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Show COLORADO RIVER LITIGATION 571 In the first section of the Act, the Secretary was authorized to "construct, operate, and maintain a dam and incidental works . . . adequate to create a storage reservoir of a capacity of not less than twenty million acre-feet of water . . ." for the stated purpose of "controlling the floods, improving navigation and regulating the flow of the Colorado River, providing for storage and for the delivery of the stored waters thereof for reclamation of public lands and other beneficial uses . . .," and generating electrical power. The whole point of the Act was to replace the erratic, undependable, often destructive natural flow of the Colorado with the regular, dependable release of waters conserved and stored by the project. Having under- taken this beneficial project, Congress, in several provisions of the Act, made it clear that no one should use mainstream waters save in strict compliance with the scheme set up by the Act. Section 5 author- ized the Secretary "under such general regulations as he may prescribe, to contract for the storage of water in said reservoir and for the delivery thereof at such points on the river ... as may be agreed upon, for irrigation and domestic uses. . . ." To emphasize that water could be obtained from the Secretary alone, § 5 further declared, "No person shall have or be entitled to have the use for any purpose of the water stored as aforesaid except by contract made as herein stated." The supremacy given the Secretary's contracts was made clear in § 8 (b) of the Act, which provided that, while the Lower Basin States were free to negotiate a compact dividing the waters, such a compact if made and approved after January 1, 1929, was to be "subject to all contracts, if any, made by the Secretary of the Interior under section 5" before Congress approved the compact. These several provisions, even without legislative history, are persuasive that Congress intended the Secretary of the Interior, through his § 5 contracts, both to carry out the allocation of the waters of the main Colorado River among the Lower Basin States and to decide which users within each State would get water. The general authority to make contracts normally includes the power to choose with whom and upon what terms the contracts will be made. When Congress in an Act grants authority to contract, that authority is no less than the general authority, unless Congress has placed some limit on it.79 In this respect it is of interest that in an earlier version the bill did limit the Secretary's contract power by making the contracts "subject to rights of prior appropriators."so But that restriction, which pre- served the law of prior appropriation, did not survive. It was stricken from the bill when the requirement that every water user have a contract was added to § 5.81 Significantly, no phrase or provision indicating that the Secretary's contract power was to be controlled by the law of prior appropriation was substituted either then or at any other time before passage of the Act, and we are persuaded that had Congress intended so to fetter the Secretary's discretion, 79 In the debates leading to the passage of the bill, Senator Walsh observed that "to contract means a liberty of contract" and asked if this did not mean that the Secretary could "give the water to them [appropriators] or withhold it from them as he sees fit," to which Senator Johnson answered "certainly," 70 Cong. Rec. 168 (1928). 80 See Hearings on H.R. 6251 and 9826 before the Committee on Irrigation and Recla- mation, 69th Cong., 1st Sess. 12 (1926). 81 See id., at 97,115. |