(The Center Square) – Republican congressional representatives from the Pacific Northwest are proposing legislation that seeks to bar any federal funding to breach or alter operations of the Lower Snake River dams in Washington state.
Their DAMN Act – that is, the “Defending Against Manipulative Negotiators” Act – was introduced by GOP Reps. Dan Newhouse and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of eastern Washington, Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Cliff Bentz of Oregon, and Russ Fulcher of Idaho.
As proposed, the measure also seeks to prohibit implementation of the Columbia Basin Restorative Initiative announced in December by the Biden Administration.
That initiative, negotiated over the past two years by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, calls for restoration of wild salmon populations and support of tribal-sponsored renewable energy production over the next decade within the Snake and Columbia river systems. It does not rule out breaching the dams.
The pact is supported by the Democratic governors of Washington and Oregon and four regional tribal nations but opposed by the State of Idaho. It has been filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon, seeking to pause decades-long litigation against the federal government’s operation of the dams, which tribes and environmental and sportsmen groups claim have decimated salmon migrating between the Pacific Ocean and spawning habitat in Idaho.