Floor Statements

Thanks.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I am champing at the bit here because he is absolutely right, and one of the things I want to emphasize, because I think in the last few nights we have not gotten this point across to the Speaker and to the folks who might be hearing this conversation this evening, the purpose of the 30-something Group, the main purpose, is for us to help get some understanding out to our generation about the issues that we are debating in this Congress and how it affects them. And the student aid cuts that the gentleman was talking about just a few minutes ago, more than any other issue almost, is the easiest for folks in our generation to understand how it impacts them.

What maybe is not so obvious is what Congressman Meek was just talking about a minute ago. The Republican leadership, our friends on the other side of the aisle, will try, as they put forth this reconciliation act, AKA budget cuts, because reconciliation and other words that are used inside this Chamber and in this Capitol, that is Washington speak for budget cuts, the budget cuts that they are saying they are going to need to put forward to address the deficit and to address the out-of-control spending that they have engaged in are not for Katrina relief, are not being put forward so that we can pay for Katrina and for the aftermath of Katrina. They are so that they can preserve the $70 billion in tax cuts that they have put forward.

Let us boil this down to its simplest terms. They will represent and have been representing that they have to do these cuts because the impact from Katrina is so significant and we have got to do something. We have got to get a handle on the spending. Why does getting a handle on the spending have to be on the backs of the people who can least afford it and we are going to enrich the backs of the people who do not need help?

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to be even more specific, because he is absolutely right. The groups that are out there trying to help those in need are opposing these cuts. Every major religious institution has sent letters to our Speaker, to this Republican leadership, asking them not to do what they are trying to do, not to harm people who are most in need, particularly in exchange for preserving tax cuts for our wealthiest citizens.

Just in student aid alone, they are proposing a cut of more than $14 billion from the student aid program, which is the largest cut in history to Federal student loan programs. On top of that, it increases the cost for student borrowers who are already saddled with about $17,500 in debt. They will be forced to pay $5,800 more for their college loans. In my community that is really real money.

That is real money. I do not know a lot of people who can just reach into their pocket or go down to their local bank branch and yank out $5,800.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, if I can just say one thing, first of all, it is such a pleasure to see you and have you join us tonight. The gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Berkley) has been an amazing advocate for the people who are on this floor tonight championing their cause. Those of us in the 30-something generation have had an opportunity to stand on your shoulders for the years you have been in Congress and been in the legislature in the State of Nevada fighting for the people that have no voice. That is really why we are here. We are so glad and privileged to have you join us tonight to take up this fight.

If the gentleman will yield, $8 trillion is a really, really big number, a difficult number for a lot of people to get their minds around in terms of a concept. Tell us, how much money does that translate per man, woman and child in America?

Mr. Speaker, I think we should put a link on the 30-something Web site.

Mr. Speaker, I am also going to speak up for those of our colleagues with white hair, because Mr. Meek and I represent tens of thousands of folks with white hair.

When the President talked about an ownership society, I think he was talking, well, I must have misunderstood him because, apparently, he is more interested in making sure that the top 1 percent of the population owns everything and that they are the only ones in a position to own anything.

Because if you look at people's ability to afford housing, in almost every major city in America, it has become virtually out of reach. The average price of a house in just my county is $348,000, the average price of a house. Now, that is not an attainable price for an average middle-class person, never mind somebody who is on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

But let us talk about senior citizens. Let us talk about the folks who are living on fixed incomes. And then, let us turn to the people who are in our community, in south Florida, who just got hit by a category 3 storm who, right after the storm, were in a bad enough situation to begin with, because we got hit much worse than anyone expected. But then, 2 days ago, it started pouring rain on the houses that were already blown out by the wind and the rain.

Oh, yes. These people in this picture, this lovely couple who happen to be constituents of mine, they live in a condominium in my district where I just went door to door giving out self-heating meals. These are people who are frail. They were told that they had to leave because many hundreds of the apartments in this condominium complex alone are being condemned after the rain because there are gaping holes in the roof. And on top of that, with thousands of people now, thousands of people in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami- Dade counties who were hit by Wilma and whose homes are being condemned, there are numbers in the thousands, and that is just after this week's rain, we expect more rain in the future; and they are not even done counting the number of buildings that have been affected.

This budget reconciliation, these budget cuts cut housing vouchers, cut affordable housing programs. Just in our State, we would take a 3,500 section 8 voucher cut. So we are talking about people who are hit by a natural disaster who are being forced out of their houses, and now they will have the manmade disaster of this budget cut, these budget cuts that will force even more people out of their houses.

But ``we want to create an ownership society in America.'' The President of the United States was elected to help people own things and to accumulate things. All I can see anyone accumulating is people who already have a whole lot and could live their whole lives not accumulating one more thing.

When is it going to stop? When are we going to be able to be in a position here in this Chamber to move this country in a new direction and start helping people again?

Mr. Speaker, I will tell the gentleman why. Because according to the Republican leadership, they do not want an ownership society; they want an own-everything society. That is why. Because they fall into the category of groups and individuals that the Republican leadership in this country clearly believes should own everything.

Mr. Speaker, first I want to thank the Democratic leader (Ms. Pelosi) of California for the opportunity to spend some time talking about the issues of concern to Americans across this country, and as a member of the 30-something Democrats, and I know I will be joined by my colleagues in a few moments, we have appreciated hearing from the literally hundreds of Americans both in our generation and across the generational spectrum over the last weeks since we have been talking about those issues on the floor here.

My good friend from Pennsylvania, I cannot help but spend a few moments talking about some of the matters that he has just addressed, being that I am a Representative of the State of Florida; and I had an opportunity to engage in a very interesting and informative and timely dialogue with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) just yesterday.

Unfortunately, the industry organization that he just cited, which he also cited in our debate the other night, Associated Industries of Florida, that is not an organization, if the Members are familiar with Florida politics, that is at all representative of the average business organization in our State. Associated Industries of Florida is primarily made up of the most major corporations in Florida. Every major oil company is a member of Associated Industries. So it makes quite a bit of sense that the opinion of Associated Industries would reflect what Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania just described.

Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania advocates for more drilling off the coast of Florida, California, all around the coastline of our country. He particularly focuses on natural gas and professes that natural gas is a clean-burning gas and that there would be little to no risk to expanding that drilling. Well, when one is a representative from the State of Florida, and we have 77 million people who visited our State just last year alone and $56.5 billion in taxable sales is generated by tourism, most of which is the result of our beautiful beaches and our pristine coastline, one can clearly see why most Floridians would have a significant problem with the possibility of there being oil rigs off our beaches within the eyesight of tourists or our residents.

And Mr. Peterson of Pennsylvania has continually represented that natural gas is a potential alternative energy source. Well, just off the Florida coastline, the Minerals Management Service, which is a government agency under the Department of the Interior, has documented that there is only about a 70-day supply of natural gas off the coastline of Florida in the gulf under current consumption rates in the United States. That to me does not appear to take us into the rest of the century in terms of dealing with our energy needs.

What we should be doing is uniting as Members of Congress representing this country and dealing with our long-term energy crisis by exploring alternative energy sources, not going to the same old energy sources and trying to drill our way out of this problem. Drilling is not the solution. There is far too much environmental risk to drilling, whether we are drilling for natural gas or drilling for oil; and the proposal that we will be considering that is attached to the budget reconciliation bill, the budget-cut document that we will be considering, at the earliest, next week, includes a terrible proposal that would expand drilling off the coastline of Florida and bring drilling within 125 miles of Florida's coast on the gulf.

That is a totally inappropriate proposal. It makes absolutely no sense. It would jeopardize our environment, and I am hopeful that my colleagues from Florida and other colleagues who represent coastal communities which will also be in jeopardy if this provision passes will join us in opposing this budget reconciliation bill, not the least of which, because there are many other reasons why it should be opposed because of the dire cuts that are in the budget that are going to rain terror down on Americans across this country; but to add insult to injury, it also has a terrible provision in it that would allow drilling off the coastline around our entire country.

So with that having been said, I want to talk a little bit about what we talked about in the previous hour and turn the conversation back to the budget reconciliation bill. There are a number of significant problems with the budget cuts that the Republican leadership is proposing. But one of the things that I wanted to turn to is what Democrats think we should be doing in terms of the budget.

Democrats want to bring the budget back into balance. What we proposed in the Budget Committee today included a proposal that would bring the budget back into balance by 2012. The Democratic budget also has a smaller deficit than the Republican budget every year and would accumulate less debt and waste fewer resources on interest payments that are needed to service the national debt. We would include budget enforcement measures to protect Social Security.

We would do more for education. The Democratic proposal provides $4.5 billion more for appropriated education and training programs than the Republican budget for 2006 and $41 billion more over the next 5 years. We also reject the $21 billion in cuts that the Republican budget requires the Education and Workforce Committee to make over the next 5 years. Those are cuts that could fall on students loans and school lunches.

These are not the same old tired complaints. It is insulting to suggest that cutting school lunches and financial aid are tired complaints. If one is struggling to be able to give their children breakfast and lunch on a daily basis and make sure that they are provided with nutrition and they do not financially have the ability to ensure that they can do it themselves, staring down budget cuts that take that opportunity away from them is nothing short of cowardly. This is a cowardly budget reconciliation bill. It does not show any guts at all, and it abandons the American people.

Let us talk about housing. In the previous hour, we talked a little bit about the housing cuts that this budget-cut bill would hand down, and I am joined by my good and close friend whom I had an opportunity to serve with in now three different Chambers, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek). His district and my district were hit badly by a category 3 storm last week, Hurricane Wilma; and we were talking in the last hour about housing and the issues related to affordable housing that our constituents were already facing.

I want to just point out this picture here. Over the weekend I had an opportunity to go door to door in my district because there are so many senior citizens trapped in their homes without power. We still have half a million people who do not have power in south Florida. And, unfortunately, whether it is because of hurricane fatigue or just the fact that there was so much damage in the gulf coast region that it may be difficult to feel the pain that we are going through in south Florida and understand it, but there is not nearly as much attention as we need focused on what happened in south Florida.

When I was going to door to door in my district to try to help some of the folks who have trouble getting out of

their houses, and I am talking about people who are in their 80s and 90s, one of the apartments that the building captain in the condominium brought me into included this kind of damage. This is the result of Hurricane Wilma, and this is just one example. There are hundreds and hundreds of condominium units and apartment buildings and homes and mobile homes that look just like this.

There is a perception, whether it was created by the media or created by the lack of attention by the national media on what happened with Hurricane Wilma, that everything is fine in south Florida. Everything is not fine, Mr. Speaker, in south Florida.

This is the third floor apartment, and that is the ceiling of the apartment. And as we can see, we can look right through the ceiling at the sky. This is this woman's master bedroom; and literally during the storm, 1 minute after she walked out of that master bedroom, the roof caved in on her bed. A minute earlier and it would have caved in on her.

When we talk about the affordable housing problem that we already had, now we have thousands of people in south Florida whose homes have been condemned, who are faced with nowhere to go because the average price of a house just in Broward is $348,000 a year. The rental units, the monthly rent is sky high. And FEMA has literally only 300 inspectors in our State going through these homes to determine whether these people are going to qualify for assistance.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

The woman had to leave that apartment.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, it is worse. It got worse from there. It was not just what he was doing with his attire, rolling up his shirt sleeves, but what he was wearing that they continued to talk about. On August 29, the day of the storm, Brown exchanged e-mails about his attire with Ms. Taylor, his press secretary again. She told him in the e-mail, ``You look fabulous.'' And Brown replied, ``I got it at Nordstrom's. Are you proud of me?''

An hour later he added, If you look at my lovely FEMA attire, you will really vomit. I am a fashion God.''

This is the day of the storm. He is still being paid $148,000 a year to advise FEMA, according to Secretary Chertoff, and change, give or take a dollar or two, to advise FEMA about what they should be doing in the aftermath.

The only thing that they are doing here is they have a lopsided partisan committee that is supposedly reviewing the aftermath of Katrina and FEMA's response. You know, I would feel much better about any review, although I strongly believe that there should be an independent Katrina commission, as do 81 percent of Americans, but if they had learned something between storms.

We have had three storms in two months, from Katrina to Rita and from Rita to Wilma. They have learned nothing. After my district and that of the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) district got hit by Wilma, and Secretary Paulison now in FEMA is a qualified professional, so at least they have that right now, but unfortunately FEMA still is not getting it right.

We still 10 days after the storm do not have a disaster recovery center established in Broward County or in Miami Dade County, a permanent one. There are seven mobile units between the two counties. We have more than 136,000 people in Broward alone who have applied for assistance, and they cannot get it yet because FEMA only has 300 inspectors in the whole state and they can do about 10 a day in terms of the inspections.

I yield to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, we talk in our 30-something Working Group here, I used to say every week; but now it's every night, about third-party validators, and I think it is important to have third-party validators so that we show the people who are hearing us tonight that this is not Tim Ryan's opinion or Debbie Wasserman Schultz's opinion or Kendrick Meek's opinion or Bill Delahunt's opinion; this opinion is shared by many, many others.

The Republican leadership here, they talk a good line about faith and values. In fact, they base almost their entire campaigns, the case they make to the country, about how we need to restore family values, we need to restore values and faith, and there should be more faith injected into every aspect of our government. Well, let us see what the people of faith, our faith leaders are saying about these budget cuts that we are going to be considering next week.

Today, there were leaders from various faiths that joined in prayer at the Capitol. Those leaders included Reverend Dr. Bob Edgar, who is the general secretary of the National Council of Churches; Reverend Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and Convener of Call to Renewal; Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism; and Eleanor Giddings Ivory, director, Washington office, Presbyterian Church. They had a press conference before the prayer and they called for a moral budget and urged Congress to stop immoral budget priorities. Let me just outline a few of the things that they said.

Reverend Wallis said, ``As this moral battle for the budget unfolds, I am calling on Members of Congress, some of whom make much out of their faith, to start some Bible studies before they cast votes to cut food stamps, Medicaid, child care and more that hurt the weakest in our Nation. Reverend Edgar of the National Council of Churches said, ``We gather today just days after Rosa Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, lie in State here in the Capitol rotunda. Even as we celebrate her life and the strong witness she had for justice, we recognize that justice is hanging in the balance as this proposed budget, if passed, would hurt those who are most in need in our society: children, the elderly, and those living in poverty.''

I just want to quote from the remarks that Rabbi Saperstein made. He quoted the Bible and used the Bible's words to help our Republican colleagues understand the impact that they are making. He urges us to ``deal thy bread to the hungry,'' not ``steal thy bread from the hungry.''

Remember Proverbs' stern warning: ``Do not steal from the weak because he is weak and do not oppress the poor in the gate.''

Listen to the voiceless and to the Biblical imperative: ``Speak out for those who cannot speak for the rights of the destitute.''

These are the third-party validators who are our religious leaders that are urging this Republican leadership not to go down this path, not to pull out

the rug and the floor and literally burn the house down that people who are so badly in need in this country cannot afford to sustain.

Our priorities, apparently the priorities of this administration are in appointing unqualified people to run Government agencies like Michael Brown, whose priorities clearly were more on what kind of shirt he was wearing, as opposed to making sure that the people in the gulf coast States who were about to get and then did get hit by Katrina did get taken care of. And about whether to roll up their shirtsleeves and by appointing their college roommates to jobs, to making sure that you have well-qualified people in the Government.

It does not stop at Michael Brown. You have people who have been found to be wholly unqualified up and down the Government. You have corruption, through and through, from the top. At the White House, the first person working in the White House in 130 years to be indicted in 130 years.

You know, we have had quite a few scandals in White Houses past just in my lifetime, but never once has a White House official, an administration official working in the White House been indicted before 130 years ago. That is where their priorities are.

Mr. Speaker, it is really hard to keep track of all of the lies.

Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that they do not appear to have any interest in that. Yet again, the cronyism and the culture of corruption continues because one would think that after Brownie they would have learned, who is still on the payroll.

$148,000 a year. They may have learned and bring in additional people who are qualified. Yet, the President just picked the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, chairman to run the gulf coast recovery. Let us peruse his qualification. He gave $100,000 to President Bush's Presidential campaign.

He has 30 years' experience in the financial services industry.

It does not stop.

Because they have no interest in it stopping.

We are approaching the end of our hour, and I want to yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) and ask him to give out our Web site.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 19 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, November 4, 2005, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.

It is a pleasure to join him once again, and we appreciate Leader Pelosi's giving us this opportunity to talk about the issues that are important not just to our generation but to the citizens of this country who really need to hear both sides of the story, which they are most definitely not hearing from now.

And the gentleman mentioned the extension of Brownie's contract. I was struck by the fact when we learned that, and I think we just learned that last week, that his contract was extended ostensibly to glean more advice from him on what the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA should be doing in the aftermath of hurricanes. And we are still, unfortunately, in the middle of hurricane season. Our respective districts were just struck by Hurricane Wilma, and one of the things that we have learned in the aftermath of Wilma now is that it has really become clear that the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA have learned nothing from the aftermath of Katrina, the blown aftermath of Katrina, and then Rita and then from Rita to Wilma.

Communication failures, an inability of our cities to get generators to run their lift stations, sewage backing up in the streets, gaping holes in condominiums and mobile homes. It is pouring rain today in south Florida, which is pouring more misery on top of people who have already been through so much. And how does Secretary Chertoff respond? He extends Michael Brown's contract by 30 days. This is a person who President Bush ultimately was forced to admit was not able to handle a job the size of Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath, so much so that essentially he was forced out.

But now, because they are so married to the cronyism, the culture of corruption and cronyism and the lack of competence runs so deep and they are so unwilling to give it up and to admit that they are incorrect that they give him an extension and continue to pay

him $148,000 a year. This is what they are rewarding. They reward incompetence. They thrive on cronyism and corruption and unethical behavior. It is just unbelievable.

I think this is a good time to turn to our first chart here, if the gentleman is ready to do that.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding to me because in between these two charts or slides, I want to tell my colleagues what I saw when I was watching ``Good Morning America'' yesterday morning, Mr. Speaker.

Matt Cooper, the Time Magazine reporter who was one of the reporters involved in all of this and testified in front of the grand jury and initially resisted in terms of his willingness to testify, had an exchange with Charles Gibson on Good Morning America yesterday.

Matt Cooper acknowledged, in questioning from Mr. Gibson, that he initially heard from Karl Rove about the identity of Joe Wilson's wife and what she did for a living. Charles Gibson in this exchange said, ``So, you, I am sure, will likely be called to testify at Mr. Libby's trial, and will you be testifying to those facts?'' In other words, he asked will you be testifying that you initially heard about Joe Wilson's wife's profession and what she did and her identity from Karl Rove? And he said, ``Well, that is the truth, and I plan on testifying about what I know.''

Then Charles Gibson asked Matt Cooper, ``Is there any possibility that you are not correct?'' Because, you know, Mr. Cooper, the other side will say, opposing counsel will try to say that perhaps you are mistaken or you misunderstood or there was some matter of clarity, lack of clarity on your part. He said, ``Well, I was taking notes during this conversation, and I am pretty clear. I am going to go in and testify to what I was told.''

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, Cooper is going to say at trial, if asked, that Karl Rove was the first person to tell him Valerie Plame's identity.

I thought that was important.

And subsequently made a liar out of Mr. McClellan. He is the spokesperson standing in front of the American people and the White House press corps. In fact, I heard an exchange yesterday between him and the White House press corps where he was pressed by them to acknowledge that he basically was trotted up there to the podium and forced to lie to them, unknowingly perhaps. But in addition to being lied to, he lied to the press and to the American people.

Mr. Speaker, if we had that transparency here, if the leadership here were willing to engage in transparency and get to the bottom of whether or not prior to the declaration of war and taking us into the Iraq war and misrepresenting facts to Members of this body, if they were willing to do that, then we would not be in the position that we are in today, so much so that today in the United States Senate, Minority Leader Harry Reid had the courage to use a rule that has not been used in 20 years, at least 20 years, rule XXI that has not been invoked in 20 years, to bring the Senate into a closed session because of the foot-dragging and hemming and hawing and hand- wringing over exposing the information on how it is that we ended up in the Iraq war, and making sure that they get to the bottom of how much information, following September 11 and prior to September 11, the administration actually had and whether it was available.

None of that information has been forthcoming. There has been opaqueness, not clarity, not transparency, so much so that Minority Leader Reid had to force the Senate into closed session today in order to try to push them to get that part of the investigation rolling. It is just absolutely inexcusable.

It has been such a pleasure to serve with the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Delahunt) on the Judiciary Committee, and his eloquence and knowledge and commitment to making sure that truth is told is absolutely laudable.

You know, to follow up on what you are saying, there are consequences to the actions that they are taking. It is not just about that it is outrageous

that they have to be right and that they are dictatorial and that they insist on having their way and that, during one of the debates in the last Presidential election, President Bush actually could not think of something, of an instance in which he had been wrong. I mean, this is how arrogant this administration has become. This is how deep seated the culture of corruption and cronyism and incompetence has become. But it is the results of that arrogance and that attitude that is what is truly troubling. And troubling is too easy a word.

The other day we went beyond 2,000 men and women who are dead. Dead. Whose families are in tears. Whose mothers will never be the same again because they had to be right. Because it did not matter whether the information they had was true. They were just going to disseminate it. Because they had decided, clearly in advance of September 11, that they were going to take us into war in Iraq.

There are documents, like the Downing Street Memos that have come out, that show that they were fitting the facts around their previously arrived at decision. Sure, it is not President Bush's daughters. It is not Karl Rove's kids. What is Karl Rove still doing there?

Let us go back to the first slide that you had up there. Does it appear as though the President has stuck to his commitment as a candidate, which was, in my administration we will ask not only what is legal but what is right, not just what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves.

This is a man who has compromised our national security. This is a man who has compromised not just a covert CIA's operative life but the lives of countless operatives who worked with her, who has helped send more than 2,000 Americans to their deaths. For what? For what?

You know, last year, during the campaign, you had thousands and thousands of security moms who went to the polls, and but for just about everything else that they cared about, they cared most about making sure that their children were safe. They went and cast their ballot for this President, because they trusted him the most to protect them in a time of national security, against terrorism and disaster.

Now we have seen just how well he measures up in terms of his ability to protect people after a natural disaster. And clearly there have been troubling aspects of what they knew in advance of September 11 and whether they could have even prevented September 11 from happening, given the information that they had.

Now they led us into war with misleading information, prevarication, I will use every other word except the word I am not allowed to use as a result of our rules. But how can they not care about that?

Mr. Speaker, I just keep asking myself where is their outrage, where is their shame? Why are we the only ones that appear upset about this? Why by their deafening silence does it seem as though they are sanctioning the activity that is going on in the White House? Sanctioning the corruption, sanctioning the cronyism and the culture that has been established here?

And it would be one thing, you could say, all right, we are going to compartmentalize, many people compartmentalize things. There are many Americans that may say, you know, foreign policy is not my concern. Of course, everybody in America cares about the loss of life, and I am sure that there is not one American that does not feel sadness over how many troops we have lost, but let us say you have Americans that can compartmentalize the foreign policy and comfort themselves by saying, I know, I think what has gone on is awful, but they are making up for it. The administration makes up for it with their fabulous domestic policy with the way they are taking care of things at home.

Are we satisfied with the direction we are going? Tonight in south Florida, today all day and tomorrow it is expected again to be pouring down rain. I have 90-year-olds, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I have 90-year-olds and older sitting in squalid apartments tonight with molding wet carpeting, with holes in their roofs who are not getting the assistance they need because FEMA is a disaster of an organization. It is supposed to be a disaster relief organization. They are a disaster all by themselves.

I want to tell you what my 6-year-old daughter said this morning. We were watching TV. I was getting ready and I was watching the news and she was in there with me. And she said, Mom, is Hurricane Rita coming? Because 6-years-old do not know the difference. Rita. Wilma. They just hear the names on TV, and there is not a lot of clear understanding.

I said, No, Hurricane Rita is long gone. You can imagine a 6-year-old living in Florida. There is a lot of fear of the concepts of hurricanes and one after the other after the other keeps coming down the pike.

So my telling her that Rita was long gone and there was no need to worry anymore, that satisfied her.

The report on the news about hurricanes in general went on for a few minutes, and I was not near the TV so I could not hear exactly what they were saying, but all of a sudden she said, Mom, I know what it is; hurricane FEMA is coming. I laughed, and I explained to her what FEMA was and tried to help her understand, that FEMA is supposed to be an agency that gets us ready when a hurricane is coming and takes care of us after a hurricane passes and makes sure that people are okay again.

That is the pattern. Because there is no accountability in Iraq, and just giving away the store, contracts without any accountability.

In Florida, we have been hit by eight hurricanes in 15 months. A year ago, FEMA gave out $31 million in reimbursement and assistance to people who were not even hit by a hurricane in Miami Dade County, one of the counties that I represent. So my answer to my daughter this morning was, honey, even though this is an agency, a department in the government that is supposed to take care of people after a hurricane comes by, many people think they are doing such a poor job that it feels like they got hit by hurricane FEMA after they have come through. That is what is going on in Florida tonight as we speak.

You still have them make mistake after mistake, no communication, and yet this leadership and this Congress still refuses to appoint an independent Katrina commission to ensure that we can review the aftermath of that storm, the aftermath of Rita and Wilma and find out why they were not ready, what happened.

We still have 4 weeks left of hurricane season. We are in a 15- to 20-year run of expected really tough storms, and I mean we have an administration that we have to count on now until 2008. Do we want to leave these people in peril in charge of every branch of our government? Do the American people have that kind of confidence? Culture of corruption, cronyism, and incompetence.

It is time to make some changes so we can take this country in a new direction and reinstate Americans' confidence in their government's ability to do right by them. Up and down the line, they have proven that they do not deserve that confidence. They have not earned it.

And the culture that the gentleman is describing, he is absolutely right. It is not isolated. It is not like you can cordon off this instance and say it was just an anomaly, it was unusual. When you have something that is essentially your culture, like their culture of corruption, it is what defines you. It is what drives you every day. The culture that you are raised in is your belief system. It is your traditions. It defines almost everything about you.

It is clear that up and down this administration, up and down this leadership, I wish it stopped just at the administration, but it flows all the way down through this institution on their side and beyond. And we are in deep trouble because this government is being run by people who live by a culture of corruption.

The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) talked earlier about the 14-year covert CIA operative who talked about how treacherous it was and how they were being undermined by officials in their own government. Well, I want to go back to what Mr. Melman said in that Chris Matthews interview. Not just what he said previously, but in that same interview we talked about earlier. Chris Matthews asked him if he thought that heads should roll, essentially, for that conduct. And what he said was: ``I do not believe it would be hard for President Bush to ask that person to walk the plank.''

I do not see the plank. I have not seen Rove walk off of it. He is there still. He is still the Deputy White House Chief of Staff with the highest security clearance, with the ability to assist the President in making the most important decisions that this country faces.

The New York Times on October 5, 2003, talked about the instance of treachery. Within the CIA, they said the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery, as the gentleman from Ohio outlined. Miss Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had nonofficial cover and what was what in CIA parlance was called a nok, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create.

So we are not just talking about your run-of-the-mill covert agent. I know as I have been following this, and we are obviously not intimately familiar with the CIA's operations, I initially thought that Ms. Plame was a nominal covert agent. I know there are varying degrees. But apparently she had the most difficult cover to develop. It makes matters that much worse.

We have got to make sure that the American people can trust the information and the people who are running this country. We have to be able to trust the information that comes out of the White House.

I have spoken, I know all my colleagues have too, to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have said that they no longer trust the information that comes from the White House; yet they continue to walk the plank for the administration and for their leadership. They do whatever they are told. They never stray.

Where is their backbone?

The gentleman is absolutely right. It would be one thing if they could look us right in the eye and look the American people in the eye and their own constituents and say, I have consistently been voting exactly the way I feel. The votes I have cast go to the core of my principles, and I have always voted how I believe.

Only we know that not to be true. They could not possibly do that. They cannot have town hall meetings in their districts and look their folks in the eye and say, I have always voted my own convictions, because we have watched the read lights change to green lights, and the green rights change back to red lights. We watched this board over here.

Oh, my God, puking blood. It is just unbelievable. They have this timer that they set with 5-minute votes that turn into 40-minute votes, like the energy bill. I was not here, but the Medicare bill, a 15-minute vote, over 3 hours. And all the while our vote board with our names up here in lights, arm-twisting, blood-puking, the green turning to red, yes to no, and literally the angst that I have watched on some of my colleagues' faces knowing they want to cast their vote with how they truly believe, but they care more about the money continuing to flow, about the chairmanships continuing to come their way, and about the appropriations continuing to remain in the budget.

It is all about them. And when I ran for office, I thought it was supposed to be about the people I represented. That is why I came here. I am not sure why they came here. They have made it pretty clear, but I know that it is obvious that we came here for different reasons than they did.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, the most troubling aspect of what he just said is the question why will they not admit that they made a mistake. And the troubling aspect of that is that they did not make a mistake. It was deliberate. There is a strong possibility, given all the things we talked about here tonight, that they took us into war because they wanted to take us into war, because they had some grand plan. They had motivation. They had ``war fever,'' as the gentleman referenced earlier that Colin Powell indicated that Vice President Cheney had. The ability to admit mistakes when one believes they made them, but one has to first believe they made one. That is kind of the first rule. And the lack of capacity to acknowledge that they made mistakes is just astonishing. It really is, and they continue to astonish us on this floor and the American people.

Mr. Speaker, first I want to commend the gentlewoman from California on her heartfelt remarks on behalf of Rosa Parks and express my condolences to the Parks family and to all of the people who knew her. I grew up in a time in the middle of the 1960s, I was born in 1966, and consider it an honor and a privilege that I was raised with the rights and benefits that were the legacy of Rosa Parks. So thank you so much for paying that tribute to her.

I rise in support of House Resolution 368, the resolution congratulating the State of Israel on the election of Ambassador Dan Gillerman as vice president of the 60th United Nations General Assembly. I was pleased to learn that this resolution passed yesterday with a unanimous vote of 407 to zero, and I am quite proud to be a cosponsor.

I also wish to commend my colleagues, Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Steve Chabot, for their leadership in sponsoring this resolution. I look forward to a time when Israel is treated with respect and dignity and honor by all of the members of the United Nations.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here with you again and have an opportunity to have our 30-something Working Group talk about the issues that are important to the average American today in the 21st century. We also want to thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the Democrat leader, for an opportunity to put together this group and have this time on the floor to talk about these important issues.

This is a sad week in the United States of America. This is a week in which we started on Monday with my home State of Florida, my district in south Florida, being hit by a Category 3 hurricane, Hurricane Wilma. Today, 5 days later, we still have 80 percent of the people in my county without power. We have considerable difficulties in getting them ice and water. We have a Governor of my home State who has held up our State as the model for response to and preparation for natural disasters, yet if you went street by street and saw the devastation and asked my constituents and the constituents of Mr. Meek, if you asked our constituents if they think that this is the response that the model State should have provided, they would be ready to pull out our hair one by one.

I am going back down there tonight, and I am planning to spend the weekend going to distribution sites and talking to my constituents.

We have trucks and generators and lift stations, and lift stations still that have no power. We have the biggest city in my district, the city of Ft. Lauderdale, which literally is faced with a backup in their sewage system because we did not get generators to them. They are stuck in West Palm Beach. The Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA have not been responsive. I have people older than 85 stuck in high-rise towers with glass blown out of their windows and no elevators working because there is no power. These are people who cannot get themselves down 12 to 25 floors.

It has cooled down. There was a cold front that pushed Wilma and made her go faster, reached us right after that. It has not been, mercifully, hot. It has been in the upper 60s. But the way our climate is, when that cold front leaves, they could be hot again. The earliest anticipation that my constituents are expected to have power restored completely is November 22. This is from the model State.

That is how we started out. We are talking about FEMA that is still woefully unprepared to respond to natural disasters.

Let me move to the very next day, where we now unfortunately have had our 2,000th casualty in the Iraq war. And today, sadly, we have had the Vice President of the United States' Chief of Staff indicted on five counts, one of which was leaking the name of a covert CIA agent with the express, clearly the intent of advancing the administration's agenda that they were hell-bent on to get us into the Iraq war, because that CIA agent's husband had just come back from Niger and said there was no evidence that weapons of mass destruction were being acquired by Saddam Hussein and his allies in Iraq.

So the most sinister of intentions that the Vice President's Chief of Staff clearly had was to continue to advance the administration's agenda to get us into a war that was ill-advised, that was entered into under false pretenses with misinformation, and now the 2,000th American has died as a result of that.

When is the partisan politics and the people in the administration who are hell-bent on being right, hell-bent on having it their way, when is it going to stop? When are we going to have some bipartisan outreach?

I have been here for 11 months, and it has been incredibly shocking to me that we have folks like the gentlewoman from Tennessee who was willingly lambasting a group of her colleagues on our side of the aisle who have no ability to do the things like she is accusing. When are people like her going to sit down around the negotiating table and agree that we can and should agree on more things than we disagree?

It is so sad the Republican leadership in this country is only concerned about

being right, is only concerned about having it their way. Clearly, as the results of this week show, they will do anything, will do anything including lie to the government, lie to the press and expose an undercover CIA agent's identity in order to have their way and get us into an ill-advised and unfortunate war, which now we have no idea how long we will be in the midst of.

I am raising young children, as are many, many people across this country. I was fortunate and used to be able to say at every Veterans' Day ceremony and Memorial Day ceremony that my generation was the first generation in decades that were able to say thanks to the efforts of our predecessors, of the generations before us, that we did not have to get called to war, that our generation was not thrust in the midst of an ill-advised confrontation. The Vietnam War was the last serious conflict we entered into. Obviously the Gulf War in 1991 was not as widespread and serious and ended quickly. But we cannot say that anymore because the administration has submerged us into chaos.

Mr. Speaker, I just wonder where the outrage is. I did not hear in the last several hours since the indictment came out calls for an impeachment trial or calls for hearings in the United States Congress.

And just a few years ago, prior to my coming to the United States Congress, there were questions surrounding the previous administration and far less serious than lying to get us into war. I mean, these accusations, and let us remember that they are accusations, but they are very serious accusations, that once the accusations came out in the previous administration which were for personal circumstances, immediately we went into a situation on this House floor where we had impeachment managers, we had a trial, we had a process by which the President of the United States prior to this President was actually impeached on the floor of the House of Representatives for the accusations that were made against him that were far less dire.

Where is that outrage? Where is anyone on the other side who were calling for his head? Why are they not calling for the head of this administration?

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, what has become clear as of today is that the culture of corruption in the party and this administration and the leadership in this institution has become institutionalized. It runs deep.

It is a culture of corruption. A culture is one that is deep-seated, one that is the product of an accumulation within groups of people. The administration, various members of the leadership here in our institution, from top to bottom, the people running this country are under suspicion. And we have what I have referred to as the three Cs: the culture of corruption, the cronyism, and the question of competence.

Because now, as of today, there is no question that these are people that are not competent to run our government. They are not competent to respond to natural disasters. Look at Katrina and her aftermath. Look at Wilma and her aftermath, which is still ongoing. If they are not competent to respond to natural disasters, what are we going to do when we are hit with a man-made disaster, with a terrorist act?

I have talked to Members on both sides of the aisle this week who have privately worried out loud that they are not sure what would happen in their own community if they were hit with either a natural or a man-made disaster because there is deep-seated worry and concern about this administration's ability to take care of the American people. And never mind their ability. They are clearly focused only on themselves and their ability to accomplish their own goals and to heck with what anyone else thinks.

Clearly, they were willing to take the biggest step that any leader can take of a nation, and that is to send his or her citizens to war.

Let us just go over what some other people think, and like the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) has said, this is not Mr. Ryan's opinion; this is not Ms. Wasserman Schultz's opinion. What I am about to tell my colleagues is Ed Gillespie's opinion, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. It is not only the President's father, whom we can talk about what he said his opinion was when somebody reveals the identity of a covert agent. We are talking about on September 30, 2003, Ed Gillespie, who is the chairman of the Republican National Committee, during an appearance on MSNBC's ``Hardball.''

So we are talking Chris Matthews, who said, ``I think if the allegation is true to reveal the identity of an undercover CIA operative, it's abhorrent and it should be a crime and it is a crime.''

Hardball's host, Chris Matthews, went on to ask Chairman Gillespie, ``It would be worse than Watergate, wouldn't it?''

Gillespie's response: ``It's--yeah. I suppose in terms of the real- world implications of it, it's not just politics.''

That is absolutely right; it is not just politics. It is not just accusations that were of a personal nature like the previous President of the United States. We are talking about someone who plunged us into war and now we have had the 2,000th casualty of that war, because he is so focused on being right that he will clearly do anything and authorize his cronies to do anything and say anything to accomplish their objectives, even cause the deaths of our citizens.

I had an opportunity to go visit our troops that have come back from the Iraq war at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital right here in Washington, D.C. and I spoke to a young man whose legs were blown off, who will never be able to walk on his own legs again, whose life has been forever impacted because we have an administration that was hell bent on being right and was willing to do anything to make sure that their agenda was met. Never mind basic human decency.

We all raise our children, and I raise my children, to understand what right from wrong is, to know that we have to tell the truth, to know that we need to do right by people. And in my faith's tradition, we have an important stress on taking care of one another in our community and giving back. We have the spirit of what is called ``tikkun olam.'' And there is absolutely no hint of any of that in this administration or, quite frankly, among the leadership in this institution.

Because to a person, the accusations, and I will respectfully say again that these are accusations and that no one has been found guilty of anything or has been accused of anything as of yet, but whether it is the accusations against our former leader from this institution, or all the way up to the Vice President's Chief of Staff and the accusations made against him today in the indictment handed down, we are talking about decisions they made so they could accomplish their own political goals.

That is just heinous, and I want to know when the hearings are going to be called. I want to know where the outrage is. I want to know why the press conference was not held to schedule the special committee, the bipartisan committee that should be

brought together to do an investigation. I want to know where the outrage is. I want to know why we are not having impeachment hearings. I am waiting to hear that, because it is a little bit more important, when you send people to war just to accomplish your own goals, than when you lie about personal circumstances, totally and completely different. It is just disgusting.

If the gentleman will yield further, I wish my constituents could go to the gas station, but right now they cannot because none of the gas stations have any power. There are people in my district sitting in the dark 5 days after the storm hit them, supposedly the model State for disaster preparedness and aftermath response.

We have a Governor of my State who is refusing, after being asked several times this week, refusing to use the state of emergency to have the tankers with gas, instead of filling their contracts, which they can get premium top dollar for the gas in those tankers, he is refusing to order those tankers to deliver gas to meet the essential services that we need, to meet the needs of the generators in my cities and in the cities across south Florida of my colleagues, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Wexler), the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings), the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Shaw), the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Diaz-Balart), and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen). He is refusing to reorder the priorities of these gas tankers owned by the gas companies, the oil companies, and make sure that they can provide gas to the generators so that the lift stations can be turned on so the sewage is not backing up. We have to boil water or put chlorine in it or buy it from the few supermarkets that actually have powered themselves with a generator.

So we do not have any gas stations that are up and running on their own without any generators. Unfortunately, the oil companies have not in most cases purchased generators to be there and ready for the gas stations to use in the event of an actual disaster.

So, what we are talking about here is how deep this culture of corruption and cronyism and incompetence runs. If you could say it is an isolated instance and you have a rogue staff person who just became so focused on taking care of his boss that he decided he was going to say anything to accomplish his boss's goal, then you could say, you know what, you get rid of that cancer, and, okay, the cancer is cut out, and then the body is whole and well again.

But, unfortunately, this is an administration that is so infested with cancer, this is a party up and down the halls and walls of government that is so infested with cancer that it is impossible to cut it out completely. It runs that deep.

Next year what the American people are going to have to ask themselves is if they want this to continue. Do they want to continue to go in this direction? Do they want to continue traveling down this path, being dragged down this path, having another 1,000 soldiers die in a war that was not only ill-advised, but we were led into through deception, and then not only through deception, but through deliberate acts of deception to ensure that they would be able to drag us into war?

Then, on top of that, let us talk about some of the other things that they are willing to do and be hell-bent on in accomplishing their goals. Talk about what happens right here just in the last few months since I have been a Member of Congress.

Basically the Republicans here have created a democracy-free zone. We talk about the pride that we have in our democracy, and how participatory this institution is, and how we are all elected in our own right, and we all have the same rights and privileges, we have the same number of about 633,000 people that sent us here.

Yet it is pretty clear that we do not all have the same ability to cast our vote and have it stand and mean something and cast it freely and willingly, because the Members on the other side of the aisle have not been allowed to cast their votes by their leadership and leave that as their opinion standing all by itself because they get their arms twisted off.

We have votes like the energy vote that we had a couple of weeks ago that was called as a 5-minute vote and was held open for 40 minutes, 40 minutes, because we were killing that bill, because it was a terrible bill that was not going to do anything to reduce gas prices, that was not going to improve our energy situation that we are in such dire straits in in this country. It was going to put more money in the pockets of the oil company executives and the oil companies' profit margin.

So what they did was hold that vote open so they could twist enough of their Members' arms and work the aisles so that they could get their Members to switch. And we watched it. The board is right up above us here, our names are in lights, there is a red and green button, and you saw a whole bunch of red buttons on their side of the aisle that over the 40 minutes were switched to green.

Now, I came here with some conviction, and I came here with some backbone, and I am certainly not going to let anybody chisel my backbone away just in the name of my party. I just wonder where the backbone is? Why are they willing to just cave? Do they not have convictions? Do they not understand that you have to represent your constituents? Do not they understand that they have to represent their constituents, not the oil companies? Do they not understand they have to represent their seniors so they can get low-cost prescription drugs and not put more money in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies?

That Medicare prescription drug bill passed before I got here. How long was the vote held open; 3 hours on a 15-minute vote to do the exact same thing? That bill prohibited the government from negotiating prices, just like the Veterans Administration has that ability, negotiating prices with the pharmaceutical industry to make sure that our constituents, our seniors, could have low-cost prescription drugs, who are right now having to choose between medicine and meals.

This is what we are talking about when we talk about an institutionalized culture of corruption, because you do not see the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) working the aisles, twisting our arms off to change our votes from red to green or green to red. We get permission to stand and vote our conviction.

I can tell you all the way back to March, when I had a very strong opinion about the Terri Schiavo case, some Members on the floor disagreed with me, but nobody was coming here, nobody was pounding on me asking me not to do that, ``Do not stand up, Debbie. Do not stand up for what you believe in.'' I was allowed, even though I am a freshman and had only been here 10 weeks, I was encouraged by our leadership to stand up for what I believe in. It is just the saddest thing that that does not exist on their side of the aisle.

I am glad the gentleman brought up FEMA, because obviously that is a pretty hot issue down my way right now. Let us let people know what we were talking about the other night, because Brownie, the former Mr. Michael Brown, the former Under Secretary for FEMA, most people think that he is gone. Most people think he is no longer involved in FEMA's decision-making activities.

He is still being paid $148,000 a year as an adviser, because the Secretary of Homeland Security Mr. Chertoff just extended his contract for another 30 days. They kept him on supposedly to continue to advise them on how to deal with the aftermath of Katrina.

He is still on the payroll being paid a $148,000-a-year contract for another 30 days.

We have two more storms that have hit us since Katrina, Rita and Wilma; and it is not like they have fixed it. It is not like Brownie has gotten it right now and we have seen the fruits of continuing his contract. Now we have people who are sitting in the dark in my two counties that I represent, Broward County and Miami-Dade County. We have lift stations that are off, all 2,000 lift stations in my county have no power. The sewage is backing up. People have to boil water, but they cannot boil water because they do not have any power, or they have to add chlorine to their water. The ice and water trucks that were touted as being pre-positioned prior to the storm, they were lost, they could not find them because they relied on cell phones for communication.

Now, hello. How tall are cell phone towers? I would think that if you have a cell phone tower getting hit by 120-mile-an-hour winds that perhaps you would anticipate that they would be damaged and you would not be able to use them.

Where was the planning? I could nitpick every little detail; but, obviously, in the aftermath of a storm, there are going to be kinks, there are going to be problems. I do not want to be specifically critical of the response to this storm; I want to be more generally critical, because they have learned nothing. We have had the two additional storms following Katrina, and they have learned nothing. Sixty days have gone by. They have not fixed it. They have not made adjustments. Why?

We have people who are sitting in harm's way who have suffered damage, and they continue the contract of the man who was clearly declared as incompetent and removed from being in charge of Katrina, but not removed from the payroll, and the stated purpose was so they could continue to get advice from him. A person who was not qualified for the job to start with, because his previous experience was being head of the Arabian Horse Association.

You are absolutely right, Mr. Ryan. In terms of cronyism, that was the ultimate. You had a guy get a job because he was the college roommate of an ally of the President's and put in charge of the agency that has to be the command center for every agency in the government and directing their response to the aftermath of a hurricane, or any natural disaster. What happens is, if you put an unqualified person in that position, you are going to end up having the result that we saw in the aftermath of Katrina and the result that we have now seen in the aftermath of Wilma.

Now we have Secretary Paulison, Acting Secretary Paulison, who is in place now. He is a constituent of mine, he does have the qualifications, he does know what he is doing; but Brownie is still on the payroll, and FEMA is now in the Department of Homeland Security. It is no longer an independent agency that answers directly to the President, that has the ability to direct things on their own. They have to run it up the food chain to the head of Homeland Security.

When you put obstacles in the path of a decision-maker, it makes it harder to make the decision. And in the aftermath of a storm, you cannot have obstacles. Obstacles harm people. I am hoping that at some point someone in the administration decides that it is more important to take care of people than to accomplish their own agenda and their own goals.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is so right. As we close out, I just want to reiterate that this is about competence. It is about who do you trust. It is going to be next year asking the American people to give us the opportunity to take this country in a new direction, to end the culture of corruption, to end the cronyism, to invest the kind of resources that we need to make sure that the middle class can be thriving and vibrant, and to make sure that we have a disaster response system in place that is responsive, that meets the needs of people, and that does not leave them twisting in the wind as my constituents are right now, who are without gas and without water, where a hospital in my own district is not able to continue to take care of people because their employees do not have enough gas to get to work. Those are basic needs.

We want to thank the Democratic leader for giving us an opportunity to come on this floor tonight and for creating the 30-something Working Group. I know Mr. Ryan wants to give people the Web site where they can contact us.

Mr. Speaker, I want to let my constituents know that I am coming home tonight and looking forward to having the opportunity of helping them to get through the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma.

Mr. Chairman, I rise today to strongly oppose the Paul amendment and the civic engagement restrictions in the manager's amendment we previously debated. These will have a disproportionate and disparate impact on the State of Florida.

I just came back from my district, where the damage caused by Hurricane Wilma has been extensive. Its effects will be felt for months, if not years. Thousands of Floridians are living in shelters, as thousands of homes in the State were severely or completely destroyed.

People in Florida, Texas, the Gulf States, and across the country have been affected by these storms and have real life issues to deal with: food, shelter, clothing, fuel, lines for 2 and 3 hours to get fuel. I had to drive 150 miles today before I could find one gas station that only had about a half-hour line.

These people need shelter. They are going to need affordable housing. They could care less about partisan politics. These restrictions are misplaced and unnecessary. They preclude legitimate nonprofits from accessing affordable housing funds at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans desperately need this assistance. We should not be clouding the need for affordable housing with partisan politics.

I urge my colleagues to stay focussed on the issues that are at the center of people's lives and vote ``no'' on this amendment and ultimately support the gentleman from Massachusetts' motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, it has been stressful, and that is the mildest word I can use, last several days. We both rode out the storm in our houses in south Florida.

I have to say, if I had not been impressed by looking at the aftermath of Andrew, and I live in Broward County and so Andrew did not devastate Broward County like it did Miami-Dade County, we got grazed, but if I did not appreciate the kind of power Mother Nature has after observing the aftermath of Andrew and Hurricane Katrina on TV, I can tell you, being hit by an category 3 storm is awe inspiring.

When you are cowering with your kids and husband and your family in your home and you are boarded up in your house, it feels like God is literally throwing bowling balls on the roof. It is an emotional, stressful situation. For those of us who live in structures that have been built under the south Florida building code since Hurricane Andrew and have a sturdy structure in which to live, where we were not worried about our homes caving in around us, and then yesterday when I had an opportunity to ride with FEMA on their preliminary damage assessment review and saw the mobile home parks in my district and across south Florida spanning the gentleman's district, and literally see that the walls caved in around the foundations of these homes and just furniture was left. Massive trees fell, falling completely over or snapping in half and falling on people's houses. We can urge people to leave their homes as much as possible, but human nature often motivates people to stay with their belongings and protect their home base.

I just could not believe what might have happened. The fact that we avoided a huge loss of life is just a miracle. It really is. I have to say, the insensitivity on the part of the Governor as well as the President, both spanning from Hurricane Katrina to Wilma is just shocking. Governor Bush literally said today in our newspaper that he did not understand, and I will quote him: ``We had a lot of people standing in line yesterday that we did not like to see. That is why we tell people to have 72 hours of food and water so you do not have to stand in line.'' That was Secretary Paulison. Then the Governor said he did not understand why people did not heed the warning and get 72 hours' worth of food and water in advance of the storm. That is an easy thing to do.

Well, I do not think Governor Bush was in south Florida for the several days, 6 or 7 days' progress that Wilma made across the continent and saw the lines in advance of the storm. And you know what, if you do not have money, if you cannot buy gas for your car or get to a store, it is going to be a little difficult to stock up on 72 hours' worth of food.

When I went on this preliminary damage assessment, I will be honest, I am quite certain that a lot of these people could not afford to buy 72 hours' worth of food and water. So the insensitivity between the Governor's comments and the President's comments after Hurricane Katrina. The President said something similar after Hurricane Katrina. He said in advance of the storm, we warned people and it is our responsibility to get people prepared; but if they did not listen, there is not too much we can do about it. I guess like brother like brother.

But what is the most disappointing, really, as someone who went through the storm myself and now have had literally thousands and thousands of constituents whose lives are affected who are sitting in the dark tonight as we speak who cannot hear our voices unless they are listening to C-SPAN Radio, honestly, it is just unbelievable that last week when we had our Florida delegation meeting, to listen to the supposedly organized and well-prepared preparations that FEMA and the State of Florida were putting in place to pre-position supplies that people needed.

You would have thought that there would not be a kink in the works after the hurricane went through. Honestly, the reports that I am getting are so disturbing, price gouging of over $6 a gallon for gas in our districts. Where is the accountability? Where is the protection from the State government?

We have trucks that have been lost for 2 days that they still cannot find, that they bragged to us last week that they were pre-positioning ice and water and meals ready to eat in Jacksonville and Homestead, but then they lost the trucks because the only means of communication they had available to contact the trucks was cell phones. Maybe they did not notice, but cell phone towers are tall; and the tall things in south Florida when they got hit by a category 3 hurricane fell down or were damaged.

So that means communication went down. No water, no ice, no diesel fuel. Senior citizens older than 85 years old in Hallandale Beach stuck in their condominiums, the glass blown out of their places, no power, no food. The generators operating their power running out of diesel fuel. The mayor of Hallandale Beach had to call an emergency session of the city council and declare a state of emergency within her city so she could get ready to commandeer gas from a gas station to help those people.

This is the model State for natural disaster preparation. If we are the model, and we have already seen what the model is not, if we are the model, we have a lot of work to do.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is so right, and his comments have brought up so many different things that I want to say.

But let us go back to what we have been talking about on this floor lo these last few weeks. We have been talking about the three or four Cs that are the real issue in this administration and in this government. We have been talking about corruption. We have been talking about cronyism. We have been talking about competence. I think what has happened in our community in the last few days just points arrows in the direction of every one of those C words.

Let us talk about competence. The Governor can say, golly gee, our goal was to get up and running and be ready with all this water and ice and response and trucks and generators in 24 hours, and we will just have to work a little bit harder. Honestly, if they point to themselves as the model, if FEMA points to Florida as the model, and says that we are the most prepared State in terms of natural disasters, then they are owning up and saying, ``I am competent.'' We are competent. We are ready to do the job.

I think if we traveled through South Florida tonight and asked people on the street, whom the gentleman and I have talked with, and asked them if they think their government is competent, I think the answer would be a resounding no, because these are some of the things that our constituents are having to deal with tonight, that our families are having to deal with tonight. the reality of getting hit by a Category 3 storm and not having the government respond to their needs is that in Broward County there is no potable water. The entire county is under a boil water order, which means that when I had to give my 2-year-old a bath the other day, I could not pour water over her head because the water could give her pinkeye. That is what I was cautioned about. We have to make sure that our children do not rinse their toothbrushes with the water because it can make them sick.

We have a myriad of issues. We have water and ice and food needs. We have people in high-rises who have had windows blown out. We have trucks that have been lost. How could the trucks get lost? If they prepositioned them in strategic portions of the State so as to ensure that they could be moved out and sent to places that they know they are going to be needed, how is it that they could not find them and in some cases still have not been able to find them?

Today in Miami-Dade County, which we both represent, although now I am told that Miami-Dade County does have drinkable water, except for Miami Beach, which I represent about half of, these are the water and ice distribution centers, Mr. Speaker, that we were supposed to be set up and fully equipped with water and ice. So let us peruse the availability of the supplies today.

This is for the model State in terms of preparation and the prepositioning of hundreds of trucks to be able to be distributed as soon as the storm is over.

In advance of the storm, 2,000 FEMA employees who were supposed to be ready to be dispatched to get this stuff distributed. We had the Miami Beach distribution center supplied. Metro Zoo in South Dade, no water, partial ice. Homestead Sports Complex, which is near where the trucks were prepositioned, no supplies. None. I mean, in Homestead they did not have water or ice, and the trucks were right there to start with. The Orange Bowl was supplied, but we had massive chaos in terms of the thousands of people that showed up to try to get access to that.

We have Miami-Dade College North, which is in the north part of the county, no water, partial ice. Miami-Dade College Kendall, which is more towards south Dade, partially supplied, meaning they did not have enough water or ice for the people that showed up. And let us keep in mind that what they were distributing to people when they were able to get it were six bottles of water and a bag of ice. I mean, that is what people were able to take home while they are sitting in the dark with no ability to cool their food and keep it fresh.

A.D. Barns Park, no supplies. Tamiami Park, no supplies. The Mall at 163rd Street, in both your and my district, no supplies. And Landmark Property, no water, partial ice. This is the model State for natural disasters.

Let us talk about the IA, the granting of individual assistance or lack thereof. Why did the State of Florida, why did Governor Bush, not request automatic individual assistance for both the East Coast and the West Coast? He asked for that assistance immediately in advance of the storm for the West Coast, as if Wilma was going to hit a wall when she crossed over the West Coast and not cross over southeast Florida too.

I mean, it took literally until 7:30 last night with the gentleman talking to Secretary Paulison, me talking to Secretary Paulison, who, by the way lives in my district and is a constituent, and obviously knows the devastation, and he was in Washington, and much to his wife's dismay, he told me. But we even have the acting director of FEMA living in our area, and they still were not able to get individual assistance granted.

They literally went out on preliminary disaster assessments yesterday, as if you had to drive through a neighborhood to see the devastation. I mean, it was just so frustrating. This is what people are talking about when they say they do not feel their government is responsive to their needs, when they are frustrated beyond belief with the red tape.

I mean, it is so simple. It is very difficult to respond to natural disasters, there is no question about that. We lived through the chaos in the last few days. But, come on, if you are going to hold yourself up as a competent model and you are going to say that you are the example to which all others should be held, then you have to live up to that example.

Before I turn it back over to the gentleman, I just want to make sure we are not only talking about the one C, competence, we are talking about the cronyism too.

I was interested to come across an article today that talked about how Mr. Brown, ``Brownie,'' who was ejected because of his incompetence from FEMA, Secretary Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, extended Michael Brown's contract for another 30 days. For what?

The gentleman is on the Committee on Homeland Security. We had this partisan, dependent committee asking the right questions, supposedly, or at least that is what it was set up to do. How are they letting this happen? That is why we need an independent commission. If we had an independent commission, this would not have happened because there would be some accountability.

Our constituents want answers. I want to go home and make sure that FPL has the ability as much as they can humanly do to get those lights turned on. They are telling our people they are not going to be able to get those lights turned on possibly until November 22 at the earliest.

The other thing really disturbing that I heard and read in the Governor

and the State and FEMA's comments today was that they did not anticipate the intensity of the storm and they made a mistake in their calculations. The director of the State EOC, Emergency Operations Center, said today in the paper that they made a mistake in their calculations and did not account for the size of our population in South Florida when calculating how much ice and water was going to be needed.

We have the biggest media market in the State. There are more than 6 million people, 7 million people that live in our three counties, if you count Palm Beach too?

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, let us not even let people believe that now that individual assistance has been granted and that it is being supplied. They do not even have the registration sites set up now.

I was driving through the district with the FEMA folks yesterday and people were coming up with their houses crushed in saying, I have got to have some help here. I have a baby. I have a grandmother who needs medicine. When is FEMA coming?

The poor guy who I was riding with, he does not know what to tell people. He said, ``This is why we are doing this assessment, ma'am. I understand we are going to try to get help to you as soon as possible.''

Now we are 72 hours out. Every day the Governor says it is going to get one day better. It does not feel that way.

Mr. Speaker, we absolutely need accountability. There are people's lives at stake here. We are not here to be partisan.

I remember a few weeks ago when Katrina hit and after Katrina hit, and you and I and the gentleman from Ohio had been on this floor day after day, week after week, and talking about what the government's response needed to be and should have been and what our process should have done, which is establish an independent Katrina commission so that we could get some of these things resolved. Because it is very nice that the President is going to come down and land his helicopter or fly Air Force One or whatever he is going to do because the airports have not been open so, hopefully, he is going to have a place to land. That is very nice. I remember the movie ``The Candidate,'' and Robert Redford's character is running against another guy for the U.S. Senate, and there is a big fire, and his opponent flies the helicopter down into the disaster area to survey the damage. And you know, the whole thing is a fiery mess and the guy flies in, surveys the damage, and flies out, looks important and impressive, and that is great. But what help did he provide to the people who were there? Did he grab a hose and start spraying?

I am glad that the President is coming because he is the symbol of the United States of America, and there is one person in this country who everyone looks to, but it is only helpful if, when he sits down at the hurricane center and goes through that briefing, it is only helpful if he learns something, if the Federal Government and the administration learn something and change it for the next time. Because we were on this floor weeks ago offering our advice and our suggestions and our opinion about the aftermath of Katrina and how disturbed we were, because we said, and I remember using these words: there but for the grace of God go I, and now we have. Now it has happened to us. So it is our responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, there are those on the Majority side of the aisle that will accuse us of doing this on a nightly basis to be political and to be partisan. No. It is the fact that particularly with natural disasters, natural or manmade disasters, you just know that at some point, especially where we live and in other parts of the country that are more prone to natural disasters, you just know it is going to happen to you at some point. I have talked to constituents, I have read constituents' comments in the paper, that it is all well and good that they come in and they do this review and this assessment, but it is only good if they learn something.

One of the things, when I was at the Broward Emergency Operations Center yesterday, Tony Carper, the director, was talking about how they are trying to find generators, both the big generators that can help run the power grid while they are trying to get the power lines up and running again, and the small ones that people are going to need to run their facilities, and I asked him, I said, why, if we knew this storm was coming for so many days in advance, why did we not get those in position ahead of time? He said, because we do not have enough flexibility in our homeland security funding, because we get a lot of money for terrorism, but they are not able to use that money to respond to natural disasters. Well, we are much more certain on a regular basis that we are going to get hit with natural disasters than we are, God forbid, going to get hit by a manmade disaster.

That is the kind of responsiveness that could have been fixed several storms ago. I mean, we have our eighth storm in 15 months. How is it that that was not fixed already? How is it that we still have people sitting in the dark? How is it that we were denied individual assistance after Katrina in Florida, when you had people looking through the roof at sky, both in Florida and in Louisiana, and then the very next time that we get hit by a storm, we have to fight to get individual assistance granted when all you have to do is walk out your front door or turn on the television and you can see 100 or 800 homes damaged, severely damaged. Do they not care? I mean, have they no shame? Have they no heart?

It feels like that. It feels like they are up on high in the White House and Capitol Hill and it is not me, it is them. They are 1,100 miles from here and: my roof is not caving in, so I am okay. And I have money, I have water, I have ice, my kids are not going to get pink eye when I give them a bath and run water over their heads. I just, I do not understand. I do not understand why we had to spend the last 72 hours pounding on people, pounding on this government to get our folks some help. It is just inexcusable. It is incompetence. It is corruption, it is a crisis. We are going to have a whole collection, a whole necklace full of seeds by the time we are done with this year. God forbid. I hope that somebody decides to read the book, ``Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten'' and start remembering that we need to care about each other and that we need to be responsive and put partisan politics aside. It is not about the next election; it is about taking care of each other.

Mr. Speaker, if I can close us out by saying that their priorities are wrong. It is not an independent Katrina Commission; it is Katrina, Wilma, Rita. We have got to do better.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio. I feel a little odd over here. But, Mr. Speaker, if more of the people on this side of the chamber thought like me, then we would be improving things really significantly here. So I think maybe if I stand here long enough, maybe the philosophical brain waves will travel over here.

It is wonderful to have our colleague from Ohio join us in the 30- Something group. We have been trying to encourage our fellow 30- Something Members to join us down here to talk about the things that resonate universally across this country. The gentleman is absolutely right, both gentlemen are. It does not matter whether you are in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, Idaho, California, the things that we talk about on this floor during our hour are resonating and run deep in terms of their impact on Americans, whether you are from the right wing of the spectrum or the left wing of the spectrum.

Let us take the cost of college. Obviously, people in our generation, whether they are raising children that are about to go to college, or whether they, in the case of people who are maybe closer to the ages of the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Boren) and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), who are closer to having been in college than perhaps the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I are, the rising costs of college are just really getting out of control. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I just turned 39 a couple of weeks ago, so we are in our last year of eligibility here. So listen, I am a woman, and I am acknowledging that.

But there was an article in my paper today in the South Florida Sun Sentinel that talked about the cost of college having risen by one- third over the last 5 years. One-third. Parents have been preparing every year for yet another hit in their pocketbook. The average college costs today at a private college are $21,000, and almost $5,500 at a public university. It does not matter whether you are in a red State or a blue State, and I am going to claim Florida as a purple State. We are 50-50 right down the line when it comes to those elections, so I am not willing to cede that we are a red State just yet.

We cannot have our college students face the double-digit tuition increases that have been rained down upon them, coupled with the deep financial aid cuts that have been proposed. That is what is coming out of this Congress right now.

One of the things that we mentioned last night was that while we are very critical of the actions that are being proposed here by this Republican leadership, we do have our own set of plans, particularly in terms of how we would approach higher education and making college less expensive.

We would make college more affordable in several ways. Our proposal would guarantee a $500 boost to the maximum Pell grant scholarship. We would give students the choice between either a fixed or a variable interest rate when they consolidate their student loans, and we would do so without raising costs for students. We would keep Congress's promise that was made in 2002 on the Republican watch, which still has not been fulfilled, to lower the interest rate cap on student loans at 6.8 percent. The Republican bill reverses that bipartisan agreement and raises student interest rate caps to 8.25 percent.

We absolutely have to do not just right by our students, but we have to at least do what we say we are going to do. You cannot just talk about lowering the cost and expanding access to higher education; you actually have to follow up with action on it. And this Republican Congress and their leadership has been dropping themselves into a full- scale reversal and literally closing off access do higher education to Americans across this country.

The gentleman just mentioned that if we are going to make sure that we are ready for the next natural disaster, often when you talk about events like epic proportions like natural disasters,

you think of them in terms of their rarity. Since myself and Mr. Meek are both from Florida, and in the next 2 days we will face what is no longer considered a rarity in our State in the name of Hurricane Wilma that has now reached the point in history that it is the strongest storm on record with the lowest barometric pressure ever to be recorded in the Atlantic Basin and is expected to make landfall in our home State, possibly crossing over either mine or Mr. Meek's district over the weekend.

One of the things that we have been emphasizing over the last several days and weeks is that the confidence of the American people in their government has been badly shaken. The gentleman from Oklahoma mentioned that we are not sure how people are expected to be able to have that confidence restored and know that the next natural disaster, or man- made disaster for that matter, that their government is going to be prepared both in terms of getting them ready to deal with that disaster or in the aftermath of that disaster.

If you look at the results of Katrina and the aftermath of Katrina, certainly their confidence was not restored. If you look at the revelations that have come from the independent 9/11 Commission's Report, and now yet another report is about to come out from the independent 9/11 Commission that through their private educational foundation they are about to release a report that blasts the FBI for not implementing much of their recommendations.

When is this administration, this Republican administration and the leadership here going to listen to the priorities of the American people and make sure that, in terms of disaster preparedness, whether it is man-made or natural, that we not add insult to injury in the aftermath of those disasters by cutting services and badly needed health care and badly needed higher education and assistance for the very people that were victims? And when are they going to make sure that they have adequate preparation to deal with those, the aftermath of those disasters? Right now we have not seen anything other than the development of a partisan committee in this institution to supposedly investigate what happened. Well, if you cannot even know that the FBI and that the administration is going to respond to the report that was issued from the independent 9/11 Commission, then certainly we would have little to no confidence that anything is going to come from a partisan investigation like the one that is going on here.

Do you know what else we are for? We are for honesty. We are for honesty in government. We are for ridding this institution of the culture of corruption that has consumed it in recent weeks and months.

I was getting to cronyism, because there are a lot of Cs that are flying around this Chamber, including the first letter of the word Chamber. The gentleman from Oklahoma and I are freshmen, we just got here, we have been here 10 months. We have conversations on the floor all the time about how astonishing it is that this institution has a pall cast over it, that there is a shadow cast over this place by the culture of corruption, the cronyism, the ethical challenges that some of our Members face, the cronyism in the administration, the appointments of people who are not qualified for the job that they were hired to do.

It is time to return this government back to the honest people, back to the people who are in it for right reasons, back to the people who went into public service to make the world a better place, not to line their supporters' pockets, with all due respect. That is literally what I have watched this place become both as an outsider and now as someone who has become a Member of this body.

Mr. Speaker, I would suggest the Web site.

I was pining for you as well.

Oh, congratulations. That is fantastic.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio for his comments, and he is absolutely right.

Number one, I am sorry I was not able to participate with my colleagues last night. I was in my district. And when you are in the district, you really get a true sense of how people are feeling. The gentleman is absolutely right, there is a crisis of confidence out there in America. People really have had their confidence in their government's ability to deal with their everyday problems badly, badly shaken by one scandal after another, by one more bit of evidence of corruption and cronyism.

What all of this points to is and is emblematic of is a system that cries out for reform. We absolutely have to have some reform here in Washington, and one of the first reforms that needs to occur is to change this partisan committee that is stacked with Republicans and is currently not being participated in by Democrats and shift it to an independent bipartisan commission that is going to be able to be objective and review what really happened.

Every day that has gone by since Katrina's aftermath, a little bit more trickles out, a little bit more dribbles out, and if we are going to be able to restore the American people's confidence in their government's ability to respond to disasters like this, be they natural disasters or man-made disasters in the form of terrorism, we have to start by restoring their confidence and utilize a process that is going to be objective and that they know they can have confidence in in terms of the outcome, like the 9/11 Commission.

There is a never-ending possibility of more disaster looming over us. Even now, we have Wilma, the 21st storm looming out there in the ocean, potentially about to bear down on Florida and then the gulf coast again, nearing this weekend. If we do not get the American people answers as to how the aftermath of Katrina occurred and make sure it does not happen again, it is not like we have the luxury of time being on our side. We have storm after storm. We have the fact that you never know when a man-made disaster is going to occur. By their very nature, they are surprise attacks. It means it is ever more important we reform the system and make sure that our government is ready to respond, that we have a comprehensive ability to do that.

When we have people engaging in CYA, which is exactly what is occurring here, and when you look at the former Director of FEMA, who in today's paper it was revealed was more worried about his title in the aftermath of Katrina than getting the job done, that is deeply disturbing.

It speaks to the structure of their ability to respond to that disaster.

It does.

Absolutely.

Let us explain what we are talking about. In the press today there was an e-mail exchange revealed between the spokesperson of FEMA and then Under Secretary Brown where he was appalled that Secretary Chertoff had made him, I think it was the point person, I forgot the title he was given, in the aftermath of Katrina. But he looked at it as a slight, an insult, and somehow a demotion from his position as Under Secretary.

In the devastation and aftermath of Katrina, is that what we want the FEMA Director to be worried about, what he is called?

And how he is perceived in terms of title?

That is how out of touch this administration is. They are that badly out of touch, and that is why the system cries out for reform. We have to make sure we reform the system so that we can restore people's confidence and that they understand that the three C's are incredibly important: No more corruption, no more cronyism, and we have to restore people's confidence.

Mr. Speaker, I have mentioned this before and likened the lack of desire on the part of the Republican leadership here to establish an independent commission. For example, if the executives and CEO of Enron after the fiasco that corporation went through, it would be as if we said, Okay, Mr. CEO of Enron, you go ahead and investigate what happened at Enron and do a report and a full examination of the doings of your corporation and you get back to us and let us know what steps need to be taken to prevent it from happening again. We can do the same thing with Tyco.

I think the gentleman is smiling, and people who might hear this description would be sort of laughing to themselves saying of course we would not do that. This leadership is saying of course we would not have an internal partisan committee that would investigate. For some reason that is not ludicrous to the people who run this institution. It would be ludicrous to anybody who was a rational person who would actually want to get to the bottom of what happened. One would think given the information that has come out slowly over the last weeks now that there would be some more deep, abiding concern.

Let me go back to what I was saying earlier that came out today. Secretary Chertoff, according to The Washington Post, apparently belatedly named Brown the on-site disaster coordinator on the night of August 30 and declared Hurricane Katrina ``an incident of national significance,'' which is the highest order catastrophe under their new national response plan.

This was the reaction of then-Under Secretary Brown and his assistants, ``Demote the Under Secretary to PFO, principal Federal officer?'' an outraged FEMA press secretary Sharon Worthy wrote Brown at 10:54 p.m., soon after Chertoff's decision.

``What about the precedent being set? What does this say about executive management and leadership in the agency?''

Brown's reply was, ``Exactly.''

Reading a little further, there are e-mails ``that show that the government's response plan, 2 years in the making, began breaking down even before Katrina hit the gulf coast.

``Before the storm hit, Brown's deputy chief of staff, Brooks Altshuler, said White House pressure to form an interagency crisis management group was irrelevant even though a task force and principal Federal officer are key parts of the plan.'' He says this: ``Let them play their `Reindeer Games' as long as they are not turning around and tasking us with their stupid questions. None of them have a clue about emergency management.''

Mr. Speaker, these are the people that were responsible for making sure that the people in that picture survived and actually got out and did not have to float in a refrigerator to save their own lives. This is what they were worried about, their own little title and the petty garbage that you would think is reserved for the smallest of issues.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that I wanted to highlight was one of the things we have been asking people to do. H.R. 3764 is the Democrats' bill that would establish an independent commission on the response to Hurricane Katrina. The way that the administration relented on the independent 9/11 Commission, as the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) referred to earlier, they initially opposed, was the groundswell of support, particularly from the families of the 9/11 victims.

And we need a groundswell of support from the 81 percent of Americans that, when polled, say they think the only way to approach the response and the investigation of the response to the aftermath of Katrina is through an independent commission. We need people to contact us and become citizen cosponsors of H.R. 3764.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, we have been talking about what they are not doing, that they are not establishing an independent commission. Let us mention what they are getting ready to do because we all can describe what we think the response to the aftermath of Katrina should be. Obviously, a pretty significant fiscal hit on our economy. No question about it. Between Katrina and Rita, we have refineries down. We have gas prices that have skyrocketed out of control. We have people having to dig deeper into their pockets. A dollar is not going as far as we would like it to or as it was previously before the storm hit. So one would think that the Republican leadership's response would be to ease up on the tax cuts. Let us pull back on making them permanent. Let us push back the reconciliation process, which is Washington speak for budget cuts. Let us make sure that we can ease some of the pain and dull the sharp point that has been the aftermath of Katrina.

So, instead, what is their response? Because it certainly is not any of that. This week on Thursday we expect what will be an extremely close vote on a rash of Republican spending cuts that will cut to the core, to the deepest heart of the people who need the help the most, the people who have truly been impacted by the aftermath of Katrina. They are actually going to ask us, force us, to vote on cuts in the Medicaid program, force us to vote on cuts in the Food Stamp program, force us to vote on cuts to higher education. This is a laundry list of items that they are going to propose now. A 2 percent across-the-board random set of cuts that are going to impact the people who were hurt the most by the aftermath of Katrina. It boggles the mind. How that could be a natural response to the needs of the people who are hurting the most is just so far beyond me. I feel like I am dealing with people who live on another planet sometimes.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from Florida will continue to yield, I was just going to say that all of this points to this culture that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) referred to earlier, this culture of corruption and cronyism. And it has created this groundswell of need for reform. We cannot go on like this anymore. I mean I am raising young children. He is raising young children. The gentleman from Ohio's (Mr. Ryan) brother is raising a young child now. We need to make sure that the next generation that comes up does

not inherit a badly damaged country that results from the policy decisions that are being made here. There is some deep harm that will reverberate for at least a generation as a result of these cuts and more and more tax cuts and an ever-burgeoning deficit and more and more reliance on foreign countries and more debt. There are consequences for these kinds of things.

When I go trick or treating with my kids on Halloween, that is when I most often get to see my neighbors and spend some really good time talking to them, and those are the times that they grab me by the wrist and say, ``Debbie, what is going on here?'' Every year that goes by with another year of this Republican leadership literally not having any ability to be in touch with the reality of the lives of real people is another year that we have shaken the confidence to the core of the American people.

We have got to move in the direction. We have got to get some reform. We have got to get some leadership in America that understands what the basic needs are of the people.

Instead, we have an administration that appears to be of the wealthy, for the wealthy, and by the wealthy. It has, I think, actually reached historic proportions. We have never had a time where you have had the priorities of the leadership in the government so focused on the most elite set of people in the country.

I wish I were making it up.

Mr. Speaker, in our last few minutes, I want to just point out that the responsibility lies at the feet of the President. He has the bully pulpit to ask people who are among our wealthiest to make sacrifices.

I represent a community that has a lot of wealthy people, and I know they say to me all the time, you know what, I am willing. They understand what the needs are. They get it, and I know we have an hour tomorrow night, that we are going to have an opportunity to come out here again.

One of the things I think we should talk about, and I do not want to do a rush job on it, is there are steps we can take. There are things we can do to make people whole. There is a way that we can restore Americans' confidence in their government, and there are reforms that we can and must make. I hope we will have a chance to talk about that more tomorrow night because we have got to take this country in a new direction. It would be irresponsible for us to continue hurtling down the path of irresponsible public policy and harm that we are bringing on people who are already knocked to the ground, and now we are putting our boot on their neck to keep them that way.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to engage the gentleman from Minnesota in a colloquy and seek support to include language in a future supplemental bill to provide individual assistance to residents in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, Florida, who suffered damage because of Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina struck Broward and Miami-Dade counties as a Category One storm on August 25. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's initial assessment revealed that over 170 homes were destroyed or severely damaged in Broward and Miami-Dade counties because of Katrina's fury. Following the initial assessment, local and State authorities documented that there were at least 219 homes in Broward and 189 homes in Miami-Dade severely damaged or destroyed.

FEMA denied assistance to individuals in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties on August 31, 2005. On September 6, 2005, Florida appealed FEMA's decision and provided specific information to support its original request, including the disproportionate number of low-income residents impacted and the fact that the State does not have disaster relief funds. This appeal was also denied, leaving hundreds of south Floridians with little hope of Federal individual assistance.

I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership, commitment, and support.

I yield to the gentleman from Florida.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida and the gentleman from Minnesota, and I look forward to working with them to correct this inequity.

Madam Speaker, it is great to see that our ranks are expanding, in more ways than one in the 30-something Group, just a little ribbing to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone).

We have been talking about this for the last couple of weeks, and it is almost hard to pick a jumping off point when it comes to the culture of corruption and cronyism that goes on here. I am the newest one of us, so I sort of have the freshest look. I was so hopeful when I came here 10 months ago that we would be able to come together in a spirit of bipartisanship and that of all types of investigations, of any investigation, that the investigation of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina would be one that you would think would be a no-brainer as far as bipartisanship. It has to be similar to the 9/11 independent commission, and it is not just about that we need Democrats and Republicans. It is that we need no partisanship involved in the aftermath of

Hurricane Katrina, the investigation of Hurricane Katrina.

The analogy we have been using on the floor is having a committee in the Congress that is lopsided in terms of partisanship and internal and not independent investigating Hurricane Katrina's aftermath would be like saying that the Enron executives or the Tyco executives should be allowed to investigate themselves and determine what happened and report back to the public or the Federal Government as to what happened.

I think that people would be pretty outraged if we allowed the Enron CEO to handle their own investigation.

Back in 1994, I was serving in the Florida House of Representatives with the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), and I remember when Mr. Gingrich took the floor repeatedly and pointed then to what he called an arrogance of power. I have to tell Members it did not take them very long to come full circle and be kings of the hill of that arrogance. They have literally defined the word.

We have reached a point now where what they pointed to that they said developed over 40 years, it only took them 10. So they have a much shorter learning curve than some of our predecessors. The cronyism and the corruption has got to stop. We could go through a long list of people hired who were totally unqualified for the positions they were appointed to. And then to add insult to injury, also engaged in corrupt activity during their tenure, one of whom, Mr. Safavian, was just arrested, just indicted, and he was in charge of procurement at the White House.

Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Madam Speaker, what this boils down to is, it is about the three Cs: We have competence, cronyism and corruption. That is what this Chamber has become about. It is a question about their incompetence. There has clearly been corruption, and we have only to list the myriad of people who are in hot water at the executive branch level and, unfortunately, in this Chamber on the other side of the aisle. As much respect as we might have for our colleagues, we have an even greater respect for this institution, and, unfortunately, there are quite a number of people who forget their need to respect this institution.

And if it were not bad enough that we have a laundry list of people now who have been hired as cronies who were unqualified at the executive level for the position that they took on and then later engaged in corrupt activity, on top of that now just yesterday we hear a report that Special Operations forces were taught by individuals who have been determined to be in this country illegally, illegally, and who are now in the process of being deported. We have Special Operations forces who do not even like to acknowledge that they exist being taught foreign language by people who were found to have been in this country illegally, two from Indonesia and one from an African country.

Let us go further because I wish it stopped there. Just yesterday, we found that there is a spy apparently in the White House. I mean, a spy in the White House. I do not know. I am new. I am a freshman, and 9/11 was 4 years ago. I would think that by 2005, as 4 years has passed, the crackdown and effort that the administration and the Republican leadership here has been engaging in it to shore up our homeland security and make sure people feel safer, and security has been the issue. How in God's name do we have illegal immigrants from areas that one might question the motivation of some of the people and why they are here because certainly those nations that these illegal immigrants are from have had al Qaeda representatives come? We cannot make a blanket statement about it, but no question there have been problems with those countries.

Special Operations forces being taught by illegal immigrants and a spy in the White House, and we have cronyism that is running rampant at the executive branch level and ethical problem after ethical problem and indictments in this very institution. My God, if that does not cry out for a new direction and this country to be taken in a new direction, I do not know what does.

I came here and held up my right hand and swore to uphold the Constitution and the integrity of this institution, and I want to underscore the summary that the gentleman from the

State of Illinois (Mr. Emanuel) said the other day on a news program.

The way he characterized what this institution has become is that the leadership in this institution has taken this institution from the People's House to the auction House, and there is no other way to describe it. That is the bottom line. And it is really sad.

Madam Speaker, since the rule for the energy bill tomorrow was just filed, it seems a good place to jump off from, because I really hope that now that tomorrow we are going to be throwing the door, blowing the door wide open to more offshore oil drilling in the United States coastal regions, the gentleman from New Jersey represents the Jersey shore, I represent the eastern coastline, the gentleman represents the eastern coastline. Sorry, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) does not have much of a coastline.

But we have some deep, deep concerns that are going to be dealt with on the floor tomorrow where, for the first time, we are going to have the possibility of drilling much closer to the United States coastline in places that have been subject to a ban and moratoriums.

Given the track record, particularly recently, of competence, cronyism and corruption, I am hopeful that we are not going to see the giveaways that are in this bill tomorrow turn into what we have seen in terms of the three C's in the last several weeks and, quite honestly, in the last several years.

Madam Speaker, tomorrow they will be trying to create the mythology for the American people that this is going to do something to reduce gas prices.

There is not a single item in this bill that will reduce gas prices, not tomorrow, not next Tuesday, not 3 weeks from now will one penny get cut off a gallon of gas as a result of this bill.

What will happen is it will put more money in the pockets of the people who make money off the energy industry; we are going to waive the Clean Air Act provisions; it limits FTC penalties for price gouging; and it is almost completely impossible to increase refining capacity. There is a taxpayer subsidy for oil companies. These are the provisions in this bill. There is a giveaway of Federal lands in this bill. Madam Speaker, it is unbelievable. We just did this 7 weeks ago, and now we are going to give them more. I mean, where does it stop?

We have an alternative, I say to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek), if the gentleman would like to outline some of the provisions in it.

Madam Speaker, if my colleagues do not mind me jumping in here, lest people think that we are just on the Floor here pointing fingers and only being critical, we have our own alternative proposal, the democratic alternative to the energy bill tomorrow.

People might think that we as Members of Congress are somehow different than our constituents. I am just a minivan mom. I do not drive a big old SUV; I drive a mini van. I wish I could drive a car that was smaller, but I have 3 little kids who have to be strapped into a car seat. I have 6-year-old twins and a 2-year-old baby girl and I, like most moms, do not have much of an alternative in terms of making sure I have a car that is safe, that is big enough to haul them and all their soccer stuff and Brownie stuff and baseball stuff, just all their stuff. That is what parents across this country deal with every single day.

Last week and the week before and the week before that, I paid $45 to $50 to fill up my tank. Whenever I end up spending $45 to $50 on anything, I swallow hard. When you have to do that once a week, there is a problem. We make an okay income as Members of Congress. Think about the people who are struggling paycheck to paycheck.

Tomorrow on this floor, we are going to offer a real alternative to the energy bill. We are going to offer an alternative that puts some bark into the Federal Trade Commission's bite. We are going to give explicit authority to the FTC to define, for the first time, price gouging and what it is and how to penalize for it and make sure that there are factors that can be determined. We are going to make sure that everybody in the supply chain, including home heating fuels, deals with price gouging measures. We are going to make sure that it is not just one end of the chain, the energy chain, but the whole thing. We are going to establish a strategic refinery reserve. Our substitute would increase our Nation's refinery capacity by establishing a strategic refinery reserve.

Madam Speaker, we are taking real steps in our proposed alternative tomorrow which, of course, is not going to pass because the Republicans much prefer their industry-laden benefits package, which is the best way to describe this bill.

Pork. We will substitute any appropriate word. We have to make sure that we provide some real relief to the minivan moms and dads across this country.

Do not forget the deficit.

Madam Speaker, and yet they are still, in the aftermath of Katrina, in the aftermath of Rita, with ballooning deficits and horrific corruption and cronyism, still talking about tax cuts, making the tax cuts permanent. They are still talking about budget reconciliation, which is Washington speak for cuts. They are still talking about not providing what people in this country, in the middle, in the middle, the average hardworking American needs.

You know, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) is absolutely right. It is the fringe that has been governing this institution, and this country for the last 10 years. Most of us are mainstream. Most people consider themselves very middle of the road, moderate, not left, not right, just middle of the road, and they want the course to generally be steering in an almost straight path,

not veering in one direction or another, and most definitely, not favoring one group over another. This leadership has clearly favored the privileged, and it is not like, there is no question about that; that is documented fact. The privileged, they are first in line to get theirs. And you know, if we can throw some crumbs to the people who are average everyday Americans, then you know that is fine, too.

But we have got to make sure that we get back to the competence that we need to run this government. We have to rid this government of the cronyism and the corruption, and we have got to restore the fourth C which is the American people's confidence.

No, I was just going to suggest that you give out the website. And we always encourage people who watch us each week to contact us, give us your thoughts and opinions and please let Members know.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield. It gets worse. I was watching the hearings yesterday. FEMA's responsibility is to coordinate the response of the Federal Government in a natural disaster. They literally are the point agency, and all of the agencies in the Federal Government are basically brought under their direction. So what was Mr. Brown's response to, I think it was a question from the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Shays), about what he did to coordinate the disaster response. His answer was that he told the mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana that they should issue a mandatory evacuation, and they did not listen, according to him.

That was the sum total. That is what he kept repeating. That was the sum total of his response to the question of how did he coordinate the vast resources that FEMA has at their disposal and every agency in the Federal Government: that he picked up the phone and called two people and told them to evacuate New Orleans. Well, I do not know about you, but if I had at my disposal the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the list goes on, I think that I could probably think of a couple more things to do besides make two phone calls.

This was the biggest natural disaster in American history and his response was to make two phone calls. Now, that may have something to do with the fact that his only previous experience was running the Arabian Horse Association, I do not know; but I would think even with a clean slate, and not knowing almost anything, not being an expert in disaster response at all, I would think I could do a little bit more than make two phone calls.

I do not know where to start here, I have so many things swirling through my head. The both of you have been here a couple of terms now, but I just got here. I am a freshman. I have been here all of 10 months. In January, like you did, but for me it was my first time so it was perhaps a little bit more sacred and special, because you know how it is when you do it your first time, you hold up your hand and swear to uphold the Constitution; and when you are doing that, you swear to uphold the integrity of this institution.

We have all served in legislative bodies. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) served in Ohio, and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I served in the House and Senate in Florida. One of the things that the staff who have been around a long time, one of the things they impress upon new members, they stress how critical it is that we uphold the integrity of the institution, that the perception of the institution, that each of us as individuals, we impact the perception in America of the American people's view of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Now there is a pall cast over this House. There is a pall cast over this House because it feels like almost every month since I have been here, there is another Member of this body being accused of something.

I recall 11 years ago, in fact, it was 11 years ago Monday, that the Republican Contract With America was issued in 1994. Part of that contract, from my recollection, had to do with the integrity of this House and how the Republican leadership talked then about how they were going to, and they were very sanctimonious about it, they were going to restore integrity to this institution and inspire confidence in the American people.

My constituents have a pretty significant difference in the way they define integrity. My kids are watching tonight. The 6-year-olds are awake, and they are watching and I have to go home and explain to them why this man is all over the news; and, Mommy, what did he do? I have to have that conversation, as do parents across this country, every other week.

The reason that is important is not just because we want to uphold the impression and integrity of this institution, let us bring it home here. It exemplifies why we need an independent commission. If there are Members' ethics called into question, how are the American people going to be able to expect and get an independent, objective investigation of what went wrong?

The example that the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) just used is a good one. It would be like, to use the example of Enron executives saying Mr. Prosecutor, you do not have to do the investigation about what went wrong at Enron, our CEO and our executive board will take care of that; or Tyco.

Now we are doing that in this very House of Representatives, people who have been accused of wrongdoing, for whatever reason, not related to Hurricane Katrina, but we have got to make sure that this institution's integrity is upheld and maintained.

While you have people who are in the midst of their own personal situation, it is inappropriate, on top of the fact it was inappropriate to start with, to have a partisan select committee investigate the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, now it is underscored even more so because there are people's integrity called into question in this Chamber. We need to make sure that we can restore the American people's confidence in the direction that this country is going, in the job we are doing here, and without an independent investigation of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we are not going to be able to do that.

I am hopeful in the coming years, I will be able to talk to my kids and tell them this is an institution in which they should be proud that their mom is serving and there are people who are serving in it who have the highest values.

Mr. Speaker, listening to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), I am thinking about all of the reasons I ran for Congress, and I decided that public service was a career choice for me, and that is because I want to make the world a better place. We all do. Certainly the three of us do. Our colleagues do. The vast majority of the Members here want to do that. It leaves such a bad taste.

What has happened over the last several months and what came down today with one of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, what came down a few weeks ago with another colleague on the other side of the aisle, the whole thing swirling around with Mr. Abramoff and the lobbyist, and we even had a gangland murder connected with that in my district in Hollywood, Florida, it is so pervasive, it is so disturbing, it gives me deep concern that people end up thinking that we are all just like those individuals who have strayed.

We have got to make sure that we can restore some confidence, we can go back to why we all ran in the first place and move this country in the right direction again. You have got cronies and phonies that are infiltrating the government. The culture of corruption that has become so pervasive here, not just in this body but at the executive level as well, it is worst than startling.

Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Madam Speaker, the thought occurs to me that people might be wondering why this even matters. I mean, so many times I talk to people and they say to me it is just the way politics is. They are going to reward their friends. They get into power and they are going to reward their friends, and that is just the way politics is.

And what I have to say to them, what we are trying to say to them, is that this culture of corruption is pervasive.

The culture of corruption is pervasive. It would disturb me deeply if it was just Members of Congress and we could say, there are some bad apples where people have gone astray and that is all it is. But it goes so much deeper than that with this administration, with the leadership on the other side.

This is how deep it goes: We have got cronyism and corruption that runs all the way up the ladder. I will just outline for you what I am talking about. Let us look at the appointments that have been made.

As recently has come to light, Mr. Brown was totally unqualified to be the director of FEMA.

Brownie's previous experience was being head of the Arabian Horse Association. I saw him attempt to defend himself at the hearing the other day, and he outlined his vast array of experience being the assistant to a city manager, essentially a glorified intern. But, to me, I just feel like there needs to be a couple more lines on the resume when it comes to the man who directs the response of the Federal Government to natural disasters.

Let us take if it was just the Congress or just Michael Brown heading up FEMA where the cronyism stopped. Then I could say, you know, occasionally that is going to happen.

But let us look at the gentleman who was appointed as the Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs at the Food and Drug Administration. The Food and Drug Administration is charged with assuring the safety of everything from new vaccines and dietary supplements to animal feed and hair dye. They are the one that approve medicines and say whether medication can go on the market.

So Mr. Scott Gottlieb was named the Deputy Commissioner, and he was 33-years-old. This is the 30-something Group, so we are not going to be critical of that. But this is a person who got his medical degree at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and his previous experience prior to taking this job at FDA, and they declared him a ``noted authority'' who had written ``more than 300 policy and medical articles,'' his biography neglects the fact that many of those articles that he wrote criticized the FDA for being too slow to approve new drugs and too quick to issue warning letters when it suspects one already on the market might be unsafe.

I think if you asked the family members and people whose loved ones died from taking Vioxx and some of the other inhibitors that people have had horrendous reactions and even deaths from because some of these drugs have been raced to the market too quickly before they have been fully vetted by the FDA, I think they might take issue with the fact that the person in charge of that is slightly less than qualified.

His previous experience before that was to be the editor of a popular Wall Street newsletter, the Forbes-Gottlieb Medical Technology Investor, in which he offered such tips as ``three biotech stocks to buy now.'' This is the deputy commissioner of the FDA in charge of medical and scientific affairs.

If it was just the FDA, if we were going to stop there and it did not go further than that, I might be able to write it off. But then let us go travel over to another agency. We have another agency, the Office of Management and Budget, in which an ex-lobbyist with minimal purchasing experience was overseeing $300 billion in spending, until his arrest last week. The person who was in charge of procurement for the Office of Management and Budget was responsible for $300 billion in spending until he got arrested.

So you can see where we go. You peel back layer after layer after layer. So we are not casting aspersions randomly here. We are not just being partisan. There is a culture of corruption that is pervasive, and, my god, we have an opportunity in the next 13 months to take our message to the American people and help tell them that we are

going to come and restore their confidence; that we have got competence and we have got integrity and we know how to make sure we can expand access to health care.

Our priorities are straight. We know that the Federal Government can do something about gas prices, and not just have the President stand behind a podium and say, ``You know, if you don't have to drive, please don't.'' That is their conservation policy.

So before I go further than I should, I am going to turn it over to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan).