Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 1, rule I, I demand a vote on agreeing to the Speaker's approval of the Journal.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I, like many Americans, am watching and praying that Hurricane Rita does not cause the same level of death and destruction as past Category 4 and 5 hurricanes like Andrew and Katrina.

Watching the death and destruction wrought by Katrina was truly heart-wrenching. What was even more unnerving was watching as many desperate victims stranded on their rooftops and surrounded by rising flood waters wrote makeshift signs begging for help. All they wanted was to be rescued and to have access to food and water. Those images have been stamped into the hearts and minds of Americans and people all over the world, and we must remind the administration that we will never forget.

How pretentious of our government to assume that everyone in the gulf coast region had the means to pick up at a moment's notice and hop in their cars and get on the highway towards safety. We must be aware of the ramifications of poverty in America and recognize that it is a real condition that many Americans face each and every day.

We cannot turn a blind aye to those trapped in a dismal socio- economic predicament that this administration's tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in social programs have only exacerbated. Obviously, an investigation into the slow response by FEMA is warranted, an accurate, unbiased, independent investigation, not one that will be led by the President's own domestic security advisor or a partisan committee that was formed here in this Congress.

Does that make you feel confident that the inquiry into this administration's performance in response to Katrina will be fair and accurate?

Only a fool would allow the very people who botched the rescue efforts to be the ones to go back and determine what went wrong, what went right, and what lessons we have learned from this tragedy.

People have died because of the inaction by their government. That much we certainly know is true. Now we must move forward with an investigation that is independent and one with subpoena power so that we can avoid the mistakes of Katrina. People have died, and we need to find out why. I know that if we do an investigation in name only, then people will die again, and they will continue to lack confidence in their government's ability to help them in their time of need. People will die in Florida. People will die in Texas. People will die in States throughout the hurricane region if we do not learn from the lessons of Katrina and ensure that our failures are not repeated.

I also want to remind people that people in Florida were victims of Hurricane Katrina as well. Hurricane Katrina's first victim was Florida as it struck Broward and Miami-Dade counties as a Category 1 storm on August 25, leaving hundreds of damaged or destroyed homes and nearly 11,000 individuals seeking assistance.

These are the people that FEMA has decided do not need help. This woman here is standing in water up to her knees. Her cars are damaged. They are late model cars, not fancy ones; and they are the result of Hurricane Katrina hitting Florida. This is representative of what FEMA has denied individual assistance and denied help to.

FEMA's response to this woman and to the woman standing among the remains of her house is that ``you are on your own.''

What was FEMA's response to all the families in Florida's requests for help? It is the same as it was to the people in New Orleans who died the first days that Katrina struck here: ``you are on your own.''

Last night we learned that Florida's appeal to FEMA to help our victims of Katrina in Florida was denied once again. My question for FEMA is, hurricanes do not know State boundaries, so why does FEMA?

Florida has been hit by six hurricanes over the past year and a half. Six. It is a constant plague that the residents of Florida deal with every single year, and the denial of aid to those in need is irresponsible and unconscionable. I introduced legislation this month that calls on FEMA to provide the much-needed assets to the

residents of Florida who are victims of Katrina. And I plead with my colleagues in Congress, do not turn your backs on the first victims of Katrina. Help those in need regardless of State line.

Madam Speaker, I too rise to reflect on the life and contributions of Simon Wiesenthal who passed away 2 days ago at the age of 96.

Simon Wiesenthal is known by many to be the ``conscience of the Holocaust,'' for after the atrocities ended, he spent his entire life researching and locating former Nazis to bring them to justice.

Throughout the course of the Holocaust, Simon Wiesenthal and his wife lost a total of 89 family members. American soldiers liberated him from the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1945. He was barely alive, weighing less than 100 pounds.

As a prisoner in 12 concentration camps, Simon Wiesenthal memorized the names of his perpetrators and later he embarked on his mission to bring them to justice. He created the Jewish Documentation Center to assemble evidence for trial. His most famous cases included the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the man who supervised the implementation of the ``Final Solution.'' Wiesenthal also helped locate the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank. In total, he helped trace some 1,100 Nazis.

In a conversation with a former concentration camp inmate, Wiesenthal explained, when we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, What have you done, there will be many answers. But I will say, we did not forget you.

Now it is our turn to say to Mr. Wiesenthal, we will not forget you. We will honor his life and his work by continuing to bring perpetrators to justice and continuing to fight intolerance and anti-Semitism wherever it exists.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) speaks the truth. There is no question about it. Now we are hearing on CNN, and we have to hear it on CNN, unfortunately, that the Republican leadership plans to go forward with their partisan committee to investigate Hurricane Katrina. Rightfully so, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) has refused to appoint Democratic Members, and everyone I have spoken to in our Democratic Caucus, if asked to serve by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), we will stand our ground and insist on there being an independent commission.

The example we have been using here on this floor is would the American public be comfortable if Enron executives examined and investigated what went wrong in their corporation and their corporate scandals? How about Tyco? You would never accept those kinds of internal reviews as being accountable, objective, or independent.

If Congress is going to truly inspire the confidence again of the American people, which is what we so desperately need to do when it comes to our emergency preparedness procedures, it is to not engage in partisan infighting and backside-covering, because that is what they are doing here with insisting on having a partisan internal congressional committee instead of an independent, objective 9/11-style commission. It is confidence that we need to restore because it is the issue of security that Americans most want to feel comfortable that their government is taking care of.

That was supposedly why the President was reelected last year. One of the reasons many people cited was because they felt he would keep them safer, this administration would be more likely, supposedly, to keep them safer. I bet a lot of those people are scratching their heads wondering why they cast that vote and where is the action to back up the words that the administration campaigned on all of last year.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I want to piggyback on what he is saying here because not only do the American people want an independent review so that their confidence can be restored. They want their representatives in Congress to be statespeople. They want us to step up and put partisanship aside. My colleagues are veterans of this process, and I have been here 9, almost 10 months now, and the thing that has been the most startling to me is how partisan it is here. It does not need to be this way. I know. I have spoken to some Members even today, some Members who are leaders on the Republican side who I know if we came around the table and sat down and hashed out how we could best approach the review of what happened with Katrina and the response and our lack of preparedness, I know we could work it out. But the leadership here does not allow that to happen. It is all about winning. It is all about ``our way or the highway.'' And Americans are sick of ``our way or the highway'' politics. They just want us to get it done and do the right thing. And I just do not understand why it has to be about winning, it has to be about we are going to protect our backsides, we are going to make sure that the truth really does not come out. God forbid if we actually admit that we made a mistake. That is just irresponsible.

And to me the most devastating thing, besides the loss of life and the children, the little babies that we see being held by people who are not their mothers, because their parents are gone and no one knows where they are, the thing that is most devastating to me is knowing that there are millions of people in this country who do not believe in us anymore, who do not believe in this process. Look at the polling numbers on Congress and how Americans feel about the job we are doing. Our constituents might like us as individuals, and that is only some of us; but as a body, as an institution, we have lost their faith. And we have lost their faith because all we do is throw up our elbows and duke it out and fight to the finish. They want us to do our jobs and do right by them, and that means putting aside winning, and making sure that we can come together as Americans, like we did after 9/11, like I saw Congress do after 9/11 when we were all linking arms and working together.

Maybe Katrina, because it only happened to one region of the country, was not a unifying enough event. But if there is ever a time. We just had Rita hit Florida. It is bearing down as a category 5 on Texas now. I mean, clearly no one is immune from this in this country, and it is time that we exercise some leadership. And I think we should ask our leadership, especially the leadership running this Congress, to say to themselves, it is not all about me. That is what the American people want us to do. I just wonder whether they have the courage and the nerve to do it. It certainly does not seem that way.

It would be funny if it were not so sad.

Mr. Speaker, let us make the meat on that bone turkey, and let us talk turkey now, because beyond the partisan commission and beyond what we are saying, which is that there should be an independent commission so that we can truly get to the bottom of this, let us go a step further, because there are other things going on in Congress related to the reaction to Katrina.

We know that for the next several years we will have what will be a massive public works effort to rebuild the Gulf States, which we will be behind wholeheartedly, because there but for the grace of God go we, and we would want our colleagues to do the same and be supportive if it happened in our State. Our colleagues were very supportive of Floridians when we faced Andrew down and the follow-up to Andrew. But there are going to be some serious needs that will need to be met.

How is the Republican leadership talking about responding to those needs? Well, let us go through it. First, they are talking about keeping the tax cuts in place: Let us not touch the tax cuts, because wealthy people, they need them. It is really important. So those are off the table, those are off limits. On top of that, they are saying, you know, we got some concern occasionally about the deficit, so the right-wingers on the other side of the aisle are saying that, you know, the cost of rebuilding the Gulf States is going to be prohibitive, and we want to preserve wealthy people's tax cuts while we are rebuilding the Gulf Coast States, so we need to look to some more spending cuts. And where are they talking about those spending cuts being from? Well,

they are starting off with delaying the prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients, for senior citizens who can barely make ends meet, for senior citizens who have to choose between medicine and meals, for people who literally live, bottom line, day to day. Then, they are also talking about cutting transportation projects, thousands and thousands of transportation projects, billions of dollars.

Now, who did Katrina hurt the most? The poor people, the people who are poverty stricken, 100,000 of them at least, who could not get out of New Orleans and who had to go to the Superdome to be able to find refuge. So how, when we are trying to find them jobs, are we going to get them to those jobs if we cut transportation projects, if we do not have mass transit assistance? That is how poor people get to work.

Where is the heart? Where is the trust? There is no heart in this leadership, no caring, no feeling. It is all about them. It is, you know, we got ours and the people that support us, we gave them theirs, and we are going to make sure they keep it, and everybody else be damned. That is what these people are all about.

When it comes down to it, over the next 14 months, as we go through a discussion with the American people about the choices that they will have, it is going to be about trust. Who do you trust to take care of you? Who do you trust to be there for you in your time of need, to protect you when you are in potential danger, and to be there for you when it is time to clean up and help you move your life forward?

Mr. Speaker, in the last few minutes, and if the gentleman from Florida wants to go over this, I would be happy to yield to him.

We have on our side of the aisle a series of proposals, an action plan that Leader Pelosi has put forward related to housing and economic security and health care that we are going to be talking about over the next several months, because it is not all about complaining. It is not all about we do not like what they are doing. We have a series of proposals that we want to see happen to ensure that people can move their lives forward. We have to make sure that these people have health care. We have to make sure that they have roofs over their heads. We have to make sure that they have access to jobs and job training. We have to make sure their kids have a place to go to school and that the communities where these kids go to school can actually make sure they have room for them, like our community. The people coming down to south Florida, we are exploding in our public schools. We could barely take on another kid who is moving to south Florida voluntarily. So we have plans, and we are going to make sure that those plans are outlined and that we pursue them and that the American people understand that we are going to be there for them when they need us.

Too much to talk about.

They do not make mistakes.

Mr. Speaker, you know, it certainly does not have to be that way. It certainly was not that way when the shoe was on the other foot, because some people listening might feel, well, you know, this is just the way Congress does it. Congress is a partisan body, it is a political body; and you know when one side is in charge, they run the show. They run these investigations, and that is just the way it is.

Well, in this situation, you have got a Republican Congress investigating a Republican administration. And let us go back to the Reagan years when you had the Iran-Contra scandal. Then you had a committee set up within the Congress, which was a Democratic Congress investigating a Republican administration, so obviously there was some inherently built-in accountability in that situation.

And when it came to the way that committee was appointed and developed, even internally within the Congress there was mutual agreement on both sides of the aisle that it was done in a bipartisan fashion. And I will quote then-Representative Dick Cheney from Wyoming who is now our Vice President. He said, because he was one of the key sponsors of the committee of the legislation that created the Iran- Contra Committee, he said at that time, ``I must say the majority has been exceedingly fair in the proceedings. The leadership of both parties has worked in a truly bipartisan fashion to create this committee,'' referring to the Iraq-Contra Committee.

Well, it is really unfortunate that when the shoe is on the other foot and they have the opportunity to do the right thing and work in a bipartisan fashion, that they are choosing not to. And it is certainly within their discretion. It is within their choice, and they are just wiping their hands and refusing to do it.

I know the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan) is pulling over our 30- something board, and we want to let people know how they can get in touch with us, and we want and we urge their feedback. We want to hear from people.

Mr. Speaker, the way I want to conclude for us, or my portion of the conclusion, is to reiterate that at the end of the day we have plans.

If we were in charge, we would be moving to ensure that we got health care to the people who are victims of Katrina. We would be making sure that we helped get them some economic security. We would make sure that there was some accountability in the process of the doling out of contracts for the clean-up and the construction.

We would be making sure that education was of primary and paramount concern. We would be initiating an agenda to assist people and restore confidence in the emergency preparedness and disaster response procedures in America.

Because Katrina was not the first hurricane that bore down on our country; and as we have Rita churning in the gulf as a Category 5, we know she is not going to be the last. And, you know, I think we should conclude by praying for the people who are going to be experiencing Rita in the next few days and sending them our best wishes and urging them to heed the warnings that your emergency managers are going to be sending out to you.

So I look forward to joining you again as we do each week, and now, you know, in double session, because we have so much to talk about and let people know what is going on here in the Congress.

Mr. Speaker, it is, once again. This is a regular weekly event for us, and it is an important thing we do. And I really enjoy spending the time with you on the floor and with our colleague from Ohio just trying to talk to folks in our generation. So often when I talk to friends of mine and neighbors and colleagues in the 30-something range, they sort of tell me, they scratch their heads and wonder, you know, most of the stuff you all talk about in Congress has no impact on my life.

They really think, because what they are doing is they wake up in the morning. They get their kids ready for school. They get themselves ready for work. They get in their car in their garage. They drive out of their garage. They go to work. They pick up their kids, they come home and park the car in the garage again and start it all over the next day. And when you are living that kind of life, trying to balance work and family, trying to in many cases live paycheck to paycheck, it is very difficult to listen to the debate on this floor and understand how the things we do affect their lives.

But if there is anything that we could do to show our generation how government impacts their lives and can significantly alter their lives or through inaction how it can alter their lives, it is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because we have so many glaring examples of what went wrong, of what should have happened and did not, and how hundreds of thousands of people's lives have now been turned upside down. And normally, I think people that are in our generation look at, and quite honestly, older and younger than our generation look at the victims of Hurricane Katrina or of any tragedy which is a natural human thing to do and say to themselves, you know, that is not me. That is them. That would never happen to me. I do not live in a community where that could happen.

But the gross underpreparation and disregard for the potential for a Katrina to happen, I mean, substitute any potential disaster in my region of the country and there but for the grace of God.

We have got to take the next step and help not just our generation but all

Americans understand what should happen for these Katrina victims now. They need housing. They do not need a lot of talk. Of course, they need sympathy and empathy. They need emotional assistance, but they need housing. They need roofs over their head. They need economic security. They need to know how it is they are going to get a job again, where are they going to get a job again. How are they going to get their home loans resolved?

I was reading an extensive article today how you have banks that were in those gulf coast States that the bank was blown out, the properties that they lent money on are gone, the people are gone. So what happens to the transaction? How do they get the money back? What is Congress going to do to try to help put all that back together and sew it all back together?

Then there is health care. We have to make sure that these people can go to the doctor and get well. Some of them were not well to start with. Some of them were the picture of health and no longer are.

Finally, we have got to make sure that these kids, these thousands and thousands of displaced kids, get back to school somewhere and that the communities that they are going to end up going to school in, we are from south Florida. An influx of children the size of which came out of the gulf coast States is not a depth that our community could absorb. We are already in an overcrowded situation in our public schools, and so are many communities.

So we need to make sure that the leadership in this Congress understands that those are the kinds of tangible things that we need to talk about and stop moving forward with an investigation that is basically turning inward on itself. We need the independent commission. Objective observers, experts, people who can be trusted because it is trust that we need to restore so that when this, God forbid, happens again, and, unfortunately, we know nature will cause yet another problem like this to occur, that we have the accountability in place to know it will not happen. And a partisan committee set up by the Congress with a majority of one party serving on it, whether it is our party or the Republican Party, is not the appropriate way to handle this.

It would be like if Enron executives or Tyco executives suggested that they would do the investigation on what went wrong with their two companies themselves, the corporate executives.

That is right.

And the gentleman is absolutely right, we are here to say it right out loud. I also voted against the partisan committee that was voted on last week.

And something else we should address out loud are the ludicrous comparisons that have been made to other so-called partisan or internal congressional investigations. They are comparing the Katrina committee that was formed in the Congress last week to the Iran-Contra investigation. Well, there is absolutely no comparison. The Iran-Contra investigation was by a Democratic Congress versus a Republican administration, where clearly there would not be the legislative branch and the executive branch walking in lockstep. Clearly there was the accountability there when you have two different party leaderships running those two different branches of government. So that is a ludicrous comparison and makes absolutely no sense to use it, and it is disingenuous to use it.

And to add insult to injury, and I also hope we spend some time talking about this, what the leadership in the Congress is talking about, as if it is not bad enough we are not going to really get to the bottom of why there was a serious lapse in emergency preparedness and disaster response in the gulf coast States, now, during the rebuilding effort, when we have all said and all Americans have locked elbows and said we will rebuild the gulf coast region and we will do everything we can to help them, and we absolutely should, what are they talking about here in the Congress? They are talking about massive spending cuts, including cutting the prescription drug benefit for our senior citizens in Medicare; eliminating it, repealing it, or delaying its implementation as an offset to paying for the reconstruction of the gulf coast States.

Go right ahead.

Let us roll back a piece of it.

That is right.

I am sorry, we are all just champing at the bit tonight, but including in a region where the plight of over 100,000 people after the hurricane was the result of their poverty. So now we are going to go in, and the second proposal for spending cuts as opposed to rolling back the tax cuts is to repeal or eliminate or delay massive transportation funding, particularly in communities where mass transit is necessary and the only way poor people can get to work is using mass transit. So they are victims of a natural disaster; and now, a few months later, we will make them victims of a congressional disaster.

They have a name for it. They are calling it Operation Offset. This is their plan. They are going to come back here in a few days and propose Operation Offset, which is going to say that we are not touching the tax cuts. In fact, I will quote. I believe it is the chairman of the Republican study group, our colleague from Indiana. He said, we need to rebuild. We can find the cuts in Washington, D.C. to do that, I really believe that. And his proposal is to set aside all those additional highway projects and delay the drug benefit by a year. Those are just some of the proposals that are expected to come down the pike.

Now, before I yield to the gentleman from Florida, I represent a district that is not poverty stricken. There are poverty stricken sections, but there are communities in my district that are quite wealthy. And I have people in those communities stopping me in the supermarket and saying, Debbie, keep my tax cut. These are people that need help. We need to make sure they can have health care and that they have a roof over their head. So there are people out there that benefit from these tax cuts that get it, so why do they not get it here?

We do not ask them.

Please explain prevailing wage.

Sorry.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, to stay on Davis-Bacon for a second, there was also some irony in the President's waiver because last year when it was 2004 and we were in advance of a Presidential election, he took great pains at expressing his deep affection for Florida and Floridians, talked about how important a State we were and made many trips to our State. Interestingly enough, he waived the Davis-Bacon requirements for Broward, Miami-Dade, and Monroe County in this last go-round with Katrina.

There were four storms last year that came through Florida. Not one of them did he do that. And after Katrina, in a year that is not an election year, he waives the prevailing wage requirements in Davis-Bacon in three counties. Yet FEMA, his administration, has refused to reimburse and grant individual assistance reimbursement for people who had their homes damaged, looking through their roof at the sky that were victims in Florida of Hurricane Katrina.

If they are not going to reimburse people and they are going to have to rebuild themselves or be left out in the cold and not rebuild at all, then what is the burning need to waive Davis-Bacon and the prevailing wage requirements in those counties? I guess only to help contractors, only to ensure that whatever building is going on is going to put as much money in the pocket of a contractor and workers be dammed because they really do not matter anyway because it is not an election year.

I mean, the way that we can ensure that we prevent this fraud and abuse in contracting is stop the sweetheart deals, stop the monopoly contracts, make sure that we have some bidding and responsible bidding so that we know that the contractors that can actually do the work for a responsible amount of money are the ones that get the contract.

We have a funeral and cemetery company that got a contract, a no-bid contract, in Louisiana to bury and, I guess, deal with the bodies, and there are so many of them; and this is the same company that was prosecuted for throwing bodies into the forest of a cemetery in West Palm Beach, Florida. Prosecuted. Buried people in the same grave, moved bodies from one grave to another. This is the kind of track record this company has, and now they have been given a sole-source contract in Louisiana. I mean is it not time that we stop the madness in giveaways that this administration has been in lockstep involvement in trying to help corporations as opposed to real people since the day that they walked into the White House?

I mean, our legislation that was introduced by the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) and the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) today would do several extremely important things. One is it would establish an independent commission to prevent fraud and abuse. I mean, that is essential. We have to have some reviews of the process. We have to review contract awards to ensure that the Federal Government is complying with the competition requirements that there are. I mean, the implication of potential payoffs is just rampant without that type of review.

We have to review whether contract awards are based on merit as opposed to relationships between awardees and Federal Government officials. I do not know if it is any coincidence, but the Vice President is the former CEO of Halliburton; and I would love to see how many contracts Halliburton has

gotten. I am sure there is no coincidence there. Nothing granted to Halliburton based on relationship with the administration. Right? Could not possibly be.

Review in realtime the spending that is going on under ongoing Federal contracts to determine whether it is wasteful, whether they are actually doing the job that we contracted with them to do. In Florida there is a huge review going on over the private contracting that the government has been involved in because in almost every instance none of the private contractors are meeting their obligations. They are not meeting their accountability standards. Money is going out the door.

At the Federal level, we deal in the billions. Billions. People do not have any concept. It is hard to get our mind around that much money. If we do not adopt an independent commission and start injecting, insisting, on some accountability, then it is mindboggling how much waste we are going to let go out the door.

Mr. Speaker, as we have the last few minutes here, let us just recap what is not happening that should be happening.

The American people clearly have indicated that they want an independent commission. They want a commission that is going to truly investigate what happened so that it never happens

again. Instead, they get a partisan committee created in Congress with an imbalance of Republicans to Democrats and Congress investigating itself. What are they getting? Instead of a bipartisan effort to truly rebuild the Gulf States, they are getting proposals to cut prescription drugs for senior citizens, transportation projects for people that are in dire need of being able to use that transportation and unclog the arteries of America, billions of dollars in proposed cuts in higher education, in college aid in the budget; only a couple of weeks delay in the reconciliation process, our budget reconciliation process which is also a round of cuts; a response from the Republican leadership here that the answer to their ballooning the deficit is to cut into the hearts of the people that need it the most.

Mr. Speaker, at the end of the day, what we are proposing is an independent commission. We are proposing a review, a thorough review of the contracting process to make sure that there is some accountability in the way we spend these dollars. We are proposing housing and economic security and education assistance for the Katrina victims that need it the most. And I have to conclude by saying that we also have proposed passing legislation to ensure that all victims of Hurricane Katrina, including those in our home State of Florida, get reimbursement for the damage that they received, because they certainly are not getting that help right now.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today, first of all, to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), the gentleman from California (Chairman Thomas) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. McCrery). It is because of their flexibility and sensitivity that the residents of Florida who suffered damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina are one step closer to getting emergency tax relief for those affected by the hurricane.

Today, we provided emergency tax relief for Floridians affected by Hurricane Katrina as well as for those affected in our neighboring States to our west. I am so pleased to have been able to come together with my Florida colleagues, Messrs. Foley, Diaz-Balart, and Shaw to make this possible.

As a Member of Congress that represents South Florida, I can empathize with the victims of Hurricane Katrina because my home, South Florida, has been struck by numerous hurricanes and is threatened by them every year.

The scenes of the destruction throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have reminded South Floridians of the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 hurricane which struck South Florida 13 years ago.

The pain of those who lost loved ones, their homes, their pets, and who now find themselves in temporary housing, thousands of miles from home, their pain is palpable and every Floridian's heart goes out to them. However, I rise tonight to call the Nation's attention to something that I think has been overlooked, understandably, by the Nation, and that is the plight of those residents in Florida who suffered damage because of Hurricane Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina's first victim was Florida as it struck the Broward and Miami-Dade counties as a Category 1 storm on August 25, leaving hundreds of damaged or destroyed homes in its wake. Many of the farmers and agricultural workers that grow and tend these crops that were damaged will be out of jobs or will lose significant income this year as a result of this storm.

Craig Fugate, Florida's emergency management chief, told FEMA officials last week that the State expects the loss of over 2,000 farm- related jobs in Miami-Dade County alone. Okra, malanga, sweet potato and cassava crops have been destroyed, he said, resulting in about a $492 million loss.

That is why it came as a surprise to many homeowners in Florida when FEMA announced that it would not be providing individual assistance to residents of Florida who suffered damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina. I want to make it very clear what the effect of this decision means to the residents of South Florida who suffered damage in Hurricane Katrina.

This year, this is what FEMA will not pay for after Hurricane Katrina struck Florida. This woman here, who has had the roof ripped off her house and most of her possessions water damaged: FEMA's response to her, You are on your own, good luck.

How about this family here? This woman is standing in water up to her knees. Her cars are halfway submerged. These are not fancy cars. These are later model, 10-year-old cars. What was FEMA's response to her family's request for assistance? The same as it was to the people in New Orleans during the first days following Hurricane Katrina's aftermath when it hit the Gulf States: You are on your own.

My question to FEMA is this: Storms do not know State boundaries, so why does FEMA?

FEMA has set an arbitrary and discretionary threshold of 800 homes that have been destroyed or badly damaged as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Let me reiterate this is a purely discretionary number. Title 44 in the Code of Federal Regulations states, ``There is no set threshold for recommending individual assistance.''

It is estimated that more than half of the residents who need assistance with storm recovery in Broward and Miami-Dade counties live on less than $20,000 a year. Yet FEMA denied Federal aid to those who qualified. Most of the mobile home residents in Broward impacted by Katrina are primarily uninsured or underinsured.

My State has been hit by six hurricanes over the past year and a half. This is a constant plague that the residents of Florida deal with, and the denial of aid to those in need is irresponsible and unconscionable.

I introduced legislation last week that calls on FEMA to provide the much-needed assistance to the residents of Florida who are victims of Hurricane Katrina. I plead with my colleagues, as we did today with the Katrina Tax Relief bill, let us make sure we do not turn our backs on the first victims of Hurricane Katrina and give help to those in need, regardless of State line.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, today I offer an amendment to provide guidelines and incentives for States to civilly confine violent sexual predators.

I want to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner) and his staff for this support in working with my office on this provision. I would also like to thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) for his support as well.

Most criminals deemed as sexually violent have broken State, as opposed to Federal, laws. This amendment would incentivize States to implement civil confinement programs. This is not a new or radical idea. As of 2002, 16 States and the District of Columbia have implemented some form of a civil confinement law. Under this amendment, civil confinement would encompass those who admit their illness, as well as those who are deemed too dangerous to return to society without proper treatment and rehabilitation.

Texas prisoner Larry Don McQuay is an example of the kind of person who would merit civil confinement. He is a convicted child molester who describes himself alternatively as scum of the Earth and a monster.

He is currently serving a 20-year sentence for molesting three children.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here with my colleague once again and an honor to serve with him. I just have to commend the gentleman. I saw him when I was watching my TV coming off the plane yesterday, the gentleman's trip to tour the devastated areas and, particularly Hancock County, which I think the gentleman particularly went to with his Committee on Homeland Security colleagues to highlight that it was not just New Orleans, it was not just the ground zero area of New Orleans.

Ground Zero was actually Hancock County, and the communities there that essentially, it appears, have been forgotten, or at least neglected because they are smaller and the focus does not appear to be on them. So I was so proud of the gentleman to see him doing that. Once again, the gentleman is stepping up for people who need him. This is not, we are not here for a love fest; but it did my heart some good to know that colleagues of mine were going where their help was needed.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is right. As we discussed last week when we were putting this bill together, and we are fortunate that we have all 25 members of the Florida delegation as cosponsors, we are working together on this, this is not a partisan issue. We have some homeowners who were looking through the roof of their houses at the sky. The impact on those families in Florida is the same as the impact, without the widespread devastation, that they are feeling in the Gulf Coast States. But we wanted to make sure that Floridians do not get left behind who are suffering in the same way. I appreciate the gentleman's leadership and advice and guidance on helping to put that bill together.

One of the things that I wanted to talk about tonight is where we go from here, which is, I know, the direction that the gentleman from Florida is taking this discussion. There are some good things that have happened, in no small part, I think, due to the things that we have been pointing out over the last 10 or so days. Leader Pelosi has rightly called for an independent commission similar to the 9/11 Commission.

Like the gentleman said, that would not be Members of Congress sitting around and talking to each other; that it would be, and certainly that would be bipartisan and would be balanced and fair, so the American people can have confidence in our emergency preparedness and disaster response system. Because of all of this that has happened in the last 2 weeks, that is what has been shaken the most. We have been building, since September 11 we have been trying to rebuild Americans' confidence in the system, because when you have the Twin Towers knocked down, that was the biggest devastation beyond, obviously, the tragedy of the 3,000 people who died there, was that America's confidence was shaken in our ability to respond to those kinds of disasters.

And it is 4 years in the making, a process that we restore confidence, we restore people's ability to believe that we have some security here. While we may have made improvements on the terrorist and international risk preparedness level, clearly the domestic preparedness level, as the President admitted today, we have a lot of work to do. Because we never can predict Mother Nature, and particularly because of where we live, we have hurricanes approaching our constituents on a regular basis, it is really disturbing.

So I am glad that Under Secretary Brown did the right thing and stepped down. We called for it a year ago with our colleague, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Wexler); and, quite honestly, had he done the right thing sooner than that, then perhaps we could have had a prepared expert in place who could have responded much better to the results of Katrina.

The gentleman is absolutely right on point.

Your comments remind me of a question that our good friend, Doug Lyons from the South Florida Sun Sentinel, who I spoke to this morning, asked me. He said, he asked me if Michael Brown's resignation was enough. He said, now that we have got a successful, documented professional who will be at least, on an interim basis, running FEMA and making sure that the disaster response to Katrina has an expert in charge, is that enough? You know, can we all breathe a sigh of relief, wipe our hands and go home?

I mean, the answer to that is just so absolutely not. The leader of FEMA is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, when you ask any expert in emergency preparedness and disaster response if the one leader is the most important chink in the armor, they would of course say, no, it requires planning and preparation and budgeting and foresight and hindsight and a whole combination of expertise and planning that goes into preparedness and response.

So while it certainly was the right thing to do, and we are pleased to see that former Under Secretary Brown now did the right thing and stepped aside, there is so much left to be done. And going forward, while we can talk about what went wrong, we need an independent investigation and an independent commission that will be able to examine objectively so the American people have their confidence restored and that we know we have some competence and some deliberations going on about how we are going to deal with these kind of disasters in the future. We have got to talk about what comes next.

You watch the news every night, and now almost all the TV stations are allowing Katrina victims to list their cell phone numbers on national television because some of them are still looking for their kids. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, at least as of yesterday, said there were still 1,700 missing children reported from Katrina's aftermath: 1,700 children, 14 year olds, 12 year olds, 6 year olds, babies. There are babies that are still separated from their parents, from their moms.

We have got to do something going forward for these Katrina victims. We have got to make sure they have housing. We have got to make sure we get these kids back in school and we can get them back in school near or in the area that they originally lived in. And like the gentleman said, with the President's waiver of Davis-Bacon, which is the law that requires the prevailing wage be paid to workers, what incentive is there going to be for them to come back?

When you have the State of Israel, which commendably has offered scholarships for the college students that were displaced by Katrina, and we have Katrina victims going over, Jews and non-Jews going over to Israel now to accept scholarships, and the generosity of other countries, boy, does that say a lot about what we need to do to step up and make these residents whole again. We have got to ensure that a number of different things happen.

This is the 30-something Working Group. We have got a generation of people and young kids and our generation's children that are going to be in

dire need of their government's assistance. And if there is any time when it is imperative that the Federal Government engage, any point with any circumstance that there is an appropriate and vital role for the Federal Government, it is in response to a hurricane.

I am glad to see that the President today acknowledged finally, because it is really the first time I have heard him acknowledge, the possibility of a mistake. I am glad to see that he owned up at least in part to the possibility of there being problems, and it will be interesting to see what he says Thursday night when he speaks to the American people.

I hope what he says, we hope what he says is that there is going to be some drastic changes in our preparedness, in our response, in our funding, and in our priorities, because right now we are moving in the wrong direction.

Mr. Speaker, if you do not mind if I jump in, I want to just caution people listening tonight, our colleagues, our leadership, because when you have a disaster or anything of the proportion in size that Katrina was, it is hard to get your mind around it, especially if you have not been there. You now have direct, first- person ability to relay and understand the depth of what happened. Most of us have only seen the aftermath on TV.

The danger that we have in front of us is that with every passing day that Katrina's hitting is behind us, we are in danger of the American public and us as leaders becoming desensitized. The more it is on the news, the more we hear about it, the more we read about it, it is just the human psyche is such that you cannot have that raw nerve scratched every day and not steel yourself against it. With that desensitization, we are in danger of not having an appropriate response come out of this body, and we have got to come together.

We come here every week and we stand up and we point out our very clear differences with our friends on the other side of the aisle, but it does not have to be this way with the response to Katrina. There are some specific action items that can and should be done in order to prevent ourselves from becoming desensitized, not just as policy-makers but in the general populace as well.

We need the press. We should commend the press from the floor of this body for the spotlight that they have shown on these victims and their reality because, quite honestly, without that spotlight being shown by them, without their piling into the storm-ravaged area, see no evil, hear no evil, they would still be saying the same thing, and we would not have had the response and reaction that, quite frankly, we should have had right from the beginning.

So I want to commend the press and encourage them to continue to do it, but we have some action items that need to occur.

We need to get these people health care. We need to make sure they have access to Medicaid immediately. We

need to get them food stamp access. We need to make sure that they have access to education and housing and not just far-flung housing all over the country. If you lived in New Orleans, you do not need to resettle yourself permanently in Utah. That is not what we want to have a policy direct these people to. We want to bring them back. We want to set up transitional and then temporary housing and then eventually get them into permanent facilities, whether it is facilities that they have assistance from the Federal Government or whether they be given the ability to help them to make their own purchases of homes, which would be a wonderful thing to see.

That is what the leadership in this Congress is going to need to make happen. It is certainly going to be suggested by our side of the aisle. We need to make sure that we come together and suggest it on both sides of the aisle. The reconciliation process should be suspended. There are a number of things that should happen, and we are going to continue to talk about that.

Offered By: Ms. Wasserman Schultz

Amendment No. 8: Insert after section 511 the following new

section (and redesignate succeeding sections accordingly):

Madam Speaker, I rise today to introduce legislation with all 25 Members from the State of Florida that would assist residents of Florida who were victims of Hurricane Katrina. But before I do, I would like to say that I am proud to have supported the two emergency relief supplemental that we have passed for victims of the hurricane in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion. The pain of those who have lost loved ones, their homes, their pets and now find themselves in temporary housing thousands of miles from home, their pain is palpable.

As a Member of Congress who represents south Florida, I can empathize with the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the gulf States because my home, south Florida, has been struck by numerous hurricanes and is threatened by them every year. Even now we have Hurricane Ophelia, which at 5 o'clock was declared a hurricane approaching the coast.

The scenes of the destruction throughout Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have reminded south Floridians of the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 hurricane which struck south Florida 13 years ago.

However, I rise tonight to call the Nation's attention to something that I think has been overlooked, understandably, by the Nation, and that is the plight of those residents in Florida who suffered damage because of Hurricane Katrina. I want to remind people that Hurricane Katrina first made landfall in Florida, striking Broward and Miami-Dade counties in the heart of my congressional district.

When it first hit Florida, Hurricane Katrina was not a large storm. In fact, when it made landfall in Florida, it was only a Category 1 hurricane which moved quickly over the State and moved out into the gulf before building strength and causing the devastation that has transfixed our Nation for the last 10 days.

While only a Category 1 hurricane at the time, the damage caused by Katrina in south Florida was extensive for many people.

In Broward and Miami-Dade counties, more than 350 homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports today that Craig Fugate, Florida's emergency management chief, told FEMA officials this week that the State expects the loss of over 2,000 farm-related jobs in Miami-Dade County alone. Okra, malanga, sweet potato, and cassava crops have been destroyed, he said, resulting in about a $492 million loss. In addition, State agriculture officials say avocado and tropical fruit crops were severely affected.

Many of the farmers and agricultural workers that grow and tend these crops will be out of jobs or will lose significant income this year as a result of this storm.

On Saturday, August 27, the front page of The Washington Post and many other media outlets throughout the country showed pictures of the flooding and damage in south Florida resulting from Hurricane Katrina.

That is why it came as a surprise to many homeowners when last week FEMA announced that they would not be providing individual assistance to residents of Florida who suffered damage or destruction as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

I want to make it very clear to you, Madam Speaker, what the effect of this decision means to the residents of south Florida who suffered damage from the hurricane. This here, this, is what FEMA refuses to pay for when Hurricane Katrina struck Florida.

This woman here, who has had the roof ripped off her house and most of her possessions water damaged, FEMA's response to her is, you are on your own. Good luck.

And how about this family here. This woman is standing in water that is above her knees. The water is inside her house and has damaged her cars. Her house is not a fancy beach house. It is an average American's house. Her car is a later model and clearly more than 10 years old.

What was FEMA's response to her family's request for help? The same as it was to the people in New Orleans who were dying in the first days after Katrina struck: you are on your own.

My question to FEMA is this: Storms do not know State boundaries, so why does FEMA?

Looking at this picture here of the woman standing in her destroyed home, I am reminded of a woman that I met last week when touring hurricane damage in my own congressional district. I was touring the damage at the Park City Estates mobile home community in Davie, when I met Dorothy Rothbauer, an 86-year-old resident whose mobile home was damaged in Hurricane Katrina.

Ms. Rothbauer's home is roughly 20 miles from the beach. Her mobile home is nice. It is not extravagant. It is cozy and it has been her home for 25 years. Ms. Rothbauer is not a woman who lives beyond her means. She lives modestly and saves her money and has gotten by all of these years.

But now she needs help. She needs her government's help. As she showed me the damage to her house, she began to cry. It was excruciating. Pieces of the exterior have fallen off. Water has leaked in and the extent of structural damage is unknown.

She looked into my eyes, knowing that FEMA had told her that they could not offer her assistance, and crying, asked me what she was supposed to do now.

As I visited the other homes in the neighborhood, I realized that Dorothy's house did not have even as extensive damage as the others.

Across the street and down the block, roofs were entirely ripped off of these houses.

Dorothy's neighborhood is just one of many communities affected by Hurricane Katrina throughout Broward and Miami-Dade counties. And FEMA's answer to why they are not offering individual assistance to us in Florida is that for this storm FEMA has decided there is a State threshold of 800 homes that need to be damaged in Florida.

My State of Florida has been hit by six hurricanes, six in the past 2 years. Denying the people of Florida Federal assistance to rebuild their homes is wrong, and I urge my colleagues in the House to join the 25 Members from Florida in ensuring that FEMA will reimburse them for their damage.

The Census Bureau reports that in 2004, the percentage of people living in the Miami/FL area in poverty was 17 percent. The Federal poverty level is, just $12,334 for a family of two and only $19,307 for a family of four. Denying the people of this area Federal aid in rebuilding their lives is unconscionable.

It is for this reason, Mr. Speaker, that today I am proud to introduce legislation that is co-sponsored by every member of Florida's House of Representatives delegation. All twenty-five Republicans and Democrats.

My legislation would direct FEMA to cover valid claims for individual assistance resulting from Hurricane Katrina's impact on the State of Florida.

This legislation does not ask for something unusual, it only asks to right the wrong done to the people of Florida and it allows us as a Nation to answer the tear-filled question of what am I supposed to do now, posed to me by Dorothy Rothbauer last week.

I urge my colleagues to co-sponsor my legislation that would extend relief to the Florida victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. It is again great to be here with my colleagues from Florida and Ohio. It is so important that we spend the time that we spend here each week helping to get the message out to our generation and, quite honestly, to the generations ahead of us and behind us.

We had a devastating tragedy happen to us in our country, and that is to all of us, about 10 days ago. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I literally live at one point or another through every storm in the ``cone of error,'' as every storm that approaches the United States at some point or another, the gentleman's and my home and the homes of our constituents are in the cone of error for some period of time. So we know what it is like to stare down any one of a number of different levels of hurricanes or tropical storms.

As we speak tonight, we have Ophelia just about 100 miles off the coast of our State, yet again another tropical storm warning. We are up to ``O'' now. It is just never-ending.

One of the things that I would like to spend some time on tonight with both of your indulgence is we do need to get the information out, and one of the things that I did on Tuesday at home in south Florida was help to try to channel the energy of south Floridians who obviously were devastated by the last Category 5 hurricane that hit the United States and that unfortunately hit us in south Florida, deep in the hearts of our community, and we had an outpouring of affection and assistance from across the world. So you can imagine listening to this, what people in south Florida so badly want to do is return the favor and give back to the people in the gulf States and across the country what was given to them 13 years ago.

They do not know where to channel that energy, because there are so many relief organizations, so many on-the-spot relief organizations that have cropped up in the last week; and, unfortunately, if you recall during Andrew and during the 9/11 attacks, you have groups that will form within a matter of days to take advantage of a whole lot of money that is flowing through people's hands.

So what we did in south Florida is we channeled people's energy through one organization, Volunteer Florida, which is an organization affiliated with the State that exists throughout the year to help foster volunteerism. But we turned it into the clearinghouse for our State and gave people a phone number that they can call. I will check my notes and provide it. I do not want to give out the wrong number. Logon to www.volunteerflorida.org. We are trying to make sure that people go through an agency they know they can have confidence in.

Beyond that, there is an absolute necessity, I feel, for us to talk about what has gone on in the last 6 or 7 days, or, rather, what did not go on, because it is just absolutely unacceptable to me, and unacceptable is not a strong enough word.

The response, the lack of response, the indifference, the insensitivity and the actions and words of the leadership that is running this country in response to this devastating tragedy is just inexcusable to me.

While I have heard many of my colleagues and other people across this country say now is not the time for finger pointing, well, do you know what? If we did not talk about what was not going on last week, then, quite honestly, I think President Bush might still be on vacation even today. I think quite honestly that perhaps there would not have been a response even to the degree that we needed it without someone saying that the emperor had no clothes. Where was the help?

We know, because we live in the cone of error, so often in south Florida that you have several days' notice, and they did have several days notice that a Category 5 hurricane was bearing down on the gulf coast States. Where were the troops on the border of the cone of error? Where was the readiness? Where was the preparation? Where was the response? Where was the organization? It was nowhere.

We have got to make sure not only that it never happens again, but that there is an investigation and that there is a discussion in this body as to why it happened. We should talk about FEMA and why it is being led by a person who has absolutely no previous emergency preparedness or disaster experience, none, why his ineptitude was allowed to continue. Why a year ago when Florida faced four hurricanes, FEMA was handing relief checks out like candy to people who were not even victims of the storms.

There has got to be some accountability, and the time is not 2 months from now. We have billions of dollars that we are appropriating here and are about to appropriate that we should be appropriating, but we are going to go put it in the hands of people who have proven that they are incapable of handling disasters like this? Something needs to happen so that we can hold these people accountable on many different levels.

Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I want to just highlight that this is not an isolated incident. It would be easy to say that FEMA was just overwhelmed and could not possibly have been expected to be prepared for a storm the size of Katrina since this administration changed the rules of the game when it comes to FEMA. FEMA used to be an independent agency prior to the Bush administration and prior to its being absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. FEMA was an independent agency with a director and a staff that had expertise in disaster preparedness.

I want to just highlight for my colleagues prior to Hurricane Katrina some of the instances of irresponsibility on FEMA's part under Secretary Brown's leadership. In 2004 Florida officials recorded 123 fatalities from last year's hurricanes. We had four hurricanes that hit Florida last year. FEMA pays expenses for 315 deaths; 123 fatalities documented from last year's storms. FEMA pays expenses for 315 deaths. There is something wrong with that.

In 2004 FEMA reimbursed over 5,000 people $9.3 million for rental assistance when a follow-up study showed that most residents never left their homes. In 2004 FEMA reimbursed people for 11-piece bedroom sets when they just owned a bed. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina strikes Florida damaging over 200 homes. FEMA has declined to pay individual assistance to those homeowners.

And I stood in the yard of an 86-year-old woman on Monday who lives in my district who was in tears, whose hearing was so poor she could barely hear what I was saying to her. Her home had no roof. Her neighbor's home across the street was basically crumpled in his yard, and around the corner was the same type of home with the roof ripped off and lying on the front lawn. FEMA has decided that there is an 800- home standard for destruction or damage before they will pay individual homeowners reimbursement for their damage.

Let me just show my colleagues the type of damage that FEMA says people are not eligible for assistance. This is what FEMA will not pay for. After Hurricane Katrina, as a Category 1 storm, struck Florida last week, this is the damage that they say these people do not deserve reimbursement for because we did not have 800 homes suffer this kind of damage.

FEMA is saying that the standard they are using in 2005, and as I have outlined for my colleagues, which they had no such standard in 2004, coincidentally in a Presidential year, they are saying that because Florida did not reach the threshold of 800 homes that were damaged that our homeowners who have damage are not eligible for individual assistance, meaning they cannot get reimbursed by the government, by FEMA, for the damage.

Now, I will not claim by any stretch of the imagination that Floridians suffered the same type of strife and damage that people in the gulf States did from Katrina, but I will argue that hurricanes know no boundaries. Hurricanes do not respect State boundaries. Katrina did not know the border of Florida and Alabama and on westward. The impact on a homeowner in Florida is the same as it is on the homeowner who suffered the same kind of damage in a gulf State. This is what FEMA is denying. It is disgusting. And it is just not going to stop. We have got to get the word out to people, Mr. Speaker, that there are places that they can turn to for help, but clearly FEMA was not one of them.

Mr. Speaker, to piggyback on what the gentleman from Florida said about tax cuts, I mean it is just mind- boggling that yet again, their answer, their solution for everything is more tax cuts. I mean, I would not believe it unless I had it in print in front of me, but Treasury Secretary Snow said just the other day, today is September 7, he said yesterday at a press statement, this is in response to what we should do about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. He said, ``Making the tax cuts permanent would be a real plus in a situation like this, because people would know they had going forward the advantage of lower tax rates,'' Snow said. ``And when people know they have lower tax rates locked in going forward, it affects their behaviors. It makes them more confident of the future.''

Now, let us talk more about FEMA's failure, because that is really what it boils down to at the end of the day, because we need FEMA to be there, we need FEMA to generate confidence in Americans.

Mr. Speaker, the Republicans, and I am going to use the word ``Republican,'' but the Republicans ran last year on being the party that would be the best choice to protect people. They were the security party. That is supposedly the thing that tipped the scales.

Well, it is not just an issue of security in a terrorist crisis, which all of this resulting from Hurricane Katrina calls into question now, about whether they really are the party. They are clearly not the party of crisis.

They have proved they would not be able to be there in a disaster, in a disaster of any major proportion.

Let me just detail, because I have another chart here that is going to outline a couple of things that I think are important, FEMA's failures. Let us talk about cleanup, and let me just acknowledge that ``personnel'' is spelled wrong on this chart. I want to make sure the people knew that I know how to spell ``personnel.''

Cleanup: FEMA has failed for pay for debris removal from private property. This has resulted in many homeowners incurring large expenses paying for the removal of not only their own fallen trees and other damage, but also rubble blown onto their lots from other locales.

Let us talk about Federal aid.

So we give them an ``F'' in cleanup, because they are basically ignoring Florida as if a storm never hit our State.

FEMA must be more responsible in allocating Federal aid. We are talking about the things that FEMA should have been doing already and must do going forward. About $30.8 million in FEMA money has been awarded to residents in Miami-Dade, a county that I represent and that Congressman Meek lives in, much of it for replacement of appliances such as televisions and air conditioners, although the storms last year in Florida barely grazed the county. Meanwhile, this year, when the storm hit the county directly, now they are not reimbursing people who have legitimate damage and roofs ripped off their houses. Meanwhile, other storm-ravaged areas still have many families who continue to be displaced because of the severe damage to their homes. So they get an ``F'' in Federal aid.

How about personnel? Subsequent reports detailed how FEMA inspectors received little training, that FEMA approved millions in assistance to other areas of the country largely unaffected by disasters; that government scientists said that FEMA misrepresented wind data that it used to justify the payments in Miami-Dade County last year, and that the agency paid 315 hurricane-related funeral claims in Florida, even though the official death toll was only 123. So they get an ``F'' in personnel.

Fourth, the shocking statistics in terms of their preparedness. Florida officially recorded 123 fatalities last year from hurricanes, as I outlined, but were paid for 315 deaths, including those of a man who shot himself and a stroke victim who was hospitalized more than a week before the last storm hit, and that was documented by the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel. In one case, a FEMA worker tried unsuccessfully to persuade a coroner to count among the hurricane casualties a morbidly obese heart attack patient who purportedly was scared to death.

This is the kind of thing that went on in FEMA before Katrina. These are the people that we are putting our confidence in and that people in the gulf coast States are having to put their confidence in, who are going to come in and rescue them and clean up this mess.

Most recently, disaster aid earmarked for hurricane victims in central Florida paid for funerals for people who died of cancer, a brain aneurysm and, in one case, advanced AIDS, according to the local medical examiner. That was in the Sun Sentinel as well. Asked to comment on payouts in central Florida, FEMA spokesman James McIntyre did not provide a response. He also did not address how many more funerals FEMA has paid for since that time.

We have to make sure that FEMA takes responsibility and is held accountable for its mishaps. This is an organization that gets an ``F'' in every single thing that they are primarily responsible for. This is the organization that Americans are supposed to be putting their confidence in, that is going to be there for them when disaster strikes, and in advance of disasters striking that they should be ready for, and afterwards when they have to come in and clean it up. It is just absolutely inexcusable and disgusting.

For example, with the President, responding to the damage that the gentleman talked about to the levees, he said on Good Morning, America last Tuesday, that no one expected the levees to fail. Yet, he cut the budget that would have shored up those levees just last June, in 2004.

You talk about the quarterback, and let us continue the football analogy. If you have got the quarterback in the FEMA Director not having any ability to get things done, let us continue the football analogy and call Secretary Chertoff the coach, and the President the man in the front office. You have got both of those people who we cannot have any confidence in either.

And I will take a less than left-leaning example here, an excerpt from Fox News Sunday, because the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) talks about it not being intentional. The gentleman is right. It is not intentional. Their response was not intentional. It was just indifferent. The indifference is what is shocking. And you had Chris Wallace go through this exchange with Secretary Chertoff on Fox News Sunday this past Sunday.

Mr. Wallace said, ``But Mr. Secretary, you know there are an awful lot of people around the country that are asking these questions and want to hear answers from you today.

During the week, during this past week you seemed to minimize or not to know about a lot of problems on the ground in New Orleans. Let us watch some of those.''

And then he went on to show him some of the clips.

And this was Secretary Chertoff's response: ``We are extremely pleased at the response that every element of the Federal Government, all of our Federal partners have made to this terrible tragedy. There have been isolated incidents of criminality. We have all seen pictures of looting.''

Then he goes on to say: ``I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who do not have food and water.''

Well, I can understand why, because yesterday when we had the briefing in this Chamber from most of the members of the Cabinet, you had one of the Secretary of Defense's military leaders stand up and say that the pictures we have all seen on TV are just like looking through a straw, that that does not show the full picture. We are looking through a straw, that they are extremely pleased with their response and it is going exceedingly well.

So then he goes on to say, what Chris Wallace says: ``Mr. Secretary, how is it possible that you could not have not known on late Thursday, for instance, that there were thousands of people in the Convention Center who did not have food, who did not have water, who did not have security, when that was being reported on national television?''

Secretary Chertoff says: ``Well, Chris, you know, that is one of the issues we have to look at. I mean, we were in constant touch with what was going on in the field, getting information from State and local officials. As it happened on that very Thursday I was in a

video conference with State officials and did not get any information about this. And one of the things we will look at is why in the middle of this emergent crisis there was a conflict in the information.''

You know, I can tell Secretary Chertoff why the State and local officials did not feel like they had to tell you that there were people at the Convention Center, because you could not turn on your TV and not see them dehydrating in front of your very eyes. How about the woman who had her dehydrated baby who she could not even wake up? I mean, I have a 2-year-old. God forbid that ever happened in my family. I can assure you that if it happened in the community that I represent, I have a hunch that the response would have been a little bit quicker because my constituents are not poor and they are not African American primarily.

You know, you talk about the South, and obviously I am one of those Members that would be very protective of the South. But this could be a natural disaster in Detroit or in Wisconsin or name any State with a black community or a predominantly poor community, and there but for the grace of God go them. I mean, really.

We are not here to point fingers. We are just here to point at what has been happening in front of our very eyes. And this has just got to stop. We do have to come up with solutions. We cannot hand out $50 billion to a person who is running the show like it is a circus, like he is the ring leader in a circus, and not a very good one. It is just inexcusable. We cannot ever let this happen again, and we have got to draw a line in the sand and say this far and no further.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take the time of the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey).

Mr. Speaker, first let me say that my thoughts and prayers go out to those who have lost loved ones and those who have suffered as a result of the destruction of this devastating natural disaster. I represent South Florida, an area that is far too often in the cone of error of just about every hurricane that approaches the United States and also home to the last time a Category 5 storm hit a United States territory.

As I speak here tonight, it is unclear how many people have been killed or will ultimately die as a result of this storm. What is clear is that America has received a wake-up call, and it came in the form of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina calls into question our preparedness as a Nation to deal with any kind of major disaster, whether it is a natural disaster or a disaster resulting from a terrorist attack.

This month marks the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attack on our Nation. Our country saw the devastation that could be caused by a terrorist attack, recognized our vulnerabilities and supposedly set about the task of protecting Americans as best we could from disaster. The administration knew about the vulnerabilities of the levees in New Orleans. They knew about the level of poverty that exists in the Gulf States that would hamper evacuation plans, and they should have known at a minimum the day before the hurricane hit that they would need more law enforcement, rescue, medical and evacuation personnel.

And herein lies the problem: They knew about these problems as we know about many problems and vulnerabilities that exist throughout other cities nationwide, yet we have been slow to act to improve the situation. I represent a city, the City of Miami, which is the third poorest in the Nation. In prior years, local officials in New Orleans recommended a plan that would have cost $14 billion to reinforce the levee and pump system that keeps New Orleans safe. The State of Louisiana sent out a call for help that the project was too big, and they needed Federal assistance to even begin the project. And the pleas for help from State and local officials fell on deaf ears in the White House and Congress.

Let us put the New Orleans levee construction into perspective. We spend over $1 billion a week on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we just handed out $14 billion to oil companies in President Bush's energy bill we passed this summer. What is the ultimate lesson of Katrina? The lesson is that the officials that were supposed to provide support, safety and security to the people in the Gulf States failed. The result was a situation where every emergency coordinator knew that disaster was imminent. However, the existing emergency infrastructure was not there to remove people from harm's way, and by doing so, it could have saved their lives.

We cannot as local, State and Federal officials draw up plans, have a 1-day mock disaster drill, and then pat ourselves on the back and say our job is done here. The government is here to provide the infrastructure that is necessary to prevent deaths from imminent disaster and step in immediately afterwards to ensure that deaths do not result from the destruction caused by that disaster. I think that the response from the Federal Government fell far short of that standard.

The lesson that Hurricane Katrina needs to have taught our government officials is that the current emergency management infrastructure could not handle a disaster the size of Katrina, and that we must streamline and reform our disaster preparedness and response. And we have to do it today. Our Nation's first priority should be to provide security, safety and infrastructure here at home. It is a disgrace that it took a disaster of such magnitude to bring light to the weaknesses of our system, and we must take the lessons learned to ensure that such catastrophes do not occur again.

At the very least, we need not have our leaders respond in the fashion that the President and the Speaker of the House and a number of other leaders have in the last 10 days, indicating that perhaps they did not think New Orleans should be rebuilt and perhaps the people who did not get out of New Orleans made a bad decision.

We need to think about the wherewithal that people in these communities had prior to the storm, and we need to give them that wherewithal to move forward and go on so we can rebuild New Orleans and make sure that we never have to stare down a hurricane the magnitude of Katrina and not be prepared as we were in this storm.

Mr. Speaker, my deepest condolences go to the victims of Hurricane Katrina who have lost their lives, their homes and their livelihoods. For many, it did not have to be this way.

I represent south Florida, an area with a great deal of experience with hurricanes. Frankly, the planning and response efforts that I have seen from FEMA and the rest of the Federal Government leaves my confidence in our ability to respond to any kind of domestic disaster shaken and makes me fear for my constituents should a hurricane, or other disaster of this magnitude strike south Florida.

There are some serious questions to be asked: Why with several days' notice about this storm, were more people not evacuated? Where was the plan to evacuate people who did not have the money or ability to evacuate themselves? When the size and strength of the storm was known, why wasn't a response team in place to go into affected areas immediately? Why was Federal funding to reinforce the levee system cut when it would have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars? And, given that this disaster was the first large scale test of the new Department of Homeland Security and their Federal Emergency Management Agency, does this new structure improve or hamper disaster prevention, response and relief?

Yesterday morning, President Bush went onto NBC's Today Show and made the following statement: ``The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.'' President Bush's statement shows a complete lack of understanding of, and insensitivity to, the plight facing so many American families today, or why those families died or are now suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The United States Census Bureau reports that in 2004 over 23 percent of the population of the city of New Orleans was living at or below the poverty level. The poverty level is $12,334 a year for a family of two, or $19,307 a year for a family of four. Mr. President, when a husband and wife only make $12,334 they very likely do not have a car, or money for gasoline, or even money for a bus fare to get out of town. It was not a mistake on their part, but rather Mr. President, a mistake on your part that you did not have a plan to evacuate these families from the path of imminent danger.

One thing is very clear; poor planning, and a slow response to an imminent disaster has cost hundreds of people their lives and hundreds more will die if the Government does not significantly increase its response. Even today, there are over 200,000 National Guard troops that have not been called up to help in the relief efforts. Even today, the Navy's Hospital ship Comfort remains in Baltimore Harbor, and will not set sail for the Gulf until Saturday and will not reach the Gulf for a week after that.

Our government must be better prepared to plan and respond to disasters of every kind in this country. But for right now, we must mobilize the incredible resources of the Federal Government and respond to this crisis in a manner that recognizes that people are dying as we speak because not enough has been done to help them.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from California for yielding me this time.

I rise in support of the Paul amendment and, in addition, in reluctant opposition to H.R. 3199 for several reasons.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, I watched as Members of

Congress came together in a bipartisan effort to craft legislation which would, it was argued, strengthen law enforcement's hand in fighting terrorists. Americans from across the political spectrum were willing to sacrifice some of the freedoms we cherish to immediately address security concerns, with the understanding that many provisions would be revisited and the civil liberty protections that we all hold so dear would be addressed.

But by making these provisions permanent, without mandatory congressional review, we placed the very democracy that we hold so dear in jeopardy. When restricting civil liberties, we should be extremely careful about forfeiting those freedoms without reviewing the ongoing need to continue to restrict them.

In these contemporary times, it may be difficult for us to conceive of the barbarous proceedings of the Salem witch trials. Indeed, they continue to perplex and horrify those of us who came later. But imagine if those perceptions and resulting actions were somehow a permanent part of our society today without an opportunity for review as to their validity?

If they were, under the PATRIOT Act's intrusive infringement on America's book purchases and library records, when the most recent episode in the Harry Potter Book series was released last Friday, we would have had hundreds of thousands of children ``burned at the stake.''

And I know this analogy might seem a bit extreme, but that is just how extreme things can become without proper checks and balances when restricting our civil liberties and freedoms, which is why we should support the Paul amendment, because true freedom of expression is an important thing to preserve.

I am hopeful that when this legislation comes back from conference that we will have a product that we can all embrace, but today I will vote for freedom. I will support the Paul amendment and I will vote against final passage of this version of the bill.