9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act

9/11 RECOMMENDATIONS IMPLEMENTATION ACT -- (House of Representatives - October 07, 2004)

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chairman, today we must undertake the most important task entrusted to us, our responsibility to protect the American people and our country, to defend our borders, and to preserve our way of life against those who already have, and those who would again, do us harm. Specifically, we must address the shortcomings in our Nation's defenses that were exploited by murderers who killed 3,000 unsuspecting, innocent people on American soil on September 11, 2001. Too many of these shortcomings have simply gone unaddressed in the last 3 years.

After months of painstaking and bipartisan work, the 9/11 Commission produced a thoughtful road map to guide our efforts at shoring up our intelligence and homeland security capabilities. The Senate accepted this road map, began working immediately in a bipartisan manner on it, and has produced legislation supported by the families of the 9/11 victims, the commissioners, and 96 Members of the Senate. Regrettably, yet again, the House Republican leadership has chosen to legislate in an exclusionary, partisan process, resulting in a bill that not only falls short of many of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations but also contains divisive, extraneous provisions.

Many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have expressed their concerns about the unnecessary expansion of law enforcement authority, the undermining of immigrants' fundamental rights, and the erosion of basic civil liberties contained in H.R. 10. I share those concerns. I am also troubled that this House bill fails to adequately address the gravest threat to our national security, terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Interestingly enough, both Senator Kerry and President Bush in the last debate made it clear that they thought that was the highest priority. Yet this bill on the floor does not address it. Luckily, the substitute does.

H.R. 10 fails to strengthen the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction program which is designed to prevent these weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, as the commission recommended and as the Senate bill does. The Menendez alternative addresses the issue of expanding our ability to acquire and get off the market for terrorists such nuclear weapons.

This legislation represents a missed opportunity to learn lessons from September 11 and to implement meaningful improvements to our ability to better detect, prevent, and respond to future terrorist attacks.

I urge my colleagues to support the Menendez substitute. It can clearly pass the Senate; 96 Senators have already supported it.

At a time when time is of the essence, we ought to act in as bipartisan and cooperative a fashion as we can. The Menendez substitute mirrors the bill passed in the Senate which incorporates the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, and it will allow us to better fulfill our sacred duty of protecting the American people and doing so in a very efficient, effective, and quick fashion. We ought to adopt the Menendez substitute.

And I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for his leadership on this critically important effort. I know that he lost many constituents in that tragic event, and I thank him for following up so diligently since then to ensure that it does not happen again.