist, she may be honest, but she has not been honest with this Court. I find her to be incredible as a witness. I find her testimony to be that of a zealot. And I'm not overstating the case, I'm not being histrionic, I'm not being dramatic. I've never seen anything like it. And I've seen a few witnesses testify.”

The Court on the Bureau of Reclamation’s expert witness:

“I'm going to start with Mr. Feyrer…There can be no acceptance by a court of the United States of the conduct that has been engaged in in this case by these witnesses. And I am going to make a very clear and explicit record to support that finding of agency bad faith because, candidly, the only inference that the Court can draw is that it is an attempt to mislead and to deceive the Court into accepting what is not only not the best science, it's not science. There is speculation. There is primarily, mostly contradicted opinions that are presented that the Court not only finds no basis for, but they can't be anything but false because a witness can't testify under oath on a witness stand and then, within approximately a month, make statements that are so contradictory that they're absolutely irreconcilable with what has been stated earlier.”

Your tenure and that of the Obama Administration as a whole have made it abundantly clear that a utopian Green Agenda is more important than working families in America. The unemployed in the San Joaquin Valley have become collateral damage as you pursue control over our nation’s vast resources. Along the way, you have damaged the very integrity of science and undermined the democratic process.

In future, I hope your remarks will be tempered with recognition of the serious damage you and your Agency have done to this country. Starving people and communities of water, whatever the cause, is wrong. It is reminiscent of the actions of brutal dictators such as Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein who used water as a weapon against their own populations.

Sincerely,
DEVIN NUNES
Member of Congress

Charge and Response: President Obama’s Primetime Address

Here is the GOP Conference response to the President's address last night.

Last night, President Obama issued a primetime address, telling the country he’s not going to “bore” them with the details of every plan – probably because he still doesn’t have one. Instead, the president stuck to the same class warfare rhetoric and embraced the plan put forward by Senator Harry Reid that gives him the immediate debt limit increase he wants, more budgeting gimmicks, and no reforms to restrain future spending. Below please find a rough transcript of some of the president’s claims with responses to help you correct the record.

Charge: “For the last decade, we have spent more money than we take in. In the year 2000, the government had a budget surplus. But instead of using it to pay off our debt, the money was spent on trillions of dollars in new tax cuts, while two wars and an expensive prescription drug program were simply added to our nation’s credit card.”

Response: What were yearly deficits when Republicans were in charge have become monthly deficits under President Obama. When Republicans controlled the House from 1995 through 2006, the average annual deficit was $96 billion. While Democrats controlled the House from 2007 through 2010, average monthly deficits were $75 billion and since President Obama took office the average monthly deficit has been $111 billion.

Charge: “But today, many Republicans in the House refuse to consider this kind of balanced approach – an approach that was pursued not only by President Reagan, but by the first President Bush, President Clinton, myself, and many Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate.”

Response: President Obama is no Ronald Reagan, and the economic stats prove it. And Reagan supported a balanced budget amendment: “Only a constitutional amendment will do the job. We’ve tried the carrot, and it failed. With the stick of a Balanced Budget Amendment, we can stop government squandering, overtaxing ways, and save our economy.” – Ronald Reagan, April 29, 1982

Charge: “Most Americans, regardless of political party, don’t understand how we can ask a senior citizen to pay more for her Medicare before we ask corporate jet owners and oil companies to give up tax breaks that other companies don’t get.”

Response: President Obama and congressional Democrats already ended Medicare as we know by cutting $575 billion from the program. Instead of extending the solvency of Medicare, Democrats slashed Medicare spending in order to help pay for Democrats government takeover of healthcare.

Additionally, the president’s calls for job-killing tax hikes will do nothing to solve the problem but everything to ensure job creators sacrifice even more with higher taxes. In total, the tax increases on corporate jet owners, oil producers, and the “millionaires and billionaires” who earn more than $250,000 a couple, would raise revenue by approximately $855 billion—about 6.6 percent of the $12.8 trillion in debt the president will add over the next ten years.

Charge: President Obama now: “Understand – raising the debt ceiling does not allow Congress to spend more money. It simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up…. In the past, raising the debt ceiling was routine. Since the 1950s, Congress has always passed it, and every President has signed it.”

Response: That’s a sharp contrast from what then-Senator Obama, said in 2006 when he voted against raising the debt ceiling: “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies…Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

Now the president has threatened to veto any debt limit increase that doesn’t go through 2013, putting his next election over protecting our next generation. Earlier this year, the Administration demanded a clean debt limit increase with no spending cuts. Now the president is demanding an increase that will last more than seventeen months to get him through the next election. According to economist Keith Hennessy, “Over the last twenty years Congress and the President have acted 44 times to increase the debt limit. Ten of those 44 times lasted more than a year. The other 34 were for less than a year.”

Charge: “Keep in mind that under a balanced approach, the 98% of Americans who make under $250,000 would see no tax increases at all… What we’re talking about under a balanced approach is asking Americans whose incomes have gone up the most over the last decade – millionaires and billionaires – to share in the sacrifice everyone else has to make.”

Response: The president continues to call for huge tax increases on individuals and small business owners earning above $200,000 for an individual or $250,000 for a couple—or as the president calls them, “millionaires and billionaires.” According to the president’s budget estimate, this would increase taxes by $709 billion over ten years. Nearly 75 percent of America’s small businesses file their taxes as individuals. Half of those small businesses would suffer from a higher tax burden under the President’s proposed tax increases, limiting their ability to hire more workers. As the National Federal of Independent Businesses said when the same tax hike was delayed until 2012, “Raising the top marginal tax rate would have hit small businesses the hardest just when the country needs them to invest, expand and hire new workers.”

Charge: “We have tried to live by the words that Jefferson once wrote: “Every man cannot have his way in all things…Without this mutual disposition, we are disjointed individuals, but not a society.”

Response: If we want to quote Jefferson, let’s take a look at all of the other quotes that warn us about public debt and his wish that the constitution included strict debt limitations:

• “I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.” – Thomas Jefferson letter to Virginia Senator John Taylor, 1789
• “But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.” – Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789