The 30-Something Working Group
THE 30-SOMETHING WORKING GROUP -- (House of Representatives - December 13, 2005)
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to join my good friend from Ohio and Massachusetts and Florida here each week.
Just to pick up what the gentleman was talking about, it is, sadly, not only on the gulf coast that we have had the issue of housing difficulties following Wilma. They had the same issue in Katrina on the gulf coast. We have got the same issue going on in Wilma, which was much smaller in scope but affected a significant number of people. We had more people affected by Wilma in terms of electric utility outages than all of Katrina, and we still to this day have Wilma victims in South Florida who have not been given temporary housing assistance, still people who are struggling to find that. Yet we are passing budget reconciliation, budget cut bills. We are passing tax cut bills in the name of offsetting the cost of the relief that we need to provide for Katrina victims and victims of natural disasters when the reality is that what we are doing with budget cuts is a direct result of needing to pay for the tax cuts that were passed just a week later.
And I want to echo what our good friend from Pennsylvania said when he introduced his Iraq War resolution, and he has repeated this a number of times, that just because you say it does not make it true. And our good friends on the other side of the aisle can continue to repeat over and over if they want to that they are offsetting the cost of Katrina relief with budget cuts, but we all know that the reality is, and I mean, we have only to do the math, that when they pass $50 billion in budget cuts one week and then the very next week they pass $70 billion in tax cuts, that is not a Deficit Reduction Act, as they called it and titled that bill, when we are adding $20 billion to the deficit.
I do not know. I go back to my kindergarten and first grade mathematics and can pretty easily sit down with my 6-year-olds, and they can figure out that the math does not work. But, unfortunately, what we have going on here, I guess, the politics of what is going on here is about message. And the Republican leadership's politics is repetition, repetition, repetition. They figure if they repeat the same message over and over again, whether it is true or not, that they figure if it has a kernel of truth, that people will believe it.
But Mr. Murtha is absolutely right on tax-cut policy, on budget-cut policy, whether it is how we got into the Iraq war and even down to the description of his own resolution. If you say it, just because you say it does not make it true. That is really what we need to get across to the American people.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, we talk about the culture of corruption and cronyism and the total lack of competence on a regular basis in our 30-Something Working Group, and we are really zeroing in on the incompetence tonight, the incompetence and the indifference, because really the two are hand-in-glove.
Mr. Delahunt, you talked about the economic tsunami, and I want to follow up on that, but let us build up to the economic tsunami that you have been describing.
First, Mr. Meek talks about the debt, the debt under this President being more than the combined total of the previous 42 presidents prior to this one.
Now, we have a chart over here that talks about the Defense budget deficits. Let us just look at the two years when we transitioned from President Clinton to President Bush. If you look in fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2002, fiscal year 2001, we had a surplus of $128.2 billion. You move into fiscal year 2002, and we have a deficit of $157.8 billion.
Mr. MEEK of Florida. Incompetence.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. If that is not evidence of incompetence, how do you have that big a swing from one year to the next, with the only difference being the person in the White House?
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Can I just make a point there, because I think it just fits right into there? $100 billion more in Iraq, $200 billion we have already spent, $100 million here for media campaigns. We have Republican media consultants slopping at the trough of the Defense Department so that they can put on a PR campaign in Afghanistan when the Afghanistan people do not even want it. The same in Iraq.
Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. It keeps going: $157.8 billion; a $377.6 billion deficit the next year; $412.1 billion deficit the year after that. We are getting a little better; we go back to $319 billion. Now we are at $323 billion. So the track record here is that there was one dip in the whole time that this President has been in office, and now we are climbing back again.
Yet, supposedly, we just passed the Deficit Reduction Act. If you are going to zero in on the incompetence, talk about the fact that the 9/11 Commission just came out with a report grading this administration and this Congress an F on the necessary follow-up to their recommendations. There is still no unified list of terror suspects for use by air travel screeners. There has been a misallocation of funds in terms of Homeland Security money. You have big city police and firefighters who still lack the ability to talk to each other. They lack the communications systems that were one of the key recommendations.
Remember, after 9/11, if you know nothing about what happened after 9/11, the thing that sticks in everyone's mind was it was so shocking that these police and firefighters, between agencies, city to county and station to station, could not talk to each other because their communications systems do not line up. They could not talk to the FBI. That has not been fixed. It is just unbelievable.
They are still cutting. They are still cutting. They are still cutting the budget, and they are cutting taxes. They are giving more money to wealthy people, not just your run-of-the-mill average wealthy person, but the top two-tenths of 1 percent of the wealthiest people in America, people who make more than $1 million annually.
So, Mr. Delahunt, you talk about an economic tsunami. The policies that have been going on in this administration and in this Congress, it is not just an economic tsunami. What the American people have been hit with is Hurricane Republican. You really cannot describe it any other way, because they have been hit by Katrina, they have been hit by Rita, they have been hit by Wilma. And instead of fixing it, instead of addressing the problems that the American people need addressed, they have now been hit by Hurricane Republican.
Or they are about to. We can stave it off. We could stave if off because there is a conference report. A bill is passed out of the House. A bill is passed out of the Senate. The cuts Mr. Delahunt described do not have to happen. There is still time to rethink this and come together and truly work together, which in my 11 months here just has not happened enough. There are isolated pockets of instances when we do work together, and I know compromise is possible.
I am praying that that happens because the aftermath of the Hurricane Republican could be worse than Katrina, but it does not have to be that way. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Sometimes incompetence is benign. We all interact with people who make mistakes, who maybe are not up to the par that we would like them to be. But not when the stakes are this high, not when you are talking about the people who are running the Government of the United States of America. I mean, not when incompetence results in debts.
The thousands of people that are harmed or died as a result of Katrina, incompetence hurt them or killed them. Governor Blanco today, thank God for technology, we talked about that last week a little bit. E-mail technology allows us to know now as opposed to what goes in a paper shredder, that the White House, Homeland Security, and FEMA all knew what was going on down in New Orleans immediately following Katrina and as she was approaching; and they either did nothing or did not know what to do.
That kind of incompetence is dangerous. When it is benign you can look the other way and you can sort of throw up your hands and say, well, those are just things you have to deal with when you encounter incompetence. We cannot allow incompetence to reach the heights that we have in this country.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. You are absolutely right. The President is trying to get away with saying generically, amorphously, we are not going to withdraw traps and withdraw from Iraq until we have results on the ground, results-oriented withdrawal.
I want to know, my constituents want to know, the American people want to know, what does that mean? Does it mean when the Iraqi troops are 50 percent independent and cannot operate on their own and protect their own country, 75, 23? Which is it? You cannot pick and choose. He cannot be allowed to pick and choose which elements of the process in Iraq he is going to put a number on and which element he is not going to.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, let me just insert one more thing because the Newsweek cover just says it all. In Bush's world, in the President's world, you do not have to have accountability. You do not have to put numbers on anything you do. You do not have to say what percentage prepared the troops have to be, and you are never wrong.
I have had to teach my kids, and they love to insist that they do not make mistakes. That is the orientation of a juvenile. My young children do not understand that sometimes they are wrong and this is okay and that you should learn how to change course. But in Bush's world, in the President's world, that does not happen. Because he is the President, he apparently has surrounded himself with people who either cannot convince him that he is wrong or he has surrounded himself with people that insist on agreeing with him all the time.
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Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Just before we close down in our last couple of minutes, we have been talking about the culture of corruption and cronyism and incompetence, zeroing in on incompetence today, and we are about third party validators. It is not just that we say it.
We got an e-mail on our 30-Something Web site that responded to some of the things we have been talking about. It was actually a Mr. Miller from Connecticut who said, ``You folks are a great breath of fresh air. I like the theme of `a culture of corruption, cronyism, and incompetence.' Well put, but incomplete. The massive rampant incompetence of this administration,'' he said, ``is a huge problem, no doubt. But for me, a bigger problem is their fundamental disbelief in democratic processes of checks and balances combined with overwhelming ideological arrogance that allows belief to trump evidence.''
I could not have said it better myself.
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