Tragic Storms in Texas

Floor Speech

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Ms. JOHNSON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart to mourn the loss of so many lives across Texas. We lost the hope of our future, so many children, so many beautiful girls, who just went to camp to have a good time, to bond with their friends, and to have that time that we all cherish from our memories of our own childhood.

Too many lives have been lost. We have the responsibility as members of government to have a look at why, what happened, what could we do better, and how can we make sure that things like this never, ever, ever happen again.

What we know, unfortunately, is that partisan politics had a role. Republicans have historically denied the ongoing effects of climate change and what is happening in our country.

Over the last decade, we have had more and more intense storms, unexpected, throughout the entire country, but surely in Texas. We have had freezes that have killed hundreds of people, and now we had a 1-in- 100-year catastrophic rainstorm that produced horrific floods and tragic loss of life.

What happened in this policy is that Republicans at every level of government in our State failed the people of Texas. At the local level, they refused to have support grants from the Biden administration that would have put in place critical sirens and warning equipment that would have warned these kids at this camp to get out, flee, and seek higher ground.

What we know is that communities that accepted these resources, they all survived. The warnings worked. This community didn't want to accept help from a Democrat, and now we have hundreds of people who are dead.

Requests were made from the State to help, ultimately, and our Governor denied requests three times for over a million dollars each time that they would have, again, tried to provide warning equipment, again failing.

Now what we have in our Federal Government is FEMA. FEMA is designed to be there as a last resort for communities when these unimaginable tragedies strike. FEMA trains and provides our first responders, the first line of defense, the people that go in and risk their lives at a time when it is most dangerous. They can't do it alone, and FEMA provides critical training, resources, and supplementation.

FEMA is designed to have an immediate response within a minimum of 15 hours. However, under President Trump and his canceling of FEMA, defunding FEMA, firing FEMA employees, terminating hundreds of FEMA employees, it was over 72 hours before critical resources were brought into Texas. Mr. Speaker, 72 hours is critical when you are floating in a river and you need help. In these situations, 72 hours make the difference between life and death, and Trump and our Federal Government failed.

After Katrina, we saw how inadequate FEMA can be sometimes. We saw the disaster of government when it didn't work. Congress put in place some measures to repeal and increase FEMA. One of those was you have to hire an experienced administrator of FEMA, somebody who knows what they are doing, because this isn't a time to play around. This administration hired as the director of FEMA somebody who never even knew whether or not a hurricane season existed, somebody who has no experience in this area.

Homeland Security Secretary Noem put in place measures, cost-cutting measures, that catastrophically impacted what the response was in this situation. Phone calls were never answered. The day after this flood happened, she canceled the contracts of the people who answer the phone when you call for help. That is not the response that this government needs, and we have to do better.

I am calling upon my Republican colleagues, I am calling upon everyone in this Congress to have us come together because these tragedies don't just affect Texas. They can affect all of us. Weather is violent, fierce, and deadly, and it is indiscriminate about where it strikes, but we have the ability to fix it. I call on my colleagues to come together. Let's make it better and let's make sure that these tragedies don't happen again.

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