STAFF: The following is an unrehearsed interview with Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley speaking to you live from Washington. Participating in today's public affairs program are Tom Robinson with KSOM Radio in Atlantic and Rick Morain with the Jefferson Herald in Jefferson.
The first question will be from Tom Robinson.
QUESTION: Thank you very much.
Senator, thank you for the opportunity.
The EPA is proposing a plethora of regulations that have local farmers concerned about the impact that some of these will have on their operations. And the smaller producers feel like they will be affected the most. Specifically, we're talking about greenhouse gas regulations and federal water permits for pesticide application and air quality regulations and, specifically, I think this is the one where some of the smaller cow and cattle producers are concerned about the gas tax that's been proposed by -- that actually, the Supreme Court ruled on.
But, anyway, how do you feel about some of these proposals by the EPA?
GRASSLEY: I wonder whether or not anybody at the EPA understands the reality of agriculture. I wonder what planet these people come from. I wish I could confront the faceless bureaucrats that come up with these ideas.
And just the economic facts of it are if you're going to -- let's take a dairy cow -- $175 of tax because they poop? It'll put every dairy farmer out of business.
We have this fugitive dust issue. You know, you're supposed to keep the dust inside your property line. I wonder if they realize that only God decides when the wind blows or only God decides when beans get down to 13 percent so you can harvest them and whether they realize that there's dust coming out of a combine. And if the wind blows, there's no way that Chuck Grassley can keep it side my property lines.
And then, you know, other issues as well. You brought up the one that's most recently bothering me because we have a court of the United States backing up the EPA in the sense that if you spray on your land, it's always been assumed that clean water bill applied to water coming out of what we call point source pollutions, not non point.
Point would be sewer lines coming out of a city. Non point would be wherever it rains in the face of this earth, there's runoff. That's non point.
And so it rains five inches on the Grassley farm and some pesticide runs off, how do I control that? Well, how do they even -- since it's so ridiculous, where do they even get the authority to do it? So this court says, well, a nozzle on a sprayer is a point -- a point source of pollution not some pipe coming out of the sewer.
And so you get this ridiculous thing. If you spray, what falls on the plant, it's OK, but the stuff that falls on the ground, if it ends up in the river, it's your fault. And I just wonder if they know at EPA how you separate that.
And so doesn't it all sound ridiculous, and the more ridiculous it sounds, the more stupid you think are the people making the recommendations. And the more you think they just really can't mean it, but they do mean it. So we've got to fight it.
QUESTION: Senator, how many of the 13 appropriations bills for the current fiscal year have been adopted? And what's the schedule and procedure for completing the budget?
GRASSLEY: OK. Well, the specific answer to your first question is I think it's only four or maybe only three of the 11 or 12 that we have a year were adopted last fall when they should be been adopted. And then until two weeks ago, we operated under a continuing resolution of them and then two weeks ago, we passed this four -- oh, I think it's $417 billion bill that had the other nine -- eight or nine appropriations in it.
So right now, until September 30th, we're operating under three separate appropriation bills and one omnibus appropriation bill. And so government is funded.
Now, today, in fact I'm right outside of the Budget Committee hearing room, we are adopting the budget for next year. But that budget is not the same as the appropriation bills, as you probably know. The budget is outside boundaries for what committees of Congress can decide to spend. And we're now in the process of adopting the budget for fiscal year 2010, but the appropriation bills won't be finalized until September.
QUESTION: Thank you.
QUESTION: Senator, if I can follow up here with just one question after my original question here.
How do you fight those proposals by the EPA? I mean, how do you go about that?
GRASSLEY: Well, there's -- if you could get a bill up to change them, would be one way. But it's difficult to get bills up. I'm not on the on the committee, and the committee is controlled by environmentalists that don't understand agriculture and want to do this stuff.
The second thing is to make it sound ridiculous and, hopefully, maybe EPA backs off. You write letters to EPA telling them how stupid it is is a formal way of doing it.
And maybe, as a last resort, you put a rider on an appropriation bill that would say something like this: That none of the money in this appropriation bill going to EPA can use -- be used by EPA to enforce such and such a rule. That's done not in frequently, but I can't quantify how often it's done. But probably every appropriation bill has some language like that in it.
But I -- I don't mean that it's easy to get it put in because environmentalists have a strong voice around here. And there's nothing wrong with environmentalists having a strong voice, but you want their voice and decisions to be based upon sound science.
And there's another one that I'll give you as an example where sound science, there isn't any science behind it at all. But now they're trying to take what you call indirect land use into consideration to decide whether ethanol is environmentally positive or negative. Today, it's considered environmentally positive. But if you assume that there's farmers down in Brazil that are going to plow up land just because we're using more corn up here for ethanol, then they're going to take that indirect land use into consideration because when you break up virgin land, you put carbon into the air.
And, you know, just how silly it is to think that there's people down in Brazil just sitting around waiting to see if Chuck Grassley plows up another acre of land for ethanol so that they can plow up an acre of land down there. But that's -- and there's no science behind it. But that's the rule that they're starting to consider.
QUESTION: Thank you, Senator.
QUESTION: Senator, Mexico is becoming an increasingly dangerous place, particularly, along the U.S.-Mexican border both for citizens of Mexico and for travelers. Part of the problem is the large shipments of weapons coming from the United States to Mexico.
How would you propose to shut down those shipments?
GRASSLEY: Oh, well, the vehicles have to cross the border with them in. More policing of vehicles leaving the United States going into Mexico.
QUESTION: Senator, recently, you proposed to authorize $25 million over the next five years to help small- and medium-sized charities get training and management help. Talk about the importance of this proposal.
GRASSLEY: Well, the importance of the proposal is that there's a lot of law for non profits to follow and a lot of non profits don't have a big staff, and we don't want them to be -- how would you say it? We don't want them to be timid in doing what non profits ought to do because they contribute a great deal to American society and, particularly, the humanitarian needs of our people.
And so this would set up an infrastructure to help non profits be up to date with what the law is so that they don't violate the law, encourage non profit, particularly, non profit raising of funds.
QUESTION: Thank you.
QUESTION: Along that line, Senator, have you -- have your requests for information, financial information, from televangelists been completely satisfied? There were one or two holdouts at one time.
GRASSLEY: Those one or two are still holding out, and we haven't decided yet to take the step of a subpoena. But it looks to me like that's what we'll have to do. We have had almost -- by two others -- almost a complete answer to what I would say would be a good judgment of some progress we're making. And that is that there's an evangelical accounting board -- and that's not exactly its title.
But it's kind a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for churches that are members of it to pledge to do certain things to make sure that their money is handled in a secure way as a trustee for the donors' money. And we've had two of these six have recently submitted themselves to this evangelical accounting board to make sure that they follow the law.
STAFF: Thank you, Tom and Rick, for participating in today's public affairs program. This has been Senator Chuck Grassley reporting to the people of Iowa.
GRASSLEY: OK. I may have -- if I took too long to answer the first question, I think I could stay a couple minutes and answer questions if any of you didn't get your questions answered.
QUESTION: Senator, I'm fine. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
GRASSLEY: OK.
QUESTION: Senator, I'm fine, too. I really appreciate that. I know we have a lot of people concerned about that here. We're right in the middle of farm livestock country down here. So thank you very much.
GRASSLEY: OK. Goodbye.
