Expressing the Condolenes of Nation to Victims of Hurricane Katrina

EXPRESSING CONDOLENCES OF NATION TO VICTIMS OF HURRICANE KATRINA

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the work of the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) in coming forward with this bipartisan resolution.

I am going to offer some formal remarks, and then I am going to say a word further about the irony of my managing this bill this morning.

Mr. Speaker, 10 days ago Hurricane Katrina slammed into America's gulf coast. The aftermath of the hurricane has prompted one of the largest response mobilizations in United States history. At the very core of all the relief effort is the overwhelming concern we all have for our fellow Americans, ordinary citizens who have become victims of this vast, unprecedented devastation.

Thousands of local State and Federal workers and volunteers are engaged in life-saving activities. Life-sustaining activities, supported by virtually all national charities, are spreading across all parts of the United States. Sheltering and housing initiatives so vital to the well-being of the victims have been activated all across the country. These efforts are aimed at providing some measure of efforts and relief to the tens of thousands of displaced Americans, many who survived with merely the clothes on their backs.

It is with a heavy heart, but with a deep sense of hope for a better future that I join all of my colleagues today in expressing my deep sense of sorrow and the condolences of the Nation to all the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I commend the resilience of all who have survived and all who are helping them to survive and am awed by their enduring vision for a better future.

For the present, I will work to fulfill our Nation's commitment to each victim that all the necessary resources and the might of the country will be used to relieve their suffering and to provide the resources they need for the brighter future characteristic of our country.

Mr. Speaker, I say the irony is, I was at an opening of an employment and training center for SOME, So Others Might Eat, and commenting there on the irony of the opening of that employment and training center at a time when just yesterday I had gone to Dulles Airport to retrieve 300 evacuees from a plane, who now reside in the Armory just a few blocks from here. And I said the symbolism of this center opening now is not lost on me, and the first moment I have to tell my colleagues about the symmetry between the opening of this center and the evacuees here, I am going to do it. Then I got a phone call saying we need someone to manage the bill expressing our condolences as a Nation and our resolve for the victims on the gulf coast.

Mr. Speaker, as I left this center, this new center where I had indicated that here in D.C. is doing very well, but certainly the poorest part of the region, surrounded by very rich counties, I was proud of my city because we had seen the need and said, Come here even though there are many unemployed here.

The man who runs this new SOME center said, We are quickly filling the 60 slots; we have 20 slots left. I am on the other side of the Anacostia in Ward 7, and Wards 7 and 8 are the high unemployment wards. So if there are only 60 slots, there are 60 times 60 people in Ward 7 alone that need it. And so he said, I think we ought to give the slots to the people who got off the plane yesterday. And I said, What a wonderful contribution that would be. We all have to find a contribution to make, and for you to contribute 20 of 60 slots from the highest unemployment pool in the city is to make the kind of sacrifice our country needs to be prepared to make now. And that is the kind of sacrifice we are seeing all over the country.

I want to say that in this House we have got to ask ourselves, what sacrifice are we prepared to make? We have assumed the best of all possible worlds, but what we cannot control is always possible and what we cannot control has happened.

I hope that in the coming weeks, as we finish the session, we will remember that it is time for us to make sacrifices. Already the Senate appears to say it is not going to bring forward the permanent repeal of the estate tax. If it took a tragedy to do it, then it has been done. The mega-rich will not get richer this time around. I just think in the spirit of trying to figure out how we can go home and say this is something we did that we would not otherwise have done but for Katrina is what we need to say.

Of course, we will go home and talk about the $20 billion and now the $40 billion. That, of course, is mandatory. That is what we are here for. The real issue for me is, what is it that we wanted to do, talking to both sides of the aisle, that we now forswear, that we now say, in the name of the greatest natural tragedy in memory, we decide that we will not do that that we most wanted to do.

Some of us wanted to do spending on some things. Some of us may want to do a little more tax cutting, but it is time for us to become introspective about being visited with the most massive natural tragedy of our time.

My heart is with the people of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the entire gulf coast. That is true of America generally. But as people take in people in their own homes, as people send money, we have to ask ourselves, what will we do, what will we say is the sacrifice we as Members of Congress have made as a body when we go home next week?

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I agree with the gentleman that we are not in an atmosphere where we can properly evaluate and investigate what has happened here. I do think it important to note that the only way to avoid making mistakes is to look at the mistakes we have made.

I do want to say this for the record. It took us a very long time to get bipartisan support for a 9/11 Commission. Is anybody in this body sorry? What would have happened if history had looked back and said there was no independent commission that looked into 9/11?

In this same way, this natural disaster is the functional equivalent of 9/11 for natural disasters. We need an independent commission to do the kind of job that the 9/11 Commission did, and I think a fair reading of that report is not that it pointed fingers at anybody, but that it did advise what it is we should do.

We should quickly get about the business of appointing a commission equal to the task of doing a credible, unbiased, independent investigation in the name of the people of the gulf coast who have suffered and in the name of the people of the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to comment that I appreciate what the gentleman has just said about how much of this was unpredictable. There is no question that that is the case.

But, for the record, it must be said that the levee was built to withstand a Category 3 storm. So the Corps of Engineers has been saying, yelling for decades that no one can say we will not ever surpass a Category 3 storm. People will tell you in Louisiana that they have been talking about dodging the bullet for decades because they did not go above Category 3.

I hope that when we repair the damage, and it will take billions more than we can imagine now, that we will do what we say we are going to do for the possibility of terrorism, that is to say, prepare for the worst-case scenario, not the case scenario that we wish for. And the worst-case scenario is finally what Louisiana got.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I just have a few closing remarks. We all agree that the first obligation of any government is to protect its citizens. The majority often say that, and we have seen no contradiction from this side on that score. And I think there has been agreement that we have not fully honored that responsibility.

It was with a great deal of thought that I became a cosponsor of the bill today, H.R. 3659, to reestablish FEMA as an independent agency outside the control of the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security. I did not do that easily. Frankly, I strongly supported and still support the establishment of a Department of Homeland Security. So I had to think about this matter. Is this a contradiction from what I generally believe, that these agencies must be brought together?

I have resolved that conflict in my mind because it is clear that FEMA is not about preventing anything. FEMA is about going in quickly and nimbly after there has been either an actual natural attack or a national attack; and there is telling evidence about how we have diverted funds from FEMA's natural disaster responsibilities to our legitimate concern with preparation for terrorism.

I believe, therefore, that we do no harm to the notion of one cohesive unit, the Homeland Security Department, to prevent attacks if we have FEMA outside. I think that FEMA simply has not done well inside the Department of Homeland Security. I cannot guarantee that taking it out will make it whole again. I do know this: that we did not have complaints about FEMA during the 1990s, and I remember FEMA's being held to great glory for how they handled and how they were reorganized during the 1990s.

I, therefore, want to thank the gentleman from Louisiana for coming forward and to say that I know I speak for every Member on my side when I say he will have our full cooperation, more than our empathy, our full cooperation when it comes to Louisiana and the entire gulf coast. I thank him for his initiative. I am pleased to be a part of it.

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