Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent due to illness during rollcall votes 521 and 522.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on 521 and 522.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address my colleagues tonight and address this House of Representatives. As I sat and listened to the Chairman of the Committee on Armed Services, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), I cannot resist the sense of duty and obligation to weigh in on some of his remarks that he made with regard to General Myers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Of course, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) has worked very closely with General Myers and he knows him far better than I do. My work in relationship there has been not as deep, but I have been as impressed as the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) has been with Richard Myers, the chairman of our Joint Chiefs, and with his vision and his ability to see beyond the horizon, as the gentleman said.

I also had the privilege of meeting General John Kelly over in Iraq before the operation that ended the battle of Fallujah, and I was impressed with his dedication and his vision and his understanding of who our enemy was and what needed to be done, and I was pleased to sit here tonight and hear the remarks made by the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), honoring the family, the family commitment to the military and to the defense of this fine Nation that was made by General John Kelly and his children.

Mr. Speaker, let me shift to the subject matter that I asked to speak about tonight and that is the subject matter that I have come to call ``Katrita.'' We have been here on this floor a couple of hours in the past 2 weeks, and I have spoken at great length about Katrina and, in these past few days, we have seen the aftermath now of Hurricane Rita. I just merge them together, because essentially they did merge together, Mr. Speaker, as Katrina hit New Orleans and points on the east and Rita hit points to the west of New Orleans on over into the bay and into Texas, so they have crossed those lines and the damage of the two hurricanes have overlapped on each other.

When I take Katrina on the one side and Rita on the other side and merge them together I get Katrita. It is the largest natural disaster I believe that this Nation has ever seen. We are fortunate that it has not been the largest loss of life, although we mourn those who we have lost, and we are still in the process of recovery. But this financial loss and the term of time that will be required for reconstruction I think is the most devastating that America has seen. We are going to need to pull together on this.

I am well aware that there are Members of Congress who have districts

that were hit hard by the dual hurricanes, and they are the most sensitive to these issues. I am up in the upper Midwest, although I have made my trip down there and much of my staff has been down there, and in fact, I have a staff person there today who will be there for some time. We want to lend a good hand to the people in the gulf coast intelligently and responsibly.

Before I get into that in any great depth, I will be happy to yield the floor to one of those individuals who does have constituents in the area, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe).

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I would pose a question to the gentleman, as the gentleman raised the issue with the natural gas and oil drilling that goes on in the gulf, I have seen the map of where those rigs are, the platforms that are out there, and what I cannot see when I go down there along that shore and what I cannot seen when I go along there and in a plane or a helicopter is any rigs. Can you see the rigs from the shoreline, say if you are sitting on the beach anywhere down there?

I would pose a follow-up question. Does the gentleman have any idea why it is some folks oppose the drilling offshore when it is out of sight?

Mr. Speaker, I am advised that the last oil spill we had in any offshore drilling for oil was 1969. I do not know if the gentleman can confirm that, but in that question could the gentleman also respond to the question of, does the gentleman know if there has ever been a spill of natural gas drilling offshore? And if it did spill, would it kind of look like the gas that is boiling up out of the water in New Orleans where it would just dissipate into the air and is there a reason to be concerned, even if we were irresponsible with regard to natural gas drilling?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for coming to the floor to stand up and let America and the Speaker know the circumstances in southern Texas and how that has impacted you all down there. I will pick up on the flow of this.

I had the privilege of going down there very early. In fact, my district director was on the ground near New Orleans on an air base on Labor Day which was just barely in the aftermath of the hurricane. It was important, I thought, to have someone down there to see what was going on so we could measure the magnitude of the disaster down.

He went down with a KC-135 load of Air Force MP's out of Colorado and reported back to me immediately. From what he saw down there, he said he thought there was so much military activity on Labor Day that it reminded him of the DaNang base during Vietnam when he was there.

So that gave me a sense of how much military effort there was even that early, and yet the public does not have the perception that there was a Federal response that was nearly as aggressive or as comprehensive as it actually was.

I would say further that I did not wait. The following week I was there on the eleventh and twelfth of September. I came in very early on that Sunday morning. I got a good look at much of what was going on and went up in a Black Hawk helicopter and flew all over New Orleans for a couple of hours. I went back down and had the meetings that I had asked for. I was given a ride over the Corps of Engineers headquarters.

There I entered their administrative offices where they rode out Hurricane Katrina, and looking at the drawings that they had and the maps of the area, and I had studied the elevations and the levees and the system that had been constructed. I had also read the reports that were predicting the worst-case scenario, which essentially Katrina was the worst-case scenario for New Orleans with the exception that maybe the winds could have been a little stronger, but it went in the most damaging path it could have. It was almost the perfect storm, and I will return to that description perhaps in a few moments, Mr. Speaker.

But when I think of the immediate military response that kept the air bases looking like Danang with so many planes landing, we had fixed- wing aircraft landing more often than one every minute, whether it be C-130s or KC-135s, cargo aircraft coming in with manpower and also with supplies, equipment, everything they could imagine that they could muster up from our military. Those fixed wing aircraft were landing on the runway. The military had set up their power system, and they had taken over the communications for the air traffic controllers which did not have power.

So the military system kicked in, and they were controlling the fixed-wing aircraft to land one more often than every minute on the runway there. Then, on top of that, the helicopters were coming and going; and they were landing crossways of the runway, asked to yield the right-of-way to the planes that were landing, a very, very busy place on Labor Day that early after Katrina hit.

So I would just fast forward to, in fact, exactly 7 days later when I found myself in a shelter in Slidell, Louisiana, visiting some of the people who had been evacuees from their homes and were looking for a place to lay their weary heads. They had set up the gymnasium there with perhaps 300 cots, a Red Cross-structured shelter. As I walked through there and visited some of the victims of the storm, I got a sense of the stories that they had lived through and a feel for the way they had been helped out and the helping hands that came from volunteers from all across this country, and in fact, hearing the stories of the traffic that was going south, while the evacuation was going north, people coming to help were a traffic jam themselves.

That is the American spirit, Mr. Speaker; and in that gymnasium, I met a young man who was a specialist with the 711th Signal Battalion out of Mobile, Alabama. He was Specialist Cunningham, and I asked him, of course, what unit he was with. He said, 711th Signal out of Mobile, Alabama, sir. I said, how did you get here out of Alabama? Didn't you get hit by a hurricane there, too? He said, Yes, but our orders were to come over here and help the people that needed it worse than we did. I said how did you get across Mississippi? His answer was, We used chainsaws and we used Humvees and

chainsaws, and we essentially cut away across the trees that were down over the highway, and we drug them out of the way and we opened the road and worked our way over here. So they had cut all the way or worked their way and cleared some of the way, if not all the way, across Mississippi to Slidell, Louisiana, on the eastern side of the Louisiana border, right next to the Mississippi line.

People from Mobile, Alabama, 300 strong, in there early, and they started out on Monday. That is Monday Labor Day, the same day my district director landed down there near New Orleans, the same day that the air traffic was landing, one plane more often than every minute, with helicopters landing in between, bringing manpower and machines and equipment and supplies in for people that were in need.

Mr. Speaker, the Federal Government did provide a fast response; but it was a huge area, 90,000 square miles to start with; and now it has been added to significantly by Rita. Of course, we learned from Katrina; and some of the things that were in place in Texas in preparation for evacuees, particularly those that might come out of Galveston in the event of a hurricane, were very beneficial to the people that came from New Orleans and found themselves in Houston.

I am quite impressed with the effort of the region and the resources that they pulled together and the ability that they had in the Astrodome to have supplies there and water and food and medicine. I think the report was 400 different kinds of pharmaceuticals in a pharmaceutical shop that was set up there along with cots and all the services that they needed, medical help and psychological help, and the list went on. Plenty of volunteers were able to take thousands of people into the Astrodome and have the supplies there so that it was orderly, clean, and neat. It was not littered.

Apparently, the people who went to the Astrodome helped clean the place up. I do not know, but every time I saw a picture of that, it was a clean place; and whenever I saw a picture of the Superdome, it was a very, very filthy and littered place that appeared to have no order, and it was a chaotic location, as we all pretty well know by now.

As the Committee on Government Reform meets and holds hearings and examines the circumstances that unfolded, I really do think that we need to let them do their due diligence. I think we need to let them listen to the testimony, and we heard the now-just-resigned director of FEMA give his testimony yesterday. More testimony followed today, I understand. It will follow in the days and weeks ahead.

It is important that we put on record the chronology of what happened when, where was the storm in the path, what notices went out, what decisions were made at what time, who was in the position of authority, and at what time did they make those decisions, who did they consult with, what was the basis of the facts of the information, what equipment did they have to work with, what alternatives did they have, what had they done in the past history to prepare themselves for such a disaster.

Certainly, it was not a surprise that a hurricane might someday hit of that magnitude, because that was published in the New Orleans Times- Picayune newspaper, I believe it was in late 2002.

I have read all those articles, and I have read the worst-case scenario, and I cannot believe that I would be one of the few people, but many, many people in that region were aware of the worst-case scenario, and that is essentially what transpired.

I think it is important to let the committee do their work, the Committee on Government Reform, bring the witnesses forward, put their testimony on the record, take the documents, the supporting documents, and put those into the record and have the staff and the interested people and the public and the media be able to take a good look and examine the facts and then write up the scenarios.

This committee will issue a report, and I want to reserve my judgment on all the things that I think went wrong until such time as I can point to them and say these are congressional findings, they are facts; and I want to base my judgment off of those facts.

I will give, Mr. Speaker, a couple of opinions on what I think happened, and not to be passing previous judgment but simply to give an overall sketch of how it looks to me from what I have seen, what I have been involved in, and that is, that I think Hurricane Katrina, and Rita to a significantly less effect, but Katrina particularly was almost the perfect storm.

It did what the director of Homeland Security said here on this floor, that it came in in a military fashion. If you were going to attack a city and you wanted to immobilize a city, what you would do is wipe out the communications, the power and electricity. That is the first thing that Katrina did. Then you would cut off all the transportation routes into the city, and that is what happened with the flooding and the roads that were taken out. Then the third thing that would happen would be, of course, you would attack, and that was the flood. The flood, when you start filling up a city like that, it immobilizes everything. It put everybody out of commission.

So it was almost a perfect storm from the standpoint of the damage that it did and the direction that it took.

I can speak about that perhaps a little bit more, Mr. Speaker; but I would add to that then, when local services disappeared and when we saw that many hundreds of the first responders were victims of the storm themselves, either their places were damaged by the wind, damaged by the water, under water, or damaged by the wind and the water and under water, but the first responders took a serious blow, and they were not there to help coordinate. They did not have a communications system to help coordinate with. I am sure that there are many, many stories of heroic people that toiled in oblivion in that chaos of the first few days that was the effect of the storm that hit New Orleans.

I will say that that rolling chain reaction of disaster, the effect of the city's response in particular was not as effective as it may have been due to lack of communications ability, due to lack of resources in places where one would think they might have been, and then the loss of communications so that it was not possible to salvage the operations, salvage the response to the storm because the resources were not there, had there been the right decisions made, I think to provide them. So you take it up to the next level of the State, and there, again, communications and decision-making are certainly something that will be questioned.

It kept the decisions out of the hands of the Federal Government, except for those National Guards like 711th Signal Battalion out of Mobile, Alabama, who came in and under whose order I do not know, but I am awfully glad they came. I was awfully proud to look at young Specialist Cunningham in the eye when he told me that they had chainsawed their way across Mississippi to get to Louisiana.

That is the American way, Mr. Speaker, and when I hear the anecdote that was told by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) a few moments ago about the decision to place the vehicles on a couple of ships and keep them safe from the hurricane, and that offer was made by a couple of captains, he said that they made the decision in just a few minutes to place vehicles on a ship. They did that right away, and they protected all of those vehicles, they were in good condition, good shape, because a decision was made at the local level. Quick-thinking people that looked around and saw the resources that they had, that has always been the American way.

When we let government make decisions, we delay. For government to make decisions, the bureaucracy moves too slowly, the information moving up to the bureaucracy gets there too slowly; and even if the right decision is made, chances are it does not get back down through and does not get implemented in time for it to have the effect that it might have.

You really need people on the ground that are thinking for themselves and have enough self-confidence, enough leadership ability and enough authority to make those decisions like that decision was that recommended by the two ships' captains that saved all those vehicles, so that as soon as the storm was over, they could roll them off the ships and put them right to work rescuing people.

I thought that was a good example, and to think that we maybe could have

had those kinds of decisions in other areas around the disaster area if we had gotten government more out of the way and let the local and those people make those decisions, but they had to make the right ones in preparation, too. That is the part that I think that the Committee on Government Reform will bring out here so that Americans will see it with a true perspective.

If I could, I would appreciate the opportunity to yield to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) who knows her mind, comes here and speaks it, speaks up for the right causes and the right principles; and I am very pleased to be associated with the gentlewoman from North Carolina.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) for her contribution to this discussion and this debate and her involvement on the Committee on Government Reform, which has got an important role to play, and always has when it comes time to streamline government and bring more responsibility out of government.

This is an especially important time. There are a lot of Federal dollars being poured into this region as we speak. And as the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) said, she voted no on the $52 billion. I am one of those people that voted no on the $52 billion. Actually, $51.8 billion, to be precise, not that a couple hundred million dollars is not splitting hairs in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, but I think it is. And I voted no because there was approximately $5 billion in there that was easily identifiable as not emergency spending, Mr. Speaker. It was money that was being directed towards 300,000 trailer houses, of which 270,000 were back ordered. Back ordered trailer houses, and mitigation of future disasters is not emergency spending.

I wanted to focus the money on emergency spending, and I wanted to get about another $10 billion down there to keep FEMA going for another week so that we could do a better job of oversight. Because, as you know, once the money goes out the door, it is a lot harder to watch where it is spent than it is to put the strings on it before it leaves the door.

I believe we could have done a better job of that, but I do believe that we are joining together here to do a better job and looking back on some of that appropriations, to do the best we can to make sure it is spent as well as we can in any future requests. I want to make sure that we weigh in very carefully on where those dollars go.

That is the biggest reason that I went down there fairly early in this, on September 11 and 12, and I got a good look at all of New Orleans from the air. I also flew down from the Corps of Engineers' headquarters there over the

Mississippi River, which runs approximately 90 miles south, in a little bit of a winding pattern down to the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River outlets into the gulf. Most people in the upper Midwest think that New Orleans is on the coast, that it is the outlet of the Mississippi, but in fact it is another 90 miles or so. Of course, when I was there, it was only about 75, I believe, because the water was so high and the damage that was done it really shortened the Mississippi River by a significant proportion.

Nonetheless, that disaster that I saw down along the channeling of the Mississippi River, or I will say next to the Mississippi River channel, where the river has perhaps, and I will state the information that I have is that the levees built to keep the Mississippi River in the channel are 25 feet above sea level. Then on the west side of the Mississippi, from the levee and going west, there is perhaps an average of about a half mile of bottom land there. That is protected with another levee about 25 feet high which protects the gulf, so that the gulf does not come into the backside of that levee that controls the Mississippi River.

That area in between those two 25-foot levees is the area that is about a half mile wide and generally about 90 miles long, perhaps 45 square miles, with six or seven towns in there. Those six or seven towns were all wiped out. The wind hit them all hard and damaged them severely. Even some of the best structures were really damaged severely.

The wind hit, and then the water surged over the levee from the Mississippi River side and flooded that area in between those two 25- foot dikes with that half a mile in between, and then the water surged over from the gulf side and did the same thing. So I am going to say wind damage like I have only seen in the worst of tornadoes, the entire area wind damaged like that, with entire buildings just blown away into splinters. Then, when the flood came from the surge, any buildings that were not blown away were mostly washed away. They floated and crashed up against each other against the levee.

Mr. Speaker, I have here on the easel a picture of one of the better built buildings down there in that bottom land parallel to the Mississippi River. This may be, just guessing, perhaps 30 miles south of New Orleans along the Mississippi. This is a building that is built with steel pilings driven in, and who knows how deep, but down deep enough to get a very solid bearing in order to build a building that can withstand a hurricane and can withstand the kind of water surge that was going to come.

As you can see, as good as it was built, it still blew everything from here on down away, and there is not a lot left to salvage here. One might be surprised that the structure seems to be fairly sound. I saw this all over, but I also square mile after square mile that had been homes that was nothing but a footing or a foundation or a concrete platform. I did not bring pictures of those because they are not so impressive, Mr. Speaker. That is just water-covered concrete footings and nothing left.

There were trees were the wind blew so hard it simply blew the leaves off the tree and the trees died. The salt water that came in, of course, killed most everything green. That is another piece that we do not hear much about, Mr. Speaker.

I have saved this particular picture because, in a way, it is kind of heartbreaking. I was walking along a levee south of Slidell, Louisiana, a levee that runs over towards New Orleans. And as I looked at the devastation after devastation, debris after debris, it was numbing after a while. It is hard to be shocked. In fact, you just get that sense of how can anything be worse and you start counting things in the trees, like counting life jackets that are hanging from the trees, hundreds of them; and counting refrigerators up in the trees, and I will say dozens of them. Odd things that stick out in a person's mind.

I ended up with about 1,800 pictures, which when I go back and look at them, I see things in those pictures that I did not see when I was there in person. But this caught my eye. Laying on the ground beside a place that used to be a home, and it says Happy Anniversary. This has not been disturbed at all. It is exactly the way it laid. You can see where the grass is laid over the top of the handle. Whether it was a husband that bought that for the wife, or the wife for the husband, or the children for the parents, or whether it was the grandchildren for the grandparents, I do not know, but when I look at that, I see one of the doves that was on top is broken and laying here and it seems to reflect on what happened to some of the families that lost a loved one maybe have not found a loved one yet.

We have done a pretty good job of locating people, but the effort still goes on. And when the waters came up, and they came so fast that there might be a 17- to 20-foot surge that would go from zero to 17 to 20 feet in a matter of 3 minutes, maybe 4 minutes, that was not much time to get away. A lot of people had to go up the stairs of their house up to their attics. And when the water came and filled their attic, they needed something to chop their way out through the roof in order to climb out on the roof to save themselves from the flood.

I do not know how many people did not have a means to chop themselves out of their own attic. I do not know, but as I look at this, I cannot help but think that it may not be this family that lost someone, but I believe it represents many of the families that did lose someone who was celebrating their anniversary not all that long ago.

On the positive side, Mr. Speaker, this is a very resilient Nation, and we have a strong character and a strong resilience. We also have a sense of defiance, which is rooted back in the defiance of King George. So when we are met with disaster, no matter how bad the disaster, no matter how bad the blow, we have people that stand up and they look around and they think, all right, if that is the best you can give me, then I can take that and I am going to rebuild. I will put my life back together, my business back together, put my house back together, and I am going to live here and make it. I am going to be profitable and contribute back to this country and the neighborhood and the economy.

This is a symbol of that defiance, Mr. Speaker. This is one of the things that warmed my heart as we flew by there. The individual or the family that owned this place had lost almost everything. This is mostly trash and rubble. If you look up here, this is debris that has all been pushed over by the wind. That is just floating debris, and the water has been over the top of this levee. That is the Mississippi River right at the top of the picture.

As the owner came and found nothing, he did find a flag pole that was still standing. There is no way the flag that was on that flag pole originally survived that wind. But, Mr. Speaker, the first thing he did was went and got a fresh Old Glory and ran it up to the top of that flag pole in defiance of the storm and in proud independence that he would be, and I assume it is a he, rebuilding.

One day I will go back down there, and I hope I can identify that flag pole, because I think there is going to be some buildings that have been reconstructed again, and the place will one day look better than it did the day before the storm hit.

We have a lot of big decisions to make: where the Federal dollars will go, where they will come from. We have an obligation to look for offsets. We cannot continue to put debt on the backs of our children and grandchildren. We can find the savings.

I am convinced that this Congress, working together in a bipartisan manner, will be able to find ways to save money so we can get the resources into the gulf coast to help out our friends in Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, and to a lesser extent some of Florida. I am hopeful that we can join together in a way to do that.

I have a few ideas myself. I am not going to enter into this debate here tonight with them, but I have been working on my own list on how to fund Hurricane Katrina's reconstruction. It is essential that we find offsets, and we can do some reconciliation legislation. It will be a blessing for us because we will find a way to make government more efficient. We will have that debate here. It will be on the floor of Congress.

But also finding ways to pay for it is not enough. We also have to spend the

money wisely. We need to limit it to the extent we can while still taking care of our obligations from the Federal Government.

I have looked at the things that we need to do to protect New Orleans again. It is below sea level. There was 16 feet of water standing in parts of New Orleans. That whole area with standing water is below sea level. We have to find a way, and there was discussion whether we could construct below sea level. Those questions landed on my ears. Actually, I thought they were prudent questions that needed to be asked, deliberated upon, and we need to bring more facts to the table before we can come up with a definitive answer.

But when you look at New Orleans and see the downtown buildings that rise up out of the water, and I was able to see it on a day when it was a bright blue sky, and the sunlight reflecting off the downtown buildings made the water blue, as the downtown buildings stood up, I looked and it was clear to me, yes, you cannot let a great city like New Orleans stand in water and not be reconstructed better than it was before. We need to rebuild the city, but we need to rebuild the city in a wise fashion.

My first recommendation is New Orleans, the levees that protect it and the systems that protect it from a hurricane, be constructed in preparation for a category 5 hurricane. If you can imagine a worse one, let us reconstruct for that. Let us do the hurricane mitigation work so the worst storm we can imagine cannot come in and do the kind of damage that Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans.

The first step is as the water in Lake Pontchartrain increased by that 14 to 15-foot average water depth, and as it went up another 8 to 10 feet, because of the storm surge from the gulf, as the low pressure center raised the level of the water in the ocean and that hard south wind at 150 miles an hour drove that water up into the lake, stacked it up against the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain and filled that lake up with 8 to 10 feet more water, and then when the hurricane shifted to the east and winds came from the north, it drove that high wall of water down against the levees on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain. The waves added another 8 to 10 feet, it washed over the levees and flooded the city.

We know what happened, and to prevent it from happening again, I believe we need to do the engineering study, do the financial analysis, but repair the levees on the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain to a level that can protect Lake Pontchartrain itself from a category 5 hurricane so it cannot be breached, and to put hurricane gates in where necessary so we can close those in the event of a storm and keep the ocean water out of Lake Pontchartrain. That is step one.

Step two is if it gets in there or if there is a surge of the water in there, and I do not know if it is possible to have that kind of an effort under any kind of a storm, but if the water does get into Lake Pontchartrain, then we need to be prepared for the second level of protection.

That second level would be to build the levees between Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans to an elevation that will protect New Orleans from 25 feet above sea level from a category 5, and then to put hurricane gates in at the inlets of the canals, the 17th Street Canal being the most infamous of them all. That can be done and protected. We need to come out with a cost and engineering analysis of that and make a decision in this Congress.

I believe if that cost is anywhere near reasonable, we need to get that done before there is new construction going on down below sea level in New Orleans itself. So that is two systems that would protect New Orleans from a flood.

I point out there is a significant amount of construction done in the world below sea level. Holland is one of those examples. I am told a third of Holland is below sea level; and when I was told that, I said they have reclaimed another portion from the sea since when I went to school and a fourth of the nation was underwater. That is probably the case. They continually reclaim. They construct below sea level. I believe we can do that in the area of New Orleans. I have some more questions from the engineering perspective that I do not have the answers to, but protect the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain to keep the ocean water out and storm surge out, and keep the water in Lake Pontchartrain there by putting gates at the inlet of the canals, and perhaps raise the level of the hurricane levees on Lake Pontchartrain.

The third thing is the pump stations have to be raised up well above the high water mark of this flood, and they need to have redundancies built in so they can pump water if the power goes out. If the power goes out, they automatically kick on. And the water that is being pumped out of New Orleans now over the last week and a half or so, it is a massive quantity of water. It is 27,000 cubic feet per second, more than twice the amount of water that runs down the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa, in the area where I live.

Mr. Speaker, Florida has a lot of experience with reconstructing in preparation for category 5 hurricanes. They have perfected a lot of the method of how to prepare for a hurricane, how to evacuate, how to zone the houses and the buildings so they are prepared for that kind of wind and damage. Requiring shutters is one thing, and building off the ground is another. There are a number of ideas from an architectural standpoint. There is much that has already been established. We should look at that opportunity to take the language of those zoning restrictions that they have and the emergency response system that they developed in Florida and bring that into Louisiana, Mississippi and parts of Texas; but Louisiana needing the most help, it appears.

I think we can learn from our experience. We need to also be able to have a Federal requirement on the construction of the levee so if there is a levee that can be breached and put that much property in jeopardy, we need to have Federal oversight over that levee. There is much that can be done and should be done.

I will be involved in the effort to identify the mitigation work and looking at the cost and the engineering design and the recommendations. I would also point out that there will be a population loss in New Orleans. I do not know that number, no one knows that number, but perhaps a loss of a quarter of the population, perhaps more. If that is the case, the homes that will be condemned, many are still under water today, that will be the last place that needs to be reconstructed.

The reconstruction of the homes can go in the higher elevation areas where they do not have water. Those decisions need to be made so people can make plans for the future. That is part of this Congress' responsibility. Wherever there are Federal dollars, we have an obligation to the taxpayers that they are spent wisely.

There are private sector solutions to this, and we need to listen to our representatives from that area, those that are advocating for less pressure on taxpayers and more pressure on individuals, and the solutions of tax credits and I will say commerce-friendly zones, tax free zones, for example, lay all of those ideas out on the table.

The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jindal) both have been very active, along with the other Representatives from Louisiana. The gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. McCrery) has been very vocal here. I am looking forward to their input and working in cooperation with them so we put a solution together that will leave a legacy of making it better when things are bad in the event of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 42 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, October 3, 2005, at 4 p.m.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

My amendment would prohibit any person convicted of crimes of domestic violence as defined by the Violence Against Women Act from sponsoring the visa application of a foreigner.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I would say in response to that that we have real victims in the cemeteries in America because they have been allowed, already having committed the crime of violence against women, to sponsor another woman to come into the country even though they have been convicted of a crime of violence and then murdered a second woman. I can give you an anecdote here; but rather than belabor that point, I think the point of protecting people from violent criminals is more important than protecting the latitude of someone who might also be a domestic criminal and their latitude to sponsor someone. If that is the case, they can find someone else to sponsor them, not someone who has committed a domestic crime.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I seek to claim time in opposition to the motion.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, normally I would not come to the floor to oppose a bill naming a post office in someone else's district. I am confident I speak on behalf of some of the west coast Members of Congress, as well as the mainstream American values and certainly have no personal animosity towards the lady for whom this post office is named in this bill.

However, there is a plethora of information on the record that sets her apart from, I will say, the most consistent of American values. And rather than read those into the Record, Mr. Speaker, I just wish to voice my objection.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, just to make a couple of gentle points, the effort has been, at least on the record, as not, I do not want to say fighting against injustice, but a record of fighting against justice, particularly in the case of the effort to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. I think most of us know about that particular case. And I am concerned about a role model. I am concerned about young people a generation or two from now. When they go back by that post office in Berkeley and look at the name on the post office, they are going to ask what were the principles that brought this about? And I contend that those principles would be running contrary to American values.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to address my colleagues and the opportunity to raise some issues before the American people as we deliberate in this great body, the United States House of Representatives.

During the period of time that the House is not in session during August, commonly referred to as the August break, seldom is it a break for any of us, except that it changes our rhythm and we go do some other things. Generally, we do things to reach out and serve the people that we have the privilege and honor to represent.

This August was no exception. There were many Members who went out across the country and across the world and went on CODELs and traveled on their own accord and visited different places and brought back that breadth of knowledge. It occurred to me sometime in, I will say late May or early June, that it had been some time since I had been to the Middle East and been back to Iraq. I had been there twice in the past, but 12 months or more had gone by, and I had not been back there since.

As I listened to the mainstream media and began to get a picture of what was going on over in Iraq, it was a pessimistic one. As I talked to the troops who were coming back, particularly in Iowa, I got a different picture. As I listened to the briefings that came from the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Myers, I got a picture that was consistent with the picture of our military that was serving on the ground in Iraq and in Kuwait and in supporting roles around that theater.

Yet you can listen to all the information you want to listen to, you can read all the documents you like, you can read The New York Times and watch the mainstream television stations, and you can surf the Internet, but the perspective does not come until you go and put your own boots on the ground and look the soldiers in the eye that are serving there in that theater; those that have been there; those that have put their lives on the line; those who have risked their lives willingly in order to protect and preserve the freedoms that we have here and advance those freedoms to the people who live there.

So we began to organize a trip to go during the month of August over to Iraq. I wanted to go also to Afghanistan at the same time. I was not able to add Afghanistan to this trip because there was an election coming up which just took place over in Afghanistan, so they were not going to allow Members of Congress in there to make their situation, in preparing for those elections, more difficult.

But Iraq was still an open area that we could go into. As I looked at the map of Iraq and the places that I had been, and in talking to the Members of this Congress who have made, some of them, as many as four trips or more over into that region, there were some places that we did not have a lot of experience with, some places we had not looked at.

In fact, this Congress appropriated $18.4 billion for the reconstruction in Iraq that included roads, sewers, bridges, electrical generation and transmission, and the oil distribution system; to upgrade the ports and upgrade the schools and hospitals, the kinds of things that would put Iraq up into maybe the last quarter of the 20th century or, if all goes well, at some time they will be into the first quarter of the 21st century.

But, Mr. Speaker, in spite of all of the things that we have done over there, the disaster that Iraq has been from the perspective of allowing their infrastructure to erode over the last 35 years and a dictator that had his power as his God, and his people at his feet, a person who took his death and destruction to many wings of Iraq, and starved them and kept them from getting medicine and education and health care, and sometimes shut off their water, as he did in the southern part of Iraq.

But we invested in their infrastructure. The American people put $18.4 billion up front. And we said at the time it was about a $100 billion project to try to get Iraq up into the last quarter of the 20th century, a more modern world.

And if they cannot get their country more modernized, it is going to be significantly more difficult for them to be able to sustain the type of government that I pray will become a constitutional republic that represents the people in Iraq and the will of the people in Iraq.

And so the $18.4 billion was invested. And most of it was committed to projects, and we knew that in this Congress. And we committed to the support of that. But no one had really been over there to follow and track the projects. And in fact I was not aware of a single Member of Congress that had gone into Basra in the south, in the British region. So we put that on our schedule.

And the wetland area where the swamp Arabs lived, they were over 800,000 strong. And when Saddam was finished putting down their insurrection that began about in about 1991 or 1992, he had killed approximately 120,000 of them and run off maybe 450,000 and there remained maybe 200,000 of the 800,000 swamp Arabs that lived in an area that was a wetland twice the size of the Everglades, Saddam drained it, turned the water away from it, and forced many of them out and changed their life.

So we went to Basra and looked at that region in the south, and the oil region there. We went to the wetlands and flew over that in a British helicopter and looked at that, and we went up to Kirkuk in the north, another area that many Members had not seen.

And in that process we came back down through Baghdad, and we did meet with a significant number of people who had been involved in the reconstruction of Iraq. We saw project after project that was there. We saw places where the money went. And along with that on that trip myself, and also the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) who was on his fourth trip, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar) from Laredo, who was elected to this Congress and sworn in here in early January of this year, and did not take him very long, he has made his trip to Iraq to start things out, and I appreciate your company along on that trip. Also

the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent).

And the four of us were the compadres that visited that area. And we had an intense 5-day trip that compressed a lot of hours in Iraq and very quickly saw a lot of the country and met a lot of the people, including soldiers from our own districts in almost every stop, although there were a few Texans along almost everywhere we went.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent).

I thank the gentleman from Pennyslvania for his presentation as well as his participation. It was an honor for me to have the privilege to go there with my colleagues and an honor certainly to look our soldiers in the eye and the nonuniformed

people that are over there, especially the Americans but all of our coalition people that are sacrificing and committing to make that region a better place.

Before you step away from the podium, one thing I would like to comment upon and that is your second picture over there to the left that shows yourself and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar) meeting some of the Iraqi navy. As you said, it is an 800-man navy. We don't expect the Iraqis to have a Navy, but there is, and trained by the Royal Marines, as you said. What impressed me as we went down that line, they were all lined up in rank order. As I went down that path and shook each one of their hands, and maybe there were 20 to 25 of them altogether, every single one of them looked me in the eye and every single one of them had some word of English that they must have practiced all night long that they could greet me and thank us for being there. We truly have partners and they are part of the coalition. When we say coalition troops, we mean American troops, all the troops that are part of that, and we mean the Iraqis. That picture brings that memory back. It was, I think, an unusual and unique situation that had taken place over there with our delegation that probably had not been the case in any of the others that had traveled over there. I wanted to point that out while I had the opportunity and I appreciate the gentleman from Pennyslvania's presentation.

Also, you made remarks with regard to the fact that we ran into people from our prospective States. We sat down in the mess hall and broke bread with Pennsylvanians and with Texans and with Iowans and with many of the States in the union. We walked into a room one evening, though, and everybody in that room was from Texas except you and me. So the next time I climbed aboard a C-130 that was full of soldiers, I walked back over there and I hollered out, is there anybody here not from Texas? About half of them gleefully raised their hands.

You are well represented over there. I bring this up in a humorous way to recognize that. At this point I would like to recognize the gentleman from Laredo, Texas (Mr. Cuellar) who joined us on that trip.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar) willingness to join us in that travel across to that other side of the world, along with the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess) and those kind of trips build bonds that will help us reach across the aisle and work in a bipartisan fashion beyond this subject matter and into many others, I hope. That is one of the residual benefits of those long and grueling days over there. It did get a little warm I understood, 128-degrees, I know we saw that, and looking back on the pictures, did it get a little warmer than that?

Mr. Speaker, I have seen over there on different occasions when the temperature cooled off down to 106, I have seen the Marines go out at three o'clock in the afternoon and play basketball in 106 temperature because it has cooled off.

I got an e-mail from a lieutenant colonel that we met over there at Camp Arifjan, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Ace, and he happens to be an individual that helped set up a trip a year ago last 4th of July for my staff and their families to take a bus and go up to Gettysburg for the 4th of July with the Army historian, to travel throughout all Gettysburg and review that on the historical day with the Army historian.

Lieutenant Colonel Gary Ace, who was deployed to the Middle East and met us there at Camp Arifjan at really our first stop, it was quite ironic. He sent me an e-mail a couple of days ago that said it has cooled off down to about 110 or 112, and it seems ironic to say so, but it is a relief from the heat.

I would just like to go through a number of the things that I reflected upon as I listened to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar) speak on this issue and refer back to a colloquy, if I might.

You brought a number of things to mind that I would like to embellish a little bit. One of them has to do with the heat and the water, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania's (Mr. Dent) remarks in particular, when he said bone-dry ditches. Certainly they are there and the fighting positions that have been dug for the tanks and armor, we see that from the air, especially in the north around the Kirkuk region, where we were.

Yet, in the south, there are irrigation ditches down there that have been hand dug and have been maintained for centuries. The water stands near the top of the ditch because it is the water that comes down the Tigress and Euphrates and it fans out in that delta. It is not sand. It is soil. It should be productive soil, and I looked at that from the air I do not know how many times. We finally got down on the ground and got a chance to look, and I could never understand why you could not see anything growing next to those ditches full of water, in the summertime, from the air, nothing green to be seen from the air.

That is because nothing grows there in those particular regions. So my old farm boys unlocked the key to that inadvertently when they stuck a thermometer in the soil. We plant corn in the spring in Iowa after the frost goes out and soil temperature gets up to 54 degrees. The soil temperature there, about that far down in the soil, was 154 degrees, and I am sure the broccoli I had a couple of days ago had not reached that temperature when they served it to me in the restaurant.

So that is some sense of what kind of heat there is, that relentless sun, and how that builds up in the soil. It would sterilize most sees. So they have to have a different kind of agriculture than I am used to, but maybe in Laredo, they could figure that out.

The American-Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Dent) referenced that and I think both of my colleagues did. It was an interesting surprise to me. It never occurred to me that there was a chamber of commerce in Iraq, and yet to find out that the Americans that were there teamed up with the Iraqis that are there, and they are seeking to build a free enterprise, retail organization that can help develop the kind of commerce that they need to grow that city and grow every city in that country.

To walk in there and have them ask, well, we would like to have you give a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce, now there is an ironic twist of fate in this life that this fellow from the cornfield never anticipated.

I looked around, and went, well, where is my interpreter; I guess I will be willing to do that. They said you do not need an interpreter, sir; they speak English here in Baghdad. So they set the microphone up and gave an introduction, and we all came and sat at the table, and my colleagues actually mixed around with them at their tables and gathered together afterwards. I gave a little speech there in English.

I could tell they understood me. They responded, smiled and laughed and clapped and frowned all at the right times. It occurred to me that if they could pull that off in Baghdad, we can pull that off in the United States of America, that English speech to the Chamber of Commerce in many of our major cities, but just a little bit of life's irony there.

They were open, they were welcome and curious. When that was over, all of us had a cluster of Iraqi Chamber of Commerce members around us with their business cards. They want to do business and trade cards and do commerce, and they are eager. In fact, we were in the Al Rasheed hotel. That was in the green zone, but that is the hotel that Deputy Security Wolfowitz was in when it was rocketed a year or more or so ago. That is one of those little ironies.

The other one that the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar) mentioned, the odd request, and I was very curious about the judicial branch of the Iraqi government. I had, I will say, a friend and colleague from Iowa, the U.S. Attorney, Charles Larson, Senior, who served over there for more than a year, and I believe it was 15 to 16 months, trying to get the Iraqi judicial branch up to speed and trying to teach them what we know from our rule of law in the United States. He served over there intently and in a very dedicated way, along with his son, Major Chuck Larson, Junior, who served as a Army Reservist in the same area.

I have seen pictures of them together, and Chuck Larson, Senior, the U.S. Attorney, brought me back, an Iraqi flag, that flew over Baghdad the day of their first election they had when we saw those fingers dipped in purple. These gentlemen convinced me that we should take a look at the judicial branch of government in Iraq. That is what precipitated the request.

We wanted to go over to the courtroom. I wanted to sit in the courtroom where Saddam would be tried for his crimes. I sat in two of his thrones, and that was kind of good, kind of fitting, but I really wanted to go sit in the chair where he was going to be, really sit in the witness chair where people would testify against him. Because of security reasons we could not go out of the zone, across the street and into that building. So they brought the three judges to us.

We sat down and talked with them, and these people, they risk their lives. They are dedicated to the rule of law. They want the politicians out of that decision-making process. They do not want them leveraging the rule of law decision.

I am going to shift into my interpretation of what I heard that day, and I am not going to represent it as being a verbatim transcript of what came out of their mouths but how I sort it

through because we're working through interpreters, but it works like. I was curious. I wanted to know was Saddam Hussein up for the death penalty. Could they sustain the death penalty? Was there law in Iraq in the face of the changing situation of the Constitution and the ratification that is pending for October 15, when he is queued up to go on trial October 19.

I asked the question directly: Will Saddam face the death penalty? The answer was, well, Mr. Congressman, we could not be commenting on a case that could come before this court. It sounded like an American judge, and it was the right answer.

Then I had to ask this long, convoluted, hypothetical question, and when I got all the way around the Horn, it might have been a double figure eight before I got back with my hypothetical, and then the answer was, if someone who might not be related to this case, that could have committed a crime similar to the one you have described that was similar to the one we may think Saddam has committed, could be up against a charge that would start the way they do in the United States with death first and then life in prison and then the penalty goes on down from there.

One of the other judges was eagerly shaking his pencil. He wanted the floor, and as I understood this and interpreted this, it was the paragraph that applied in that case to the crimes that I had described only provided for one penalty and that was the ultimate penalty. At that point, I volunteered if they could not find someone in Iraq to carry that out, I would be willing to do so provided he had been faced with the rule of law and had a just trial.

So I look forward eagerly for that trial to ensue, but it was an interesting and a unique experience to have that. It presented us also with a very neat, octagonal box of dates, that high class, and that is one of the things that Iraq does export. They export some oil, and they export quite a lot of dates, and those are about the only two products that leave that country to bring cash flow back in.

The areas around Basra have a tremendous amount of oil reserves yet, and the wells, the pipelines, the distribution system, the refineries are not in the most modern of conditions. They need capital investment from outside, and it needs to be upgraded into the modern and efficient world. That is a factor of the depreciation that comes from the years of neglect, in addition to some of the sabotage that has taken place, but the years of neglect would debilitate that system anyway. All that oil that they have is not coming to market as quickly as it should, Mr. Speaker.

Then we went up to the Kirkuk area, and I think we pointed this out in the helicopter, but we did not have very good audio there. There were areas where there was pooled oil that was not oil spilled. It was oil that had seeped to the top of the ground. There was that much concentration up there.

I am told that the oil reserves down south by Basra are larger and greater than those up by Kirkuk, but there is where I saw the oil that had seeped to the top of the ground. There is where I saw the most need, I think, for new drilling, new pipelines, new distribution systems, new refineries, and up there is where they had nine pipelines that crossed the Tigress River on a bridge.

During the operations in March of 2003, our air force went in and appropriately cut off that transportation route by blowing the bridge. When they did, nine pipelines, of course, were severed at the same time. They have all been reconnected, except for a 40-inch line that each time that they tried to lay that across the river, it would get sabotaged.

So they awarded a contract to lay it under the river, a 40-inch pipeline, 40 inches in diameter, so 3 feet and 4 inches in diameter. They have been trying to bore underneath there. Now, they are going to put it underneath in an open cut. I guess that is the kind of thing that I am interested in in my business, but to lay that pipeline 25 feet under the bed of the Tigress River, a 40-inch line, so that if the insurgents, or enemy, seeks to come along and detonate that, I suspect they will not have the ability to get down there 25 feet below the bottom of the Tigress River to blow up that 40-inch line. When it is running, it will help the cash flow of Iraq.

Speaking of that cash flow, the things that are missing, one thing that is missing from this discussion tonight. We have not talked about tactics, military security. We have referenced the bravery of our troops, the dedication, the sacrifice of our troops but not the tactics because, and I will just say this, is that as we looked at the condition of security in the country, as we listen to our military, our officers and our regular soldiers that come from our regions, that look us in the eye and speak with our accent and we know they tell us the truth, were not concerned about whether we could hang on to that country from a military tactical standpoint. It was never raised as an issue. They are doing their job, and they know they are doing the best they can with the security, and they feel in control of the situation.

It also was the case with the generals that briefed us, including General Dutton of the British, who said I can think of no alternative but optimism, and what would you do if you were not optimistic, if you did not think there was a positive solution, then what would your alternative be? Of course, there is no rational answer to that. He is right in kind of a clear, succinct, British way.

General Casey and General Abizaid briefed us. He said the enemy cannot win, if the politicians stay in the fight, and we had a discussion on the way back. The question was, did he mean American politicians or did he mean Iraqi politicians. We were kind of split down the line on that. It was a really good, healthy discussion, and I have just come to the point that I do not want to resolve that question. I want that to stand out there that he meant both. The Iraqi politicians and the American politicians must stay in the fight.

If we do that, if we send a consistent, solid message that we stick with this till the end, that America stands with the Iraqis until the Iraqis stand on their own, and by the way, they also advised us that a base would be turned over to the Iraqis for their control, and that has happened, and it has happened more than once since we have been back. I saw the clip a couple of days ago. Several bases now are Iraqi-run bases that we have.

Americans are stepping back. Iraqis are stepping forward. When it was America leading operations, the combat operations, it was Americans with Iraqis trying to lead them into combat in the early stages.

Now it is the Iraqis leading with American support, and sometimes it is Iraqis only. And you will see they have not cracked. They have not run. They have held together.

Far different than that first operation of sending Iraqis in April of 2004 into Fallujah. Those Iraqis were undertrained and underequipped, and we sent those Iraqis in there with berets and pistols on their belts and no radios and no armor, to fight alongside Marines that were trained and equipped and had communications. We should not have been surprised if they did not stand and fight. They were not ready. But they are getting ready.

It is not easy to establish a military tradition. I believe, though, that that security is coming. And when General Casey says that the enemy cannot win if the politicians stay in the fight, that means he has confidence in the security situation and the military situation that is there. I do too. I believe that in the history of this country, and probably in the history of the world, there has never been a nation go to war with a higher class of people that are in uniform on the ground in Iraq and in Afghanistan today.

And I say that for a number of reasons. One of them is that it is an all-volunteer military force. I do not know if we have ever done that before to this scale and for this duration to this scale. And we also have so many National Guard and so many reservists that add to our Active-Duty personnel that are extraordinarily professional. And these Guard and reservists have other professions that they bring in that add to the level of technical abilities, training and professionalism in a technical age, when if it goes beyond picking up an M-16 and putting on a

pair of boots, these guys are professionals in a lot of ways and are specialists in a lot of ways. And I think it is the best quality that has ever gone to the war. And every time I look them in the eye, they convince me of that. And certainly they did over there.

Mr. Speaker, I have a lot more to say about this, and I will probably take a shot at it, but I want to take a moment to bounce this back over to my colleagues, who certainly have their minds on what we are talking about here, and surely there is a gap or two that my colleague from Pennsylvania may want to fill, and so I yield to him.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comments. And in the short time we have left, Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cuellar).

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues. I appreciate their willingness to do this travel, along with my other colleague, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Burgess). I said when we got off that plane that I would go make that trip all over again with you, and I mean that sincerely. It is not always the case.

There are a couple of things that need to be fixed over there, and one of them is the constitution. Get it ratified, have the legitimate election, get the sovereignty established with legitimacy in Iraq so that they can sign contracts, and get that oil developed with foreign capital so that that capital can grow and flow and they can do business across the world. When that happens, the enemy will have to give up and recognize that they have lost.

While that is going on, the Iraqis are taking care of their own security. There is light at the end of this tunnel. There is a bright spot. And the least concern we have is whether our military is doing their job. They are doing their job. And now free enterprise needs to take hold to lift that burden off our military.

So I appreciate my colleagues' involvement here, and my hat's off to the United States military and their efforts over there and all around the world.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 26 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, September 22, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) for yielding to me. It is an honor for me to join him here on the floor again tonight. The last time, as I recall, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks), the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter), and also the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) and I were here together to celebrate the life of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. That was a somber moment, a moment of reverence and respect and reminiscing; but also, we came away from that evening and we came away from that week with a sense of the legacy that was left by the years on the bench by Chief Justice Rehnquist.

And tonight we are actually looking ahead now, looking ahead to the future of this country, the future of this Constitution, this one that they have checked to see if I would have it in my pocket. And, of course, it is there. That rumor has started around this Congress. Now I do not dare be without it. But I have carried it in my pocket for years, and it is not the freshest one. The old one that I had I autographed and handed over to the chief justice of the supreme court of the People's Republic of China as he visited here. I thought he should have a copy of the United States Constitution.

It is clear to me that already soon-to-be-Chief Justice Roberts is very familiar with this Constitution document and very reverent and very respectful.

A number of things in the conversation, particularly the gentleman from Texas's (Mr. Carter) remarks reminiscing the press accounts and the critics of Judge Roberts, that he is hostile to Roe v. Wade or hostile to this or hostile to that. And as I look across that list that was presented, it occurs to me that he is hostile to one thing that I think we can agree on: he is hostile to enemies of the Constitution. I am grateful for that hostility. It might be the only sign in the gentleman's character that one can see that is of a hostility.

And I want to tell my colleagues that my background and history with him is not extensive, but I did have the privilege to have breakfast with Judge Roberts a couple months before he was nominated by the President. There was a group of about six or eight of us at the table, and certainly it was a larger room. I had a conversation with him that was not a continuous type of conversation where I could probe into his constitutional thoughts so much as it was to judge his reactions and judge by his remarks.

I would say that, of course, what I saw there was the man that we have seen day after day here before the Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings. The man that I think in the private life of John Roberts is the same person that we see in the public life of John Roberts. The people whom he surrounds himself with, the people who count themselves as his friends, the people who know him far better than I do I am impressed by, and I know them far better than I know John Roberts. But one can be judged by the company they keep, and the company that he has kept has been stellar company throughout.

I do not think that one could write for a blueprint for a life that would better describe a path to the Supreme Court and, in fact, to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court than the life so far, the bio, resume of John Roberts. It is exemplary. I know that when they did the background check, or I am told this through the media, that there was not a single thing, it was the cleanest background check one could have asked for. Of course, I expected that, but I wanted to put that into the record as well.

There would not have been a nomination if there had been a problem; but it was one of the more stellar background checks, I understand, that has been run. And that is through the grapevine. Nothing that has been public that I know of.

I want to tell the Members that Judge Roberts has this reverence for the Constitution, and I have put together some of the quotes that have come out of the confirmation hearings over in the Senate, and some of these quotes fall into different categories, but one is under strict construction of the Constitution. Judge Roberts confirmed my initial beliefs that he would uphold the true intent of our Founding Fathers by strictly construing our Constitution. And over and over in his testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, he verified that he is a strict constructionist and that he believes judicial activism is dangerous to our system of government.

He summed it up in one line, the duty of all of us in the Federal Government, when he stated: ``My obligation is to the Constitution. That's the oath.''

I would like those words to echo again: ``My obligation is to the Constitution. That's the oath.''

If that happened to be the conviction of everyone in a black robe, we would have a lot easier task on the Committee on the Judiciary in the House of Representatives and on the Committee on the Judiciary in the United States Senate, for that matter.

His qualifications for the position of Chief Justice are, I think, clear. And the President has been impressed with not just his clarity of thought, not just with his brilliance of his legal reasoning but also with his personality, his character, his leadership abilities.

He explained his support for strict construction of the Constitution, and this would also be part of the record, when he said in the hearings, ``Judges are not to put in their own personal views about what the Constitution should say, but they are supposed to interpret it and apply the meaning that is in the Constitution . . . and the job of a good judge is to do as good a job as possible to get the right answer.'' And over and over again, this kind of philosophy comes through, not an activist philosophy but a strict constructionist philosophy.

The same day he further described a judge's proper role, and he explained: ``We don't turn a matter over to a judge because we want his view about what the best idea is, what the best solution is. It's because we want him or her to apply the law.''

``We turn a matter over to a judge because we want him or her to apply the law.'' Not to apply their judgment, not to apply their whim, not to apply what they think the policy should be. That is the job of the legislative branch. And that is consistent with the vision of our Founders, and it absolutely consistent with the language and the text of the Constitution, and it certainly is not something that we see within the

activist judges that sometimes come before our courts and make those kinds of decisions, particularly the ninth circuit out there. And I know the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks) referenced that, and I appreciate his bringing that subject up before the Speaker and before this country.

And Judge Roberts went on when he said, ``It is because we want him or her to apply the law.'' I will continue that quote: ``They are constrained when they do that. They are constrained by the words that you choose to enact into law,'' meaning the Senate or the Congress, ``in interpreting the law. They are constrained by the words of the Constitution. They are constrained by the precedents of other judges that become part of the rule of law that they must apply.''

Constrained, constrained, constrained, constrained. Four times in that paragraph he used the word ``constrained.'' I think that is indicative of the kind of judge we are going to see, a judge that exercises constraint, and a constraint that is bound up within the words of the Constitution, within the text of the Constitution, within the clear meaning and the defined boundaries of the Constitution, and the rule of law, and constraint within the boundaries of being a member of the judicial branch of government whose job it is to, as he said, call the balls and the strikes.

I want to express some gratitude to Phyllis Schlafly for bringing that idea before this country and, in her book ``The Supremacist'' when she said that a judge's job is to be the umpire, to interpret the rule book. And now this man in his hearings picked up one more notch on that philosophy and said, my job is to call the balls and the strikes. Who would want to play a game before an umpire that did anything else? Who would want to play a game before an umpire that called the balls and the strikes as he wished them to be rather than what they actually were? That is what the judge's job is, and it is a very, very clear way to describe that.

Mr. Speaker, John Roberts will not be a justice who seeks to usurp the roles of the other two branches. On the first day of his hearings he stated, ``I prefer to be known as a modest judge. That means an appreciation that the role of the judge is limited, that judges are to decide the cases before them,'' and I continue to quote, ``they are not to legislate, they are not to execute the laws.''

They are not to legislate, they are not to execute the laws.

He also explained that, ``Judges have to decide hard questions when they come up in the context of a particular case. That's their obligation. But they have to decide those questions according to the rule of law; not their own social preferences, not their policy reviews, not their personal references, but according to the rule of law. According to the rule of law.''

Now, I never dreamed as a young man, and I began in about eighth grade to study this Constitution and read this document and understand and really get some depth and appreciation for our history; I never thought I would be standing on the floor of the United States Congress celebrating an appointee to the Supreme Court because they want to rule according to the rule of law. I believed that every judge that ever put on a black robe would rule according to the rule of law. And here we have come to this point where activist judges cause me to come to celebrate because we have one before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary for a confirmation.

On the second day of the testimony, Judge Roberts said to his colleagues, ``Judges need to appreciate that the legitimacy of their action is confined to interpreting the law and not making it, and if they exceed that function and start making the law, I do think that raises legitimate concerns about the legitimacy of their authority to do that.'' Another challenge, another constraint.

I could stand here and repeat Judge Roberts' testimony all night, Mr. Speaker; showcasing what a great candidate he is for this position would be something that I would continue on with. But when asked about his threats to the rule of law, he stated, ``The one threat, I think, to the rule of law is a tendency on behalf of some judges to take that legitimacy and that authority and extend it into areas where they are going beyond the interpretation of the Constitution, where they're making the law. And because it's the Supreme Court, people are going to follow it, even though they're making the law.''

That is chilling to those of us who revere this Constitution, but we do revere the Supreme Court. And because it is the Supreme Court, in his testimony, ``people are going to follow it,'' even though they are making the law. Now, I will expand that and say, even though they are not following the law, even though they are not following the Constitution, people will respect and revere the decisions of the Supreme Court, because of the stature of the Court, without regard to the text and the intent of the Constitution or the law itself. That is my edit.

Then I will pick up that quote again. He follows that with, ``The judges have to recognize that their role is a limited one. That is the basis of their legitimacy. Judges have to have the courage to make the unpopular decisions when they have to. That sometimes involves striking down acts of Congress. That sometimes involves ruling that acts of the executive are unconstitutional. That is a requirement of the judicial oath. You have to have that courage.''

And I continue to quote: ``But you also have to have the self- restraint to recognize that your role is limited to interpreting the law and doesn't include making the law.'' And doesn't include making the law. I repeat that for effect because it has significant effect on me, Mr. Speaker.

This man, who is poised to step forward and don the robes of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is a young man with a clear legal mind, a solid moral set of values, a clear understanding of his duty before the Court, a constitutional understanding, a rule of law understanding, and a duty to history. The years that I have left on this earth may not be as many as I pray he has, but every year that this unfolds and every year that these cases come before the Court, I pray that the President can appoint some justices to this court that will match the vision and the clarity and the legal understanding of this man, John Roberts, so that one day we can work ourselves back to this Constitution, this Constitution that he reveres, that we revere.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back to the gentleman from Arizona, and I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I want to express my gratitude for you setting up this hour and providing an opportunity for myself to speak. And as I stand here as a nonlawyer and reflect upon the future and upon this Constitution, I think there is something that young people lose sight of. And I gave a guest lecture at Central College in Pella a week ago last Friday, so that has been about, what, 9 days ago or so. And in that guest lecture, it was on the Constitution, and it lasted maybe an hour and 40 minutes or so. And it was interesting to me that one of the professors there came up afterwards and he said, you have made the Constitution interesting. I had not seen that before.

It never occurred to me that the Constitution was anything but interesting. It is a fascinating document. And if you know the history of it, there is a piece of it that we seldom talk about here, we often forget, and that is this guarantee, this guarantee of our freedoms and our liberties in this foundational document that is drawn upon the Declaration of Independence, and that our rights come from God, clearly in the Declaration, and we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among them are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. But those rights are even more clearly defined in the Constitution, the rights that come from God. No man can take them away, because they come from God. And the Constitution defines that.

But as we watch this Constitution get amended with decision after decision by an activist Court, we see these rights be diminished by decisions of the Court.

And so I will take us to this question, which is: The Constitution either means what it says or it does not. If it means what it says, then we are constrained by the language, and we are further constrained by the language that was the intent of the original meeting, because the founders cannot be held responsible for an evolving language or evolving values system, or any idea that it should be read in light of contemporary values.

People try to do that with the Bible and they get off base. Truth, justice, sin, virtue have always been the same. They have been the same 1,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, and they will be the same 4,000 years from now.

But the Constitution is our guarantee. And when we deviate from that language, that strict construction, that originalist, the understanding of the guarantee that the States have all opted into voluntarily, an irrevocable bond that was established at the end of the Civil War, and we understand that guarantee must be maintained through the constraint of the judicial branch, not the activism of the judicial branch, because an active judicial branch of government undermines our Constitution, erodes our rights.

If that is the case, then what value has that document whatsoever, if you are going to let the majority of nine justices determine the future of America? We have stepped back from that now with this appointment. We need at least two more to get there. It is a long evolutionary process to see this Constitution reestablished by the Court.

We did not get here overnight. We got here over 40 years or longer. It will take at least that long to get back again. But I look for that day.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to say a few words tonight, and I appreciate the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) for being here and his consistent approach to good government and good policy. I also understand that the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has been down to the hurricane-ravaged region to see what is going on down there.

I wanted to take an opportunity to say some words about Hurricane Katrina, about the disaster itself, how it came to that point, what has happened to get us to this point, and what we need to do to get ahead in America and rebuild and reconstruct the ravaged region of the gulf coast.

As I speak, we have another hurricane that is swelling up to a category 4 hurricane. Who knows where it is going to make landfall, or if it will make landfall. If it takes a turn in the wrong direction, it could get the very location that is still underwater from Hurricane Katrina.

I take us back to those days prior to Hurricane Katrina striking that region. I know back as early as 2002 there were significant documents published in the local paper that illustrated the structure of the dikes, the levee system, the protection from hurricanes and flooding that existed around the New Orleans area.

For years they had been building miles and miles of levees and dikes. The original concept of the city, as the city got established and grew, like most cities, it was not the most scientifically identified location, but it was a location good for commerce. If you can pick a good location for commerce, then you will find out that the value of that commerce flowing into that city would be great enough to justify the construction of the infrastructure that was required to, at least within the vision of the people making the decisions and paying the taxes and appropriating the funds at that time, to protect the city with at least minimal advocacy.

As the years went by, New Orleans grew. It began to settle below sea level. And as the Mississippi River would rise and bring its periodic floods, as I have seen in Iowa, and I have worked in the floods of 1993, that water made its way down there and flooded that region too. They built protection, and each device was designed to protect the last flood, and seldom do we design to protect against the next flood.

I do not take issue with the design of the Corps of Engineers, but New Orleans was a city that was growing. And as it grew, the land settled. As it settled, the levees were constructed and the protection was established; but it was more designed for something we had experienced in the past rather than something we might anticipate in the future.

But it was not without anticipation. In fact, the newspaper articles in the New Orleans Times Picayune had laid out, I believe, five different editions of that newspaper that all dealt with the structure of the levee system, the protection of the levee system, and what would happen in the event of certain weather circumstances, particularly hurricanes. Each of those editions had five or six articles that laid out certain segments.

As I sat through the night reading through those, it struck me this was a concise presentation of the circumstances. If one wants to go and visit and understand what happened around New Orleans, I highly recommend that they revisit those pages on the Web site of the New Orleans Time Picayune newspaper. I believe it was 2002, although the articles do not have a date I can find.

What I saw was a Mississippi River leveed off from the city of New Orleans. The levees are 25 feet above sea level. They protect the flooding of the Mississippi River. It gets over 25 feet over sea level, it would spill out over the levees. And as far as I know, it has not done that, at least not from the river itself.

There were also levees designed to protect the city from the surge from the gulf. It is unclear to me the elevations of those levees. Some of them were not as high as the 25 feet above sea level that is the level around the Mississippi River. There are also levees operated by the levee district and in conjunction with the Corps of Engineers. As I picked out of that article, there is cost sharing. First of all, the Corps of Engineers constructs, operates, and maintain the levees on the Mississippi River. The other levees, particularly the levees that are the boundaries of Lake Pontchartrain that keep Lake Pontchartrain from surging into New Orleans, those levees are managed and constructed in conjunction with the Corps of Engineers. And then there are lateral levees that run along some of the canals that are constructed and maintained by the levee district themselves, according to the published documents.

As I look at those elevations, the river elevations, Corps of Engineers, 25 feet above sea level. The hurricane levees around Lake Pontchartrain, approximately 17.5 feet above sea level. The elevations along the 17th Street Canal, there was one elevation that was 4.5 feet above sea level. That canal needed floodgates at the inlet of Lake Pontchartrain to protect the surge from spilling out and breaching the levee on the 17th Street Canal. The other two canals fell in the same category.

But as it laid out this system, the system of levees designed to protect a city that is settling and a city that had as much as 16 feet of water in the city, the idea was, of course, to plan for an expected or an historical event. But one article in there laid out the scenario that was called worst case scenario; and worst case scenario was if a category 4 or category 5 hurricane came into New Orleans from the south and sat with its center near the center of the city of New Orleans, or perhaps a little to the left or west where the counterclockwise winds of the hurricane would drive the ocean water up into Lake Pontchartrain, and there would be a surge of water that actually lifts water up out of the ocean above sea level, as that water comes up it raises an elevation. Water has a tendency to flow downhill. That is one thing I can say professionally: Water runs downhill. The south wind would push that water that was elevated up into Lake Pontchartrain and raise that lake up, a lake that might have a depth between 8 and 20 feet deep, approximately 16 to 17 feet average depth, but half again more water, 8 to 10 feet more water pushed into Lake Pontchartrain. And as the south wind drove that water to the north, and it is a huge lake, that lake had half again more water.

As the hurricane shifted further to the right or to the east, that moved the eye to the east of New Orleans and to the east of Lake Pontchartrain. When that happened, the wind turned around to the north. When it turned to the north, it began to drive that water that was stacked up in Lake Pontchartrain, drive it back to the south. And when it did that, there was a 10- or 12-foot or greater wall of water because there was that much water in the lake, it was 155-mile-an-hour winds driving that water, pushing that surge over the levees, over where the floodgates needed to be and the inlets to the canal levee system.

Mr. Speaker, that was the worst case scenario, and that was the scenario that was laid out in the newspaper in 2002. It was the scenario that hit with Hurricane Katrina when Lake Pontchartrain spilled over the levees. Once it breaches a levee and the water starts to flow, the velocity of the water erodes the soil out and creates wide gaps in the levees and lets more and more water come faster and faster, and New Orleans began to fill up. We saw the low parts of New Orleans on our television screens, and I saw them from the air a week ago last Sunday. That was the worst case scenario that hit.

I pose one more thing into this question. There were a couple of other things with regard to how people responded, and perhaps we will get to that, but the scenario was this. By my information and I have not checked the actual river flows, but by my information, the Mississippi River was running at one of its lowest levels. It was at least a seasonal low, if not an historical low. As I flew down from New Orleans to the gulf, south about 90 miles of

channel to get to the Gulf of Mexico, and looked at the devastated communities down there, the 25-foot levees down below were breached. I would say they were topped. The river levees were topped by water that surged over the top, which said that this low-flow Mississippi River saw such a surge from the ocean that it came up and went over the top of the 25-foot levees, 25 feet above sea level, surged over the top of those levees and flooded the bottom ground between the gulf levee and the Mississippi River levee and washed out anyone that lived in that half-mile stretch that lives in between the two levees, all of the way from New Orleans down to the Gulf of Mexico.

That surge in that river, that surged all of the way up into New Orleans and put pressure on the entire system, I wonder what it would have been like if the Mississippi River had been running at a high flow as opposed to a low flow. It would have been worse yet if that had been the case.

I looked at what caused that disaster and how it came about and how it was predictable, it was predicted, and what we might have done and what we might well do. That will be something that I will commit a lot of my energy to in the upcoming months, to have some oversight on the planning process, since it is my background and my life's work and my history of having been flooded. I had four large construction contracts going on in 1993 in Iowa, and had them all underwater intermittently throughout that spring and early summer, and, by the 9th of July, having them all underwater with some of my equipment as well. That helps me empathize with the victims of this flood. My house did not wash away, my business nearly washed away. That season was washed away, and it put all of us through a lot of work and stress and economic hardship that I think served me well to have been tested in that fashion. Hopefully I will be able to use and draw on that experience as we reach out a helping hand to the people on the gulf coast.

As far as that background and that history subsequent to the floods of 1993, we did flood mitigation work and worked in conjunction with the victim communities throughout the region in Iowa all through the balance of the decade. We were not able to do any flood mitigation in 1993 because we were one of the companies that was underwater; but by 1994 we had pulled ourselves up out of the water and we had gotten our contracts finished and we reached out and we did flood work.

We have done work on all of the reservoirs in Iowa on the Missouri River and Mississippi River. So we have extensive experience in that kind of work and elevations and drainage and hydrology and water flows and elevations and the impact of the velocity.

So these are things that I will pay close attention to as we move forward with putting a plan together for a solution for New Orleans and the region in the gulf coast.

The gentleman that is here tonight that spoke briefly with a 1-minute speech is the gentleman from Georgia. And this gentleman is a doctor from Georgia, a colleague of mine, a classmate of mine, elected to come in for the 108th Congress together. A gentleman who has given a lot of his life for the betterment of this country, including who-knows-how- many babies delivered, how many passionate speeches on the floor based on that experience, and the times that he has taken his profession to support his work here in Congress but also the times he steps away from his work in Congress to lend a healing hand to people who need that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) for his presentation tonight and also for his service and for getting in there as he did early and seeing the situation there and reaching out a helping hand. I know that his experience there and the perspective that he picked up down in that region will serve him well as this Congress makes decisions on the taxpayers' dollars and, when we appropriate those dollars, when we direct those dollars, that they go to the most good and to the greatest use that they possibly can.

I also want to point out that many of us in this Congress recognize that there needs to be a private sector solution to this, that we need to help those people that need and deserve the help, but at the same time the government cannot be the solution to everything, that the human spirit will win out with all. And as the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) said, the spirit of the people down there showed very much the positive sides of this.

I saw some things too that strike me in a way as a sense of humor that helps people adjust to the disaster. Having been through some disaster myself, I understand that psychology that one cannot just wallow in feeling sorry for oneself. The poor me's do not clean up anything. And after a couple of weeks of people coming up and saying, I am sorry, I am sorry, one gets to the point of saying all right, but now I want to go to work and it is time to start cleaning up the mess and putting this thing back together.

One of the things that I saw was in a sporting goods store that was boarded up with plyboard in Slidell, Louisiana. It had a series of windows there with about a four by eight sheet of plywood over every one of them. And as I looked at that, the one on the left said in big red letters, ``Looters will be shot.'' And the next window to the right said, ``Survivors will be shot again,'' and there were three more windows with plywood on them painted on in big red letters, ``And again and again and again.''

And I walked in there to talk to that gentleman, and he had not had a problem with looters. His sporting goods store was full of inventory, and he was open for business that day, and he was selling product over the counter. I did not notice that there were any lights on in there. I suspect there was not any electricity, but he was doing business, and he had protected his place. I think the signs on the windows had to help, and it also helped him send a message to the people that were looting and shooting in the city off to their south and west, and that would have been the city of New Orleans. I believe Slidell was pretty close to the center of the worst of it. Although a fair amount of the town seemed to remain intact, once we got out into the countryside, there was not much left in a lot of those regions to the south and somewhat to the west of there.

As the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) has spoken about taking a ride back to Georgia with some of the evacuees and reaching out a hand to help, I wanted to point out, Mr. Speaker, the effort that we have done within the district that I represent, roughly the western third of Iowa. There are 32 counties there, and they range all the way from Minnesota down to Missouri. And we looked on television as we saw the tens of thousands of evacuees that were trapped temporarily in New Orleans that were being evacuated out. They were going to the Astrodome. They were going to the River Center, as the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) mentioned, in Baton Rouge, and around that region in the country. There were cities that more than doubled in their population in a matter of a few days.

And we watched that unfold, and we saw that tens of thousands had been taken to the Astrodome in Houston and received their cot, and the cots were lined up side by side with barely enough room to walk in between them, where people's new home was a small bag of some possessions that sat underneath their own personal cot, which was laying out there in the middle of everywhere with hundreds and hundreds of people all in one room sleeping together and set up with food lines and passed drinks and receiving medical care and doing all we could do at the time.

But they needed to be relocated some place more permanent, some place that they could call home.

I know that there were some States that set up cots within their city centers and some of those were used and they needed them. But we looked at it from a different perspective, where I am from, and we looked around and asked the question, how could we best serve some people? How could we best reach out to people in need?

We came up with the idea that I call the ``package deal.'' We sent a message out to each of the county seat mayors in the 32 counties, asked them to hold a meeting and ask to come to that meeting their emergency manager in the county, several of their top employers, their pastors, the school administrator, and any other volunteers and groups that would like to, especially the service clubs that are very effective in our region, such as the Rotary and Kiwanis and the Optimists and the Lions who all have a significant role to supplement the work of the churches.

We asked them to identify the package deal, as I referenced, and that is, with this vision in mind that we could invite people into our communities and save family units. So that when the plane landed or the bus pulled in, the mayor would be standing there to greet the family or families, and alongside them would be the pastor of their choice, if they had a choice, and next to the pastor would be the sponsoring family that would be sponsoring the newly-arriving family or the sponsors of the families, and perhaps a school administrator there.

But the essential core would be the mayor for the ceremonial duties, so to speak, and the formal welcome; the pastor for the spiritual support which we know that everyone needs; and the sponsoring family would help the new family get acquainted and be absorbed into the community, so that they would know when they set foot on the ground that they could lay their head

on a pillow that night that would be theirs and a home that they could call home, at least for a while, and a refrigerator that had food in it, and that the kids could go to school the next day.

As we put that package together and the inventory came together, we have since identified perhaps two dozen households and sponsoring families of the package deal, and I would think there are that many again in Iowa that are almost ready to say, yes, we will be happy to sponsor a family.

So we are moving forward with that process. We have some families who are placed in the region. Most of that comes from family connections or church connections, and we are reaching out to expand them. It is important for us to do all we can to donate money, commit our time, and it is also important for us to identify the resources in our communities and be able to offer a package deal where a family needs a new community and a new home to adopt them, either temporarily or, if they choose, permanently. All we ask from them is be a good citizen and you can stay here as long as you want or need to, and we are going to help you find a job. Part of the job prospects was part of the offer that we put together.

As one of my district people who will be heading this up had to say, whether or not we get a long line-up of people that are willing to come and accept this offer and take a trip to get relocated in our part of the State, as long as we offer them an option, it gives them at least some power. People that do not have options do not have hope, people who have been loaded onto planes and flown across this country and landed into cities in different States and when they got on the plane, they did not know where they were going, and I am told that sometimes they did not actually know where they were when they arrived. They found out soon enough. Mostly, though, I can confirm that in the heat of the evacuation attempt, which was a successful effort, it was not practical to be negotiating with people that were under stress on where they would go. It was just important to find a place for them to go, and the rest could be sorted out later.

So even though it sounds a little bit inhuman to load people on airplanes and fly them places, by the same token, when you go into a situation where you have that many tens of thousands of people in one place, and if you begin to negotiate and you say, here is the offer, I want to fly you off to Minneapolis, for example, somebody is going to hold out for Las Vegas or Des Moines, or wherever it might be, and then you end up with a chaotic situation when you have to act, act fast, load the plane, get going so that plane can get out of the way for another one to land and get turned around.

So I visited the area, and I left Ames, Iowa in a small plane at about 6:15 in the evening on Saturday, it was September 10, and flew down there and landed at Little Rock that night, pretty late, and left Little Rock early in the morning at 5:15, in keeping with the flight plan that we had filed. We flew on in to Louis Armstrong International Airport and landed there about 7:26 a.m., Sunday morning, September 11. Somehow, it seemed that we had not come all that far in 4 years when I got a look at New Orleans, but certainly that thought came to mind, that reverent day to commemorate September 11, it became September, 2005, and a great, great city was under water, and a huge, huge area of the gulf coast had been destroyed and blown away and washed away by the surge of the storm, an area roughly 90,000 square miles, perhaps the size of Kansas.

But as we landed there that morning, I got out of the plane and walked into the airport service center there, and there were three men that had spent most of their time working there, had not really been outside that area that I could tell. Some had lost their homes, or at least they were flooded, wind damaged, temporarily at least. They were living off of military meals, ready to eat, they seemed to be everywhere down there and there was not much of anything else, but there was plenty of water. So there was bottled water and food, the essentials of life; there was shelter there.

Their telephones, I believe their land lines were not functioning, but their cell phones were working, and my cell phone did work. So I called over to the joint operations center, which was across the other side of the air strip, and they sent a car to pick me up. I arrived at the air strip there sometime after 8 o'clock that morning, perhaps 8:15, 8:20. As I walked into that center, I met officer after officer that was there on duty in that center where they are controlling the communications for the rescue and recovery and the evacuation of New Orleans.

It took about an hour to discuss some of that through with the officers that were there, and they asked if I would stay for the 9 o'clock briefing, which began precisely at 9 o'clock, and I did stay for the briefing. It seemed as though they directed a lot of their briefing to me, and I say that because some of the details that they went into I suspect everyone in the room knew those answers except for myself. So as they directed that briefing on me and invited me to ask questions, I did ask a few; and in the end, they asked me if I would say a few words, and I did.

Good people there. They had pulled that together. I am going to guess that there were 40 to 45 people in the room, each representing their own government agency which would have been Federal and State and city, as well as the nongovernment agencies, the nongovernment organizations, the NGOs that were there. As I listened to them talk about what they had done, how they adapted and what they were planning to do, and I looked at the list, the checklist, the problems that had been raised and posted and the solutions that were proposed and how they arrived at that, it was a textbook study, I think, on how to put together a rescue and recovery operation.

The communications had been wiped out in New Orleans. In fact, Michael Chertoff stood here and gave us a presentation on the disaster of Katrina in a session of Congress in his briefing and, as he described this, he said that if the military were going to attack a city, the classical attack would be to go in and wipe out the power and the communications, which Hurricane Katrina did for the city of New Orleans, wiped out the power and communications; and then it would wipe out the transportation routes, destroy the ability, disturb the ability to get in or out of the city of New Orleans, and then attack. That is exactly what the storm did. It wiped out the electrical power, wiped out the communications, took out the cell phones even, and then wiped out the access to and from the city, even including the part of the causeway; flooded the approaches to the bridges, you could not get in or out of New Orleans, it was a stranded city, and then the attack was the water that flowed in and filled that city up, as much as sometimes 16 feet of water.

So that classical attack that came to New Orleans shut off all of the communications, made victims of hundreds of the rescue workers whom the rescue plan was designed to put to work to help save others, but they were victims of the storm and the attack, so to speak, themselves. I would describe what happened, and each of us, I think, in this country now could go down the path of criticizing a number of public figures in this event; but in lieu of that, I will take my colleagues back to the storm that I described earlier. This storm that was the worst-case scenario, that was the classic military-style attack on the city of New Orleans, the hurricane that positioned itself so that it was almost perfect.

If you were on the side of the hurricane, you would say it was a perfect storm. It was a perfect storm in that it came with the velocity and the power and the intensity and the speed and exactly in the location that it could do the most damage. It positioned itself so that it stacked all that water up in Lake Pontchartrain, then it positioned itself to surge the water back out of Lake Pontchartrain, flowed over the levee dikes, breached the dikes, and then began lowering the water level in Lake Pontchartrain while it filled the city of New Orleans.

That all took place, and it took place even though man had prepared for a bad disaster. But it was the perfect storm; Katrina was almost the perfect storm. It could have been a little more intense, it could have clearly been a Category 5, but it was nearly the perfect storm to destroy New Orleans and destroy the gulf coast and destroy the

whole flow of the channel in the bottom ground all along from New Orleans all the way down 90 miles to the Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi.

That perfect storm, Mr. Speaker, and then I would add to that another perfect storm, another perfect storm, which was the chain reaction of disaster that came when the plans for the storm and the plans for the hurricane reaction, the evacuation of people and then the recovery and the response to the storm, broke down. And it can be argued that it broke down at nearly every level at one point or another.

Having been in business for 28 years, I have seen a number of times when I have called it in business a chain reaction of disaster. In my business, the earth-moving business, I talk about this scenario: somebody forgets to load the grease tubes onto the maintenance trailer, and then they show up at the job and there is no grease. Then the man who is doing the greasing does not grease. Then, because of that, then a bearing goes out. Because the bearing goes out, the machine breaks down. Because the machine breaks down, it is not there to support the other machines; and when that happens, the whole job and the whole operation breaks down, and all for want of a grease tube.

Sometimes, the disaster could have been worse for want of better communication. As the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak) spoke here earlier in his Special Order perhaps 30 minutes ago or more, they did not have the ability, the interoperability to communicate across the different levels of law enforcement. I know that we had law enforcement sometimes standing on one side of the river or even opposite sides of the road with water in between and could not get to each other because their radios would not communicate because of frequency problems. We have the technology today to tie that all together and make that work. That was not the case down in New Orleans in many of those cases.

So because of that lack of ability to communicate between the law enforcement officers, because the power was out, the lights were out, because we had vandals and because we had looters and, in fact, on Monday, and the storm was still passing through on Monday, by Monday afternoon at 3:30, there were looters in the streets with guns, shooting, robbing, breaking in, and stashing that loot in places where they thought they could go back and get it, and many of them did. That was another piece that broke down, was the public order.

But, also, the worst-case scenario that was in the paper described that small boats would have to come in as volunteers and penetrate into the city and haul people out. Yet there were 1,000 people outside the city on Thursday morning I think, 1,000 people outside the city with boats preparing to go in, and the first boat that went in got shot at. So they were turned back and prevented from going into the city.

I happen to know that there was a fleet of air boats that came from Georgia, and they waited to get the orders to go in. They wanted to go in and save people. They could not get orders to go in, partly because of the security, and I think partly because the communication was breaking down; but, nonetheless, they decided to take matters into their own hands, went into the city, and that small group of air boats rescued 800 people. That was a point of light in this disaster of the storm, and it happened over and over again, people taking charge, people acting, reacting, responding, taking initiative the American way.

Sometimes when top-down management is destroyed because of communications or the plan just does not work, people have to take over and recover. We have done that in wars from the beginning of time, or the beginning of this country; and we have served ourselves well with that kind of initiative and that kind of inspiration that comes from that.

But the communications broke down, the plan that was there for evacuation filled up the civic center, filled up the Superdome. There did not seem to be adequate water or supplies or medicine or order in the Superdome, and it filled with people and put a lot of pressure on the people that were in there. We know that bad things happened inside that building, and they will unfold as time goes on.

The Superdome was surrounded with water, and yet I have reports that some people drove to the Superdome presumably before it was completely surrounded with water, parked their car, and walked in. If they could drive to the Superdome and park their car, they could drive out of New Orleans and evacuate themselves. Why did they not do that? So the questions remain, and many of them that are critical of government have been publicly aired, and I will not dig down into that.

But I will just say that from a weather standpoint, Mr. Speaker, we had a nearly perfect storm, from a chain reaction of disaster, from a break-down of communications and power and cutoff of the transportation routes, and then the inability of the local law enforcement people and the local security people, those who were not already victimized by the flood that were on duty, their inability to communicate with each other, and then their inability to communicate with the chain of command, going up from the city to the State to the Federal Government.

It had to have been extraordinarily difficult to get enough information to make an informed decision in a time of crisis like that, and it was immobilizing.

So the perfect storm of the weather, and almost the perfect storm of the chain reaction of disaster that flowed from lack of communications, inability to communicate with each other, and then sometimes the inability to agree on what the next appropriate action was, not having had thought this out in advance, in my history I will look back and tell you that much of what I have seen in the form of people who appear to be quick thinking, were really people who had thought ahead and simply reacted to the scenario that had played out in their mind.

And I do not know that this scenario had been played out in the minds of the local leadership, but I did read this scenario in the newspaper. And again these questions will be asked. They will be answered. And I think that America will get a reasonable perspective when Congress gets finished with our hearings sometime in the future. Right now, we are in the recovery and planning the reconstruction mode.

A few other things that come across my mind. I stopped and talked to a shrimper down at Slidell, Louisiana. He had five boats. Two of them were west of New Orleans; they survived the storm. Three of them were east of New Orleans; all of them were blown up on high ground.

He had a friend who had been running a video tape on the day that the water surge came in. I think there they said the surge was perhaps 17 feet. As the water began to come in the house, he turned on the video player. And within 3 to 5 minutes the water had filled the house to the point where he was going up the stairs. His wife was trying to save the dogs and go up the stairs, and the last sounds in the film, I am told, and I hope to be able to see that film, is the sound of this individual that is chopping a hole in the roof so he can get out on top of the roof with his wife and the dogs, to save themselves from the flood.

That 17-foot surge of water there, which in some cases was as high as 27 feet, that filled the House up in just a few minutes, in 3 to 5 minutes the water came up. It is not quite like a tsunami that breaks like a surfer's wave, and it is not quite like a wall of water, but I understand, and wish I had seen film of this, it is more like a big surge of water, a big belly of water that just rolls up and goes over the top of anything in its path.

And the power, the power of that water, of the wind too, but of the water is awesome. I have spent my life in the construction business. I have worked with asphalt, base courses and overlays. And I saw hundreds of feet of asphalt surfacing, 4-inch overlay, that had been washed off of the highway down along the levee east and south of Slidell on the road going to New Orleans.

Any water that hits powerfully enough on the top of a levee to wash off 4 inches of asphalt in great slabs and wash it several hundred feet out onto the land, is a powerful, powerful wall of water.

And I want to take you down, in your mind's eye, Mr. Speaker, down south of New Orleans, down along the Mississippi channel, along that channel

where I flew that Sunday, September 11, with the Corps of Engineers as they went down to review the levies and the places where the levies had been breached going south. It is perhaps 90 miles of river from New Orleans south down to the Gulf of Mexico. There is a 25-foot-high levee along on each side of the Mississippi River that contains the river, and there is also a 25-foot-high, approximately 25-foot-high levee that keeps the gulf from washing out the back side of that levee.

Now, as you fly down there, the communities that used to exist in that stretch, and this stretch is perhaps, it varies in width, but perhaps a half a mile wide, on average, with the bottom ground in between the two levees, the gulf levee on the west side, and the Mississippi River, that is the west side of the Mississippi River, about a half mile of bottom ground in between. There are similarities on the east side of the Mississippi too, but just speaking of the west side.

When you fly down through there, on that bottom ground you will see the places where the communities used to be. And these communities used to be communities, because the wind came up and blew hard and blew a lot of these communities away. Shattered the buildings and tore the buildings down and blew them away. And anything that stayed was flooded. The water surge in the Mississippi River surged over the top of the Mississippi River levee, and filled that area up in between those two 25-foot-high dikes with water; then the surge came from the gulf side and did the same thing.

Heavy winds blowing almost everything out of its path, and destroying almost everything, and then the water in from the Mississippi River side, from the east side sloshed in, and then the surge from the gulf side sloshing in as well, and filled that area up twice. And there is no place for the water to get out, Mr. Speaker.

And the communities as we flew along there, I saw the water towers, and could read the water towers of most of them. As you go south from New Orleans, it goes Belle Chasse, is one community; next community is Port Sulphur; the next community is Empire; the next community is to my left, Mr. Speaker. This is what is left of the community of Buras, Louisiana.

This is the best side of the water tower. This water tower has been blown down, crushed. The other side is dented and caved in. The legs are wandering back across over here. This picture is the best side of the water tower, because that is the side that has the city's name. That is why we chose this picture to put here tonight. This is what used to be the City of Buras. These homes that are here, it is unlikely that they are sitting on their own foundations, but there were a few that were, but most of them were just gone, washed away, blown away, double flooded, and destroyed.

But I have never, in the tornados that I see, living in the part of the country I do, I have never seen a tornado take out a water tower. I have never seen a wind take out a water tower. I have never seen a force take out a water tower. But this force took out this water tower. And I do not know whether it was the trash that was blown into it or washed into it, or the wind itself, or the combination of the trash, the wind, and the water. But it caved this water tower in.

By the way, there is your dish up here on top. Perhaps the cell phone tower was on top of the Buras water tower too, and they were out of communication. But that gives an example of how bad it was.

In these communities, as I mentioned earlier, Belle Chasse, Port Sulphur, Empire, Buras, and then from there further south, Buras is about 65 miles south of New Orleans, then Boothville, then Venice. Venice, by my math at least, is the last community before you hit the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps another 18 or 20 miles.

Here is another sign of the spirit of the people in Louisiana. And as you can see, as I could see from the air, still flooded, this water surge, this is the Mississippi River right here on top. And the surge has come over the top and dropped silt up here on top. This is all trash that has been pushed in from the flooding. This is in between the two levees. It goes half a mile width. This set of homes is essentially nothing left here. Shattered shards of what used to be buildings, and water standing perhaps 6 or 8 feet deep in this area. Yet after it has been up as high as here, you can see the trash has floated to here from the inside.

But one thing that did survive, Mr. Speaker, was the flagpole. And the first thing that had to happen was, the person that owns this land had to come in by boat and bring in Old Glory and run her up the flagpole as a sign of patriotism, as a sign of God and country, as a sign of defiance, that they were not going to let this storm get the best of them, Mr. Speaker.

And I am encouraged by the spirit of the people that I met, and awed by the power of the storm, and by the breadth and the magnitude of this disaster, Mr. Speaker. And I am also motivated by the challenge that lays before us all as we reach out to the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

And I visited the shelters also the next day, and I slept on a Red Cross cot, and appreciated their hospitality. I was not aware until the next day that there were people sleeping without a cot, perhaps not too many miles from where I was. As I looked at that effort that was done by Red Cross people and volunteers of all kinds, some of them had been working 18, 20 hours a day for 13, 14, 15 days in a row, now more days than that. They have committed and sacrificed a lot to help others out. And we all need to do the same. I am going to continue in my efforts.

And I am going to look forward to the challenge of rebuilding. And I am going to look forward to, in 10 years, 20 years, going back down to the gulf coast, Mr. Speaker, and seeing what has been brought about by the reconstruction effort that we will see.

And I want to be sure that the work that we do builds adequate levees, adequate protection, adequate hurricane walls and flood walls so that a category 5 hurricane can be withstood by the protection that will be reconstructed around New Orleans and around the other communities in that area.

I do not know if they will rebuild Buras. I do not know if they will rebuild these communities down there. I will say, I cannot imagine them not. But it is still highly vulnerable, and I do not know that there is very much more that we can do to protect the people of that area.

So as I add it all up, I would say, in summary, that we have to be prudent and responsible in the spending that we provide. We have to look to the private sector to contribute as much as it can. We have to get a handle on how many insurance dollars are there. A handle on how many people will not be going back to New Orleans, and I believe that number will be significant.

We need to reconstruct New Orleans in the areas where it is not likely to go underwater again first, and get a handle on how many people the population of New Orleans will be in the short term, say within the next 2 to 5 years; and the lower part of the bowl may be better used, instead, for some public purpose like a park, a golf course, rather than housing, which is going to be very, very vulnerable.

But we can do three things to protect New Orleans and protect them from an engineering prospective. One is to build a hurricane levee and hurricane walls at the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain, so when another hurricane comes, the low pressure center and the southern wind that pushes that water up into and surges into Lake Pontchartrain cannot get into Lake Pontchartrain. Keep the water out of Lake Pontchartrain is number one.

Number two is build hurricane gates at the inlet of the canals, like the 17th Street Canal and the other canals along that area, so that if the water does get into Lake Pontchartrain, or there happens to be a high wind that comes from the north, that we can protect the inlets of those canals as well as the rest of the area along Lake Pontchartrain was protecting.

And then the third thing is to raise the pump stations, the many pump stations that are there in New Orleans that found themselves underwater, out of commission, and we fit those pump stations with a backup redundant system so that if the power goes out they can still run, whether they be diesel engines or whether they be generator run, the city power that might run the pumps needs to be backed up with a generator on that location. They need to be well above the elevation where the highest likely water can be.

So those are the things that I will be taking a look at and weighing in on. These will be the things that I think Congress has the responsibility to consider. And as we encourage the people of New Orleans to keep the faith, keep the spirit, show this American spirit you have for the most part. And sometimes on television the best side of New Orleans was not shown.

But as this saga unfolds, Mr. Speaker, we will continue to see the best side of humanity, and a lot of it exists in the people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) and count it a privilege to stand on the floor of the United States Congress with the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling) and a number of our colleagues who have come down here to speak out in defense of our country.

I consider it also a duty to go to the Middle East from time to time and Iraq in particular and visit with our soldiers over there. The first time I went was in October 2003. I had some trepidation on my way over there, not so much concerned about myself because once the decision is made to go, security is out of my hands and into the hands of others. But I did not want to be in the way. I did not want to go over there and have people who had a duty to do look and say, What is that Member of Congress doing here? Is he here for political reasons? What is his gig, so to speak.

I had that same feeling when I went to the hospitals at Bethesda and Walter Reed to visit the wounded soldiers. I asked myself, how are they going to react? I found out that they are glad to see a face that cares, a face that is interested in what they are doing and is part of the team. We are part of the team.

As the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) mentioned, the kind of spirit, the shining faces that are there, and I wrote down a couple of things. It shifted my agenda here. One is it is an image that I will never forget and it was perhaps a year ago. I went to the hospital at Bethesda and I am scheduled to do that about every quarter to make sure that I have the feel for the kind of sacrifice that these brave men and women are making.

I remember walking into a room. There was a Marine captain in the room who had lost a leg right below the knee. His spirit was good, and he was strong. I said, what is in your future? And he said, I am going to stay in the Marine Corps. I am going to get therapy and get this prosthetic leg and be going, and maybe I cannot get back into combat; but I am a Marine, and that is my profession.

I asked, Is anything else going to change? He said, Yes, my wife and I are going to start a family right away. That is the kind of dedication that is there.

Also, one of the other anecdotes that came to me, when I visited with the 168th National Guard unit out of Sheldon, Iowa, and fortunately I was able to break bread in the mess hall with them, a couple of them had been back home for their 14 days of leave. They were the two with suntans, and they had gotten their suntan in Iowa. One of them said, I have been here, serving here for months and I went home for my 14 days of leave and I started watching television. I thought gracious, things have gotten a lot worse since when I went on leave. I wonder what it is going to be like when I go back. He came back, and it was just the same as when he left.

The question I continually get asked is, It is our duty to fight the enemy, but why do we have to fight the United States media at the same time?

The media is always looking for the very worst component of the worst element they can find so they can get the maximum kind of sensationalism, but not get that broad perspective of what is going on over there.

So I went over on the 15th of August and came back on the 20th. The heat got up to 128 degrees. A piece of information that I received from those Iowa farm boys, I could never figure out why is it nothing was growing along the irrigation ditches, why there was water and not a blade of grass next to it. Those Iowa farmers, they put a thermometer in the soil, 154 degrees was the soil temperature. We plant corn at 54 degrees. At 154 degrees, it sterilizes the seed and would cook anything to some of the level that they do in the restaurants in this city.

We went to some unusual places. I asked to go to some of those places because I think we need to hear some from that area. I believe we were the first congressional delegation to go down to Basra in the south. We went in there to that region, and there are two ports where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers come together. There are two ports and most of the water freight that comes in and out of Iraq has to go through there. We visited a port where there is an Iraqi manager who has been there for 8 months. He increased production by 400 percent in 8 months. He did not understand the free enterprise system, however. He did not understand that gross receipts were not profit; you had to subtract the expenses. They are missing a little free enterprise culture, and we can help them with that.

I took a ride in an Iraqi navy patrol boat. Most Americans do not think about Iraq having a navy. They have an 800-man navy being trained by the British Royal Navy. We took a flight right around the harbor. They are proud of what they do.

I was standing there in the headquarters at the command central, the command headquarters in Basra of all of the provinces in the southern part of Iraq, and I looked around me and I started to identify where some of these soldiers were from. I started to look at the flag on their shoulders. In that group of about 15 or 18 soldiers, I picked out soldiers from the U.S., Britain, Australia, Iraq, they are part of the coalition, they are with us, the Netherlands, Romania, and Denmark, all in that cluster of 15 or 18 soldiers, that many different countries represented. I hear the criticism, this is not a coalition. Yes, it is. They are working with each other.

I received a briefing from the British general, General Denton. He filled us in on the current events and the tactics. It is fairly stable in the southern part

of the country. One of the things that he said that will stick with me is, ``I can think of no alternative but optimism.'' I like that phrase. If you do not believe that Iraq can be a free people, it can be a stable country, an oil-producing country, a country that starts to export dates again and the 28 million people there can put their lives back together again, what is your belief? How would you construct an Iraq? How would you want to direct that country if you were not an optimist?

I do not want to be involved in any planning done by anyone other than by optimists. I cannot have a pessimist there, I cannot even have one of those realists there because realists, just by definition, cannot follow a dream. They want to drag down someone else's, but they cannot follow a dream. Our soldiers are there, and they are following a dream. The Iraqi people are following a dream. They have their first grasp at freedom.

We looked at the oil field in the south, the distribution lines, the platforms where they load the oil out on supertankers. There is a lot of oil in the south in Basra. The equipment that is there is archaic. It goes back to the 60s, and it is going to take a lot of capital to get those oil fields back up to the level they need to be to get the country back on a fiscal track so they can fund their own construction and fund their own growth and development of Iraq. They are a long ways away from that.

The country is far more stable, but they need outside capital from other countries in the world and from multi-national corporations that will go in and place a bet on Iraq. It will be a very safe bet because the oil is there. There is no question the market is there. With $70 a barrel oil, that makes Iraq look even better from an economic viability standpoint.

From there we boarded some British helicopters, and the British are great. Their service is good; they are professional. They give you a sense of security. They showed us the ports, and then we landed and walked around and took a look and had a briefing. After we looked at that, we flew over the wetlands where 800,000 Iraqis lived up until a little more than a decade ago when some of them rose up against Saddam Hussein, and he went down and killed about 120,000 of them, drove between 400,000 and 450,000 out of there, and shut the water off.

That area is twice the size of the Everglades, 8,000 square miles; and Saddam drove the population from 800,000 down to about 200,000 by drying them out, starving them out, and just going down and killing them. That was an impressive thing to see; and it is another place that has now been recovered, about 40 percent of the 8,000 square miles, because we have turned the water back into the wetland rather than diverted it away.

And then from there we went up to another place that a lot of Members have not gone to, but some have been up there, and that is up to Kirkuk to the oil fields in the north. And up there, there is so much oil that some of the oil seeps to the top of the ground. Where there is a pool of oil in what one might call a sand trap, there is a puddle of oil in there. It is not a spill. It is natural flowing oil that seeps to the top of the ground.

And there were oil spills too, as one might expect in a country like that. A lot of oil in the north that needs a lot of development, too; and they need to be able to get it to market. And here is one of the reasons why not. This is a pair of bridges, and these bridges were blown during the liberation of Iraq. If I have got the bridges right, and I believe it was this one, there were nine pipelines tied to that bridge that went underneath there, and, of course, all nine pipelines got knocked out.

So we put a lot of those pipelines back together, but one of them is a 40-inch pipeline, a pretty good size pipeline, 40 inches in diameter, so 3\1/2\ feet; and each time we would put that back together, then the enemy would blow it again. So we brought a contractor in there to take that 40-inch pipeline and lay it underneath the Tigress River, 25 feet under the Tigress River, by the way, so it is a little hard for them to dig down there and blow that up, and that will give it a little more security. It is one of the pieces of the infrastructure that has been put together.

After Hurricane Katrina, $18.4 billion almost sounds like loose change but $18.4 billion across a country of 28 million people the size of California that had been allowed to depreciate, erode, dilapidate itself over the last 35 years or more and a country that needs to be brought back up into the modern era. A country that could not produce enough electricity so they had to turn the lights off periodically, even in the cities that got the preferred power. And now we are distributing power to everybody equally, and the power is up to about 13 hours a day, kind on an average for everybody in Iraq.

But every time we raise the generation up and produce more electricity, then more Iraqis go out and buy the satellite dish, I say to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling), or they go out to buy an air conditioner. And if I had to choose between the two, I would take the air conditioner and skip the television, by the way. But when they buy the air conditioners, the demand for power goes up and up and up, and we cannot quite catch up with the equation of how much generation do we have to put in place before it meets the demand. But we are putting generation in place.

I have here a picture of the mother-of-all-generators. This generator came across 1,057 kilometers of not always friendly territory. In fact, a lot of it was hostile territory. It came in several loads, but there were two big loads. For me, I am a guy who has hauled some heavy loads. A 400-ton generator, 325-ton turbine, and they came in a caravan with other equipment that was about a mile long, and this has all been set up now and up and going. Actually, it is going to be formally put on line in about January.

But this mother-of-all-generators has been brought all across that territory, could not have a bullet wound in the generator, came through safe and sound, the generator, the turbine, and the rest of that. And they have constructed this together near Kirkuk, and this power will go to a number of the outlying communities as well as Kirkuk, and it dramatically kicks up the generation capacity.

So I went to see where the money went that would build the infrastructure of Iraq. And I saw renovated swamps. I saw sewer plants and lines that have been constructed. This generation that is here, I am watching them as they are constructing, not exactly a refinery, but it is a preliminary process to, I think, take the sulfur out of the oil that is there. I have watched work around that country, and I have watched the spirit of the people. And then from Kirkuk, we flew across in Black Hawks down to Baghdad across that vast open space and arrived in Baghdad.

We had to push and hurry because I was scheduled to meet with the Iraq Chamber of Commerce. I did not think about Iraq as having a chamber of commerce, and they are affiliated with the Americans in a way; so I believe they call it the American-Iraq Chamber of Commerce in Baghdad. They asked me if I would give a speech.

Yes, I will do that, but where is my interpreter?

Well, you do not need one because these people all speak English.

And I thought that was kind of a telling thing, and there were, I think, 56 of them there, somewhere between 55 and 60 Iraqi business people that are members of the chamber of commerce that want to do business. They want to get free enterprise going, and they just want to have a chance. The message that I carried to them was a message that America is not going to be the economic salvation for Iraq. Iraqis are going to be the economic salvation for them. They are going to need to build those traditions of free enterprise. They are going to have to build the institutions of business that go along with this free enterprise structure and culture that we have in the United States of America.

They have got a great start if that many of them can communicate with the rest of the world through a common form of communication currency called English. But they have got a lot of cultures to establish. If the manager of the port city down near Al Basrah does not understand the equation between gross receipts less expenses equals net income, it does not mean he is not a good manager. It just means

that there is a blank space in their upbringing, and I want to see the free enterprise culture established and grow. We can use American business people over there.

The security part is the part that I have the least amount of advice for because we have the highest degree of professionals that are there providing security. Soldier after soldier, when I looked them in the eye, I came back from that country, my third trip over there, more confident than ever in the job that they are doing and the security that is being provided. I believe that because of the National Guard and our Reservists, added to our active duty personnel, the people that have more experience than most, that bring their professionalism with them, I believe that we have fielded a military here of the highest quality of people ever to go to war, and that is our soldiers that are over there who are putting their lives on the line.

General Casey said something that I think we need to remember, and that was, ``The enemy cannot win if the politicians stay in the fight,'' and I believe that he meant the politicians here on the floor of Congress, Mr. Speaker. I believe he meant the House and the Senate. I believe he meant the people who believe, that are setting up quasiforeign policy, the people that the enemy are listening to. We need to send a solid message over to them: we stay in the fight here; the Iraqis stay in the fight there.

As the politicians and the military, we will have 200,000 in uniform by next spring, and they are leading the battle over there; and Americans are stepping back. And we have handed over a base now to the control of the Iraqi troops. Signs are positive. The free enterprise side is coming along. They will get a constitution ratified. When they do, they can sign a contract to develop that oil. When they develop that oil, that money will come into their coffers, and they can develop their country. That is the formula for success in Iraq.

I appreciate the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence) yielding to me, and I appreciate his leadership on this; and I look forward to the day that we can celebrate a victory in Iraq.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being recognized to have the opportunity to address the Speaker before this House.

This Nation has undergone the most serious natural disaster, the most costly natural disaster. Possibly not in the measure of lives but in the measure of treasure, it certainly has, and we pray for the recovery of those victims that are yet to be found. We pray that that number can stay as low as possible, and we know that, regardless of the number, each loss of life hurts and pains each family deeply.

This Congress has addressed Hurricane Katrina, done so quickly. We had a unanimous consent agreement after a conference call on Friday after the storm struck in its fury and the wind began to die down on Monday, the previous Monday. We appropriated $10.5 billion, Mr. Speaker, and we did so under a unanimous consent agreement. We did that because we knew that we needed to get resources into the hands of the people who were saving lives, lifting people off of rooftops and pulling people out of houses and bringing boats down through the communities, and we needed to make sure that the resources were there.

We needed to make sure that there was food, there was water, there was shelter, and this Nation watched on television as the disasters that were there brought people together in the Superdome, in the convention center, other locations around New Orleans, other locations around Alabama, Mississippi and, of course, other places in Louisiana.

This Nation has watched transfixed as we reacted and we deployed resources into the region and began to recover from this disaster. Each of us have different opinions about what was done right and what was done wrong, but Mr. Speaker, my position is that we are not done saving people. We are not done helping people get relocated. We are not done helping their lives get put back together, and they are not finished building for their future. Once that path is determined and once they start down that path and once we can see that we put a plan together that is going to help people get relocated, and at least in the short- and mid-term future, we will have seen to the needs of the many, many needy, then that will be time enough and plenty time enough for us to meet together in this Congress and to put together a chronological order of what happened, who knew what, why did they know it, what they did not know and why, what communications did they have, what decisions were made that impacted on the rescue operations and the recovery operations. What did they know and when did they know it, Mr. Speaker, is one way to ask that question and what did we learn from this disaster.

Time will come and that will be soon enough, and perhaps in this hour I will go back and talk about how I think we should put together the system here in Congress to take a good look at this, but, right now, we are recovering from this disaster.

Congress appropriated $10.5 billion that Friday following the storm, and it was emergency spending. It was a special session, emergency spending money, $10.5 billion. Our report was that FEMA was spending $500 million a day. By the end of that day, the report was $750 million a day. So that was a calculus to get us through Labor Day weekend, appropriate $10.5 billion.

I asked for an accounting of that spending. It did not come early in the week. It did come later in the week, and the accounting came with the request for another $51.8 billion, and the calculus for the $51.8 billion was not readily available to us. The answer was simply we know we are going to spend more than another $50 billion, so let us appropriate it.

So this Congress laid out a blank check, and in that appropriation there was a single line item. First, there was $1.8 billion in there for the Department of Defense, and they spent a lot of money down there and poured a lot of resources in. That is fine, but I believe the largest single line item ever passed in this Congress and appropriated without strings attached, without guidelines, without congressional direction was the $50 billion that went to FEMA.

I asked for an accounting of that money. I wanted to know, first, how was FEMA spending, and now the number went from $500 million a day to $750 million a day to $2 billion a day, and where was that money going. I happen to think in those terms of unit prices, how many meals, how much water, how much ice, how much fuel, how many rental units, how many people are on payroll, how many contractors are coming in that are contractors that are being paid, how do these contracts all add up, how does it divide out, how does it average out.

I thought it would be something that would be a calculation that one could track, and when I did get a look at those numbers, it had $3.3 billion there for 200,000 trailer houses, 30,000 of which were available and 170,000 of which were back-ordered. So it is hard to define that $3.3 billion as emergency spending when you spend the money to purchase a contract for future construction of trailer houses not available, and I say that is not emergency spending.

In addition, in the $50 billion that came for the second appropriation there was another 100,000 trailer houses in there for the tune of $1.6 billion. So now FEMA has had the authority apparently to purchase 300,000 trailer houses for the cost of $4.9 billion, $400 million of it will go for the 30,000 trailers, and that is rough numbers. Those trailers are available, but 270,000 trailers are back- ordered for a cost of about $4.5 billion, declared and deemed to be emergency spending, the kind of thing that is going to help save lives, recover people, and, in fact, it took resources away that could have been better used in the recovery process.

In addition, in that appropriation there was $650 million that was declared to be emergency spending, dedicated to mitigation of future disasters. Mitigation of future disasters cannot be characterized as emergency spending and cannot be characterized as something that helps disaster victims today in the gulf coast. It is money that could have gone to help people, but it is pigeon-holed. It is earmarked, and it is committed to other projects. We do not know what they are. Congress was not apprised of that, and yet we have an oversight responsibility.

All appropriations must start in this House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, and those appropriations then flow through here over to the Senate and from the Senate then probably back, not often back to conference but to the President.

We start the appropriations process. The Founders were very clear in our responsibility and our duty here. You cannot spend money without the House of Representatives initiating this, and

the House of Representatives approved one single line item, $50 billion.

I simply asked that we cut that down and appropriate $10 billion for the second week. It got us through the first week of intensity. The second week should have done the same. In fact, it would have nearly met the $2 billion a day that FEMA said they were spending, but we could not bring that up in those increments because the Senate was busy with their confirmation of Justice Roberts and did not want to be bothered to walk out of the Senate judiciary chambers to vote yea or nay on a $10 billion package that could have passed the Senate under a unanimous consent because, in fact, not a single Senator stood up against the $50 billion anyway.

So that did not hold very much sway with me from a rational perspective, Mr. Speaker, and so I voted ``no'' on this appropriations process. Because although I want to help people, we have an obligation for oversight and there was none; and, furthermore, we have an obligation to devise a plan, and there is none. Now, it does not mean there is not a plan to reach out and help people and that the system is not working. It is, Mr. Speaker. So I do not want the wrong implications to get in there.

But maybe you have heard the story about how the fellow went in to drain the swamp and he found himself up to his ears in alligators and it took his mind off of draining the swamp. That is kind of what happened down there in New Orleans. Everybody is so busy fighting off the alligators that the overall plan that needs to come into play to take care of the billions of dollars that likely will be coming from the taxpayers of this country has not been put in place, it has not been articulated, or it has not even been speculated to this Congress in any large way. And it is our job.

If there is no plan that comes to us that we can support, it is our job to devise a plan that we can support. In fact, it is our job to consider many, many alternatives and put our best foot forward, our best brains forward and husband the resources. We need to do the wise thing, the right thing, and position New Orleans, the gulf coast, for the long term, the best long term for this entire country, Mr. Speaker.

So after that vote, as I asked questions and tried to get answers, I think really it was just there were not answers out there. Everybody was busy working to save people, and they should have been; but there was not an eye on what are we going to do with 300,000 trailer houses when or if they ever get built and where will they go. Will they go 100 miles north of New Orleans, up someplace maybe north of Baton Rouge where it gets a little higher ground? Will they go in there and trench in water lines and lay in sewer lines and build a sewer plant and bring in electricity and put in electrical lines and put in streets and driveways and set these trailer houses in there row after row after row?

Imagine how big a trailer court it would be if it had 10,000 trailers in it. Now think of 100,000. And even though they probably will not all go in the same place, think in terms of 100,000 trailers all rowed up. Now think in terms of another hurricane, a windstorm. What happens? Do people want to live in those trailers in perpetuity? And I will say, no, not very many.

And what is the life expectancy of a trailer when we put $4.9 billion into 300,000 trailers, and many months from now the last trailer is built? Maybe even more than a year from now the last trailer is built and wheeled into site. Where are the people going to be that will come to move into those? The displaced people will have found a place by then.

So I contend, Mr. Speaker, that that is not a solution. It is not a wise solution. It is a distraction from the solution. It has happened without deliberation and without debate. It was an administrative decision, and I have not found the individual that will stand up and say, yes, that was my idea, I liked it, and we are going to stick with it. No, there is not an answer on that, Mr. Speaker, because the public knows at least intuitively that that is not a long-term solution. In fact, it is not a short-term solution. The trailers are back ordered, Mr. Speaker.

So as I watched this unfold and had my difficulty in getting answers, I began working the phones last Thursday. I had two staff people that worked diligently into the night on Thursday and started again on Friday and worked until 11:30 at night on Friday night trying to come up with contact numbers so I could make a phone call and talk to a few of the people that were in the region down in the gulf coast that could give me some of the answers and what the real plans were, if there are any; what kind of definitive answers and responses could we get.

We were not able to make contact in any meaningful way; and so along about Saturday, in fact about half time at the Iowa State-Iowa game, I made a decision to jump on a plane in Ames. I left at the end of the third quarter. It was hard to do, but Iowa State was ahead 23 to 3 at the time, so I went down to the airport, jumped aboard a little Bonanza airplane, a little single-engine, and we flew our way towards New Orleans.

We stopped in Little Rock that night and stayed out of the area. There was not a room to be had anywhere in that close region from Baton Rouge on south. In fact, even north of Baton Rouge. So we stayed in Little Rock, and then went back in the air at 5:15 in the morning and flew on into New Orleans and landed there about 7:26 a.m. Sunday morning. There was no commercial traffic going in or out of the airport. There were military air flights that were going in and helicopters moving around, but not the real intensity that you might expect to see, and I found out why.

We pulled up there to the flight service, and they looked out and came out to greet us. Real fine folks there. They were very friendly and kind of wondered what we were doing there; and we said, well, we came down here to take a look and see what is going on. They said, well, we do not see too many people coming in here like that. So we walked into their office and they said, well, did you have something to eat? Here is some ice water, here is a little pop. We have a little food here. Here are some MREs, some meals ready to eat.

Those MREs seem to be everywhere in that city. Every time you turn around, there is another boxful of meals ready to eat. That tells you they have been getting resources out for quite some time. Everywhere you go there is cans of water and bottles of water, and sometimes iced- down pop and food sitting around. It is not always the finest quisine, but it is nutrition just the same.

So we had our conversation there and picked up the phone and called across to the military headquarters where the central command is that is planning and taking care and managing the disaster relief that is going on, and I told them I had just flown in in the morning and wanted to come over and talk to their commanding officer and get a sense of what was going on there. So they sent a car over right away to pick me up and brought me over to headquarters, and we had a good chat there for a while and a briefing on the maps on where the water was.

In fact, I happened to recall that on the back side of this picture there is a map, Mr. Speaker. This is the map of New Orleans; and as it sits here, it is color coded according to the depth of the water. This is Lake Pontchartrain here, and there is some high ground up along the edge of the Lake. But once it gets over the levee, it goes too deep, and the brown is 9 to 16 feet of water. Now, this is after the flood. And then it goes to orange, and you can see the brown; the deepest areas would be right in here and here.

This is the 17th Street Canal, I believe, right in there. And then there are two other canals that caused a problem. I believe this one had about three breaches in it about there. This one up here and this way started flowing water down into New Orleans.

But the depth of this water, the dark brown, up to 16 feet deep, 9 to 16; and the orange, you can see in some of these areas here and here, 6 to 9 feet deep; and then in the green areas, the water was 4 to 6 feet deep; and then the blue gets a little more shallow, 2 to 4 feet deep; and the turquoise, or the lavender, about 0 to 2 feet deep. There were some deeper areas in here this far, as you can see; but this huge area out here was all water inside this shipping canal, here and inside the Mississippi

River dikes and all around this way. So this is the bowl. This is the bottom of the bowl, Mr. Speaker; and this is the area where the people suffered the most.

Listening to the briefing there, I want to say a few good words about the people that are on the front lines that have been working relentlessly for, I have lost track of the days now, 14, 15, 16 days. Maybe it is 16 or more days. Some of those people have worked 20 hours a day, some longer than that. Some did not leave duty and just nodded off a little in between from one crisis to another.

As I began to walk around up there in their operations center and talking to different officers and talking to different people that were there, I began to find out a lot about what they had been doing. The 82nd Airborne is the military unit that is taking care of the communications there. In fact, simply because of the service that they have provided and the communications system they set up, they finally linked together the rest of the agencies, the nongovernmental organizations and the Federal agencies that are there, linked them together in a communications system. And now, I believe that they meet every day at least once a day for a joint meeting where they all sit in the room. And they are all in that room, by the way, talking to people next to them and exchanging information. Instead of sending a message back to Washington, DC, and waiting for an answer in an e-mail or on a cell phone, they are right there with the people looking them in the eye. If they need a meeting, they can have that meeting on the spot.

And I will tell you from my trips over into other parts of the world, particularly three trips into Iraq, that if there is any organization in the world that has an ability to bring order out of chaos, it is our United States military. And when we look at a natural disaster of this magnitude, this unprecedented magnitude, we see that it was difficult to get resources in there. It was difficult to coordinate those resources. From this same microphone, I believe it was the Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, gave a good explanation of what happened in this hurricane/flood that was Katrina, and it was this:

If you were going to do a military assault on a city, the first thing you would do would be to go in and cut off the power and the communications, which Hurricane Katrina did. The wind took out the power lines. The wind took out some of the cell phone towers. It took out the ability to make telephone calls. It took out the ability to turn on the lights and run anything. It shut down the communications. This city was shut down. No lights, no power, no telephones. Well, sporadic cell phone service that finally just sputtered and died out. That went on.

That is the first operation you would do, would be to wipe out the communications and the power. The second thing you would do would be to cut off all the transportation routes to the city, which this flood did. Sometimes it just took out the access, or flooded the access to the bridges; and sometimes it took out, I believe it was Highway 10, where it blew parts of that out and dropped it right down into the water. But it shut down the transportation routes in and out of New Orleans.

That is the second thing you would do in a military operation. First, shut off power, communications, and then cut off transportation, or access to the city. And then the third thing you would do after you immobilized the city would be to attack, and that is what the flood did. This flood poured over the dike through the 17th Street Canal, through this other canal, and then filled this deep bowl up here with up to 16 feet of water in these areas and drifting on out to this perimeter along this way.

While that was going on, we had people that knew that there was a problem brewing. They knew the bowl was starting to fill, but they could not get over here to see how much water was coming in because there just was no transportation access to do that. So they could only speculate. And if you cannot see the water pouring in, you cannot tell how much water is coming in. You can have some degree of knowledge as to how fast it is; but when the power is out and it is at night, you cannot really tell what is going on.

On top of that, as I had my conversations with the people over there, I found out that on Monday afternoon, by 3:30, there were looters out then, in force, in gangs, with guns, already stealing, already looting, and taking shots that were keeping our rescue people from going in.

Now, when you think about going in in a boat in a swamp in an urban environment, we do not have any military trained to do that. We have never envisioned that kind of warfare, with a flooded city where you go in with a John boat and float on in there and try to rescue people while under fire. That is not part of what we have experience with or anything we have ever imagined. So the gangs intimidated, the shots were fired, and they kept the rescue operations and some of the recovery operations and some of the analysis operations from going in and seeing what was going on and being able to identify this problem.

Meanwhile, New Orleans is filling with water, and it filled beyond any level it had ever been at before. Now you had the perfect storm. And I could talk about the weather forces that brought that out, and I think what I would do is just to give the quickest of answers. Most people, I think, Mr. Speaker, have watched this on television, and it was almost a perfect storm from the standpoint of where the eye of the hurricane was, how the wind drove and the counterclockwise spinning of the hurricane, where it sat over here to the east, or to the right of New Orleans, slightly to the right of New Orleans.

That wind that came from the south and up in here in the outlet of Lake Ponchartrain off of the open gulf here drove water up into Lake Pontchartrain, a lake that is maybe 8 to 15 feet deep; but it is a huge lake. And it pushed so much water up into this lake that there was half again more water than there was before the storm. Eight to 10 feet more water in this lake driven by the low pressure center, which actually lifts water up that is in the center of a hurricane.

And then driven by 150 or more velocity winds, pushed that water in and shoved an extra 10 feet up into Lake Pontchartrain, and then stacking that water over here on the north side.

And when the hurricane moved further to the east, this counterclockwise motion turned that wind around from the south, southeast, where it was driving the water into Lake Pontchartrain, and brought it over to the top; and it was coming now down from the north. And you had 10 feet of water pouring down here with 8 to 10 feet of waves on top of it, and all that surge and splash went right up against here and breached the levee for the 17th Street, here and I believe there.

So it was the perfect storm, but it was a perfect storm that was predicted. It was actually predicted in The Times Picayune newspaper in late 2002, if I have my dates right. I have read all of the articles. It is extraordinarily informative. There is one that says, ``Worst Case Scenario.'' What I have just described was the worst case scenario.

But, nonetheless, I sat in on that briefing, engaged in that briefing, gave a little talk to the people there working, giving their hearts out for the people in the gulf coast region. They are proud of the work that they do. They are humble people with an inner pride. As I stood and looked them in the eye, I could feel that commitment to Americans, dedication to Americans, all of us pulling together. People from all over the United States came down to work in the gulf coast region to provide relief as fast as they possibly could. They gave their all.

The airport in New Orleans, the Louis Armstrong International Airport, was separated into several different areas. One concourse was a hospital and triage area. There were two other areas for the victims of the flood, the future evacuees. And then the troops and the rescue workers, they would find any place they could to sleep. Sometimes there would be room. Sometimes it was a corner, if they slept at all.

They went to work. They went to work to save lives. They peaked out there on one of these days at the rate of 10,000 lives a day being pulled out of New Orleans through the operations there at the airport.

We know that the Coast Guard saved a high number. The last number I heard was 9,000. I expect it is more than that.

The numbers of people now in shelters has been diminishing significantly. There is a steady rotation of people coming through. As flood victims, they are still giving up. Some people like to stay in their homes. They are realizing this is going to be a long time, so they are starting to come out. As they come out, there are people being placed in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and further up in the United States.

I am happy to say that the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa has welcomed some victims of Hurricane Katrina. All of us are reaching out. What we are seeking to do in the Fifth District of Iowa is ask the county seat mayors to conduct a meeting. Many had those meetings, bring with them and ask to sit at the table the county emergency manager, the pastoral groups, representatives of the churches within the county, the school administrators and the top employers in the counties so we can get a sense of what jobs are available.

What we want to do and are positioning ourselves, I call it the tour guide technique. I want to make sure that we have a household that is identified that is ready to receive a family. I want to make sure there is a place in the school for the children that might come. I want to make sure that house is ready, and the people know when they pull into town, whether on a bus or plane, they get off of their transportation, whichever mode it is, there would stand the mayor with a smile and a handshake and welcome them to the city. Also next to him would be a pastor of the faith of their choice, if they had a choice, and next to him or her would be a sponsoring family that will help them get acclimated to the community and any other resources they might need. We will help with job placement and interviews. That is happening all over this country.

I would like it to be one-stop shopping within the county and determine how many families we can take within each county and set up that system so people do not go off into the unknown.

The evacuees have lived in that region all of their life, and now they have to do something different. There is no housing available near New Orleans. Baton Rouge is full. There are no hotel rooms anywhere there.

I had the privilege of using a Red Cross cot the night before last. They gave me a little place in the corner to lay down and sleep, and I am grateful for their hospitality.

What I saw in that first day after the briefing, I hitched a ride in a helicopter. I flew around the city, a couple of laps around the Superdome and over along the top of Lake Pontchartrain, back around here, and there is another region that is outside of the picture. That entire levee dike is gone. They do not have any protection from the Gulf of Mexico from this way.

We flew all of the way down here on the other side of the Mississippi River. Right here is the Corps of Engineers' headquarters where they weathered the storm right here on the banks of the Mississippi River. Right across from them is the grain handling terminals. I believe that is the largest one on the river. It appears there is not structural damage, and we have heard reports there is a fair opportunity within the next couple of weeks to see grain shipments get up near its previous volume that it had.

We looked over this entire city and flew over the water and wind damage. Some places outside of the water you will see wind damage where it wiped out block after block, some houses into kindling. You can see where the footings were of the houses and the square spots. The numbers of devastation was by far the worst. In New Orleans the people suffered the worst, but it is not the worst place for damage, though.

After the morning of traveling around and looking at New Orleans from the air and getting a sense of how this water sits here and how bad this damage is, then I went over to the Corps of Engineers and had a long and significant conversation with the colonel who was on duty during the flood, who was also in command at the Corps of Engineers the day I was there.

He talked about the flood event and talked about the difficulties they had, and he talked about the hydrology. And since that is my background, doing drainage work and river channelization, we are always looking for ways to manage water in an efficient fashion. It is an interest in my life. It is a background in my profession. Because of that, I feel an obligation to understand New Orleans, and I think I do, at least in the broader text.

I cannot say I have enough information to say that I understand the details yet, and I do not think anyone does. But I have most of these elevations memorized and committed to memory and most of the elevations along these levee district canals, so I have a sense what happens when the water goes up. We call it stacked water in Iowa, and they call it a surge down there. But I have a sense of how this all fits together, and where the pump stations are. They are scattered all over, and the Corps of Engineers had to go in and use their portable pumps to go in and pump down around them to work, renovate them, and get those pumps up and going again. That has been extraordinary work.

As I listen to the volume of water that they are pumping and their prediction on where they would get, and knock on wood they got where they hope to be since I was there some time yesterday afternoon, but their prediction was within 36 hours they would have another three pump stations up online. If that happened, and they cautioned there are no guarantees in the flood recovery business, and I have been through my own floods, especially 1993, but if those pumps came online, there would be 27,000 cubic feet per second pumped out of this bowl that is New Orleans.

I do not have the elevations on how far below sea level that is, except the water was 16 feet deep in the deepest parts. That indicates at least to some degree how far below sea level that is. The pumping that is going on at 27,000 cubic feet per second, and my recollection is that the Missouri River in the central part of the United States in Yankton, South Dakota, releases about 11,000 cubic feet per second during the winter time, the nonbarge season. I know how that river flows at 11,000 cubic feet per second, and those numbers would indicate that the Corps of Engineers and the city pumps for New Orleans are pumping not quite two and a half times the flow that comes down the Missouri River past Sioux City, Iowa. That is a tremendous amount of water.

They will get ahead of this water. I believe they set a date of October 8. Lord willing and if the creek does not rise and it does not rain, they should get the water pumped out of New Orleans by about October 8. Given the volume, that is an extraordinary accomplishment. All of the lives that have been saved and all the people that have been lifted out are also an extraordinary accomplishment.

The time will come to learn from what we have done here, but it is too early to point the finger of blame. It is too early to come in and say some people did not try hard enough because they had a bias. That is just utterly wrong. There is no division between Americans when it comes to a crisis. We look at each other and we see Americans, and that is as far as it goes.

After the briefing at the Corps of Engineers, I hitched a ride on a different helicopter and went from there on down the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River dumps into the Gulf of Mexico about 90 miles south of New Orleans. Today, there is some question whether it is 90 miles south or 75 miles south. The Gulf of Mexico has invaded and come upstream a ways. That is an indistinct line today because of the storm.

We flew along the Mississippi River, and along that river there are two dikes. There is a river dike. This would be well south of here, south all of the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, that 75 to 90 miles. There is a river dike that is approximately 25 feet above sea level. That was built by the Corps of Engineers to protect the boats for shipping up and down. The shipping was moving the day before yesterday, and there was a lot of traffic in the river. I could see it accelerating as the day went on. That dike was on one side.

Approximately a half mile to the west is another dike, and that dike is approximately the same elevation. I do not know what elevation it is. It appears to be about the same given where the water stands, and that protects the

other side of the dike and about that half mile wide strip in the middle from the surge and the storms and the hurricanes from the gulf.

So you have a strip of land between two dikes, a dike on either side about 25 feet above sea level, half a mile wide strip in the middle, with a highway down the top of one of them. People think they have protection from the levees. They think, I have a levee on the front side, on the river and on the gulf side, and so how could you be more safe than down here in between them.

Mr. Speaker, there is community after community along that 75- or 80- mile stretch; and these communities do not look to have been very big. They look like there were approximately 300 people here, 700 people there, typical small communities in that flat-bottom ground, a little farming going on and not any big volume. Every once in awhile there is an oil refinery, and at one location there was a heliport to service the oil platforms out in the gulf.

As we flew along that, and, remember, I had been desensitized by about 2 hours in the air over New Orleans, I looked at where trees were down, houses flooded up to the roof tops, roof tops with holes chopped in them that people had climbed through, and after seeing that for a couple of hours, you get desensitized. But as we went south along the Mississippi River, I found that the desensitization that had taken place and the numbness that sets in after seeing all of that destruction did not condition me for the condition of that strip of land between those two dikes.

That is some of the most utter destruction that I have ever seen in my life, and it is the longest expanse I have ever seen. As you watched that, I began to piece together what happened. Down there, there were homes from an entire community that were just blown away. Sometimes the buildings were just shattered, and there would be just kindling stacked up against the dikes with all kinds of trash, boards and jugs, you name it. But entire communities were just plain footings there for the houses. Maybe a flat concrete pad was there. Community after community was like that. Sometimes there would be a church or school left standing. In one town, part of the school was left standing, but next to the school the water tower was blown down, crashed, bent, destroyed.

And I have seen some destruction in my life, and I have seen power antennas, towers go down. I saw telephone poles that were blown clear out of the ground. But I have never seen a water tower pushed down by the force of nature in my life. But that water tower went down. And we got a picture of the water tower, and I did not commit the name of the community to memory, but I can go back and look at that. And a number of those communities took similar devastation, but all of the rest of the water towers stuck together. That went down.

There was one family location, and I think this is a time to look at a representative example, Mr. Speaker. This is a building location, and it appears to be a dwelling; but it may have been a dwelling and a shop. This is steel piling that has been driven down into the ground so that it can withstand hurricane-force wins. Hurricane-force winds, at least Category 4\1/2\ or so, blew that sheet metal clear on through the building, stripped it down just to the I-beams that were driven to the ground. And the rubble that is laying around, there is no such thing as a representative sample. It is just everything was its unique piece of disaster, and pieces of property of the family were scattered all over; but there was this time, who knows, hundreds of thousands all over in that region.

There is no way, Mr. Speaker, that anyone can get a handle on the scope of this disaster without having flown over the region in its entirety, got down and talked to the people in the shelters and spent some time there, and I did not get to spend enough time there, and then go out on the ground and walk among this kind of disaster. But one of these places, very near where the water tower was blown down, there was a set of buildings that looked something like this. They were all shredded into this unrecognizable gnarly metal mass, and a flagpole had survived. There is no way that a flag would survive like this; but the flagpole, I guarantee it had been bent severely, but it had survived.

And this poor fellow who did not have anything except a mass and the mess he cleaned up did not have value, had not started that project yet. He had to come in there on a boat, and he had to go over to that flagpole and he ran Old Glory up to the tip of that flagpole, and there it flew in all its glory. And I can tell my colleagues it catches our eye, Mr. Speaker, when we see something like that, that sign of patriotism, that sign of defiance, that sign of determination that says, Katrina, you did not get to me. This might slow me down a little bit. It is a bump in the road, and, in fact, it is a pretty severe bump in the road, but you cannot break people's spirit that is as strong as these people's spirit is. And I saw that spirit in the floods in 1993 when we had those in Iowa when people pulled together, and I see this spirit down in the gulf coast today, Mr. Speaker.

So as we flew over that disaster, we began to see piece after piece of costly damage by that storm. The water had surged up the Mississippi River. The wind and the low pressure had sucked the water up, and the wind had driven it up the Mississippi River. And when we think about a river that has got 25-foot high levees on either side, to push that up that high and have that splash up and over the top of the levee, and in a lot of cases the levee held, but the water spilled over the top but did not breach it.

In that surge it lifted up grain barges; then put them up on the dry, some of them as high as clear at the top of the dike. And there is one tow there that I happened to notice, a tow being, Mr. Speaker, that when one ties a bunch of barges together, whatever size that is that they go down the river with, that is called a tow. And for us in the upper part of the Mississippi River, about 15 barges is a pretty good tow.

Down there 40 is not too many, but I happened to see one that had 30 barges in the tow; and of the 30, 25 of them were still tied together. The other five barges had gone off somewhere, and some had been pushed up on the dry. A couple were capsized, I could see. Some of them turned over on their side. But 25 of the 30-barge tow were all lifted up off the surface of that water. The water actually lifted them and floated them up and set them up on the bank, 25 barge tows all still tied together, all sitting up on the high and dry.

Ships that were just pushed together and shattered; shrimp boats by the dozen, 15 of them in one cluster just shoved up against the levee, tipped over. Some completely capsized, a lot of them on their sides. There was one company, I think it would be a single company, that had what I call tender boats, and these boats were painted yellow and blue. They were all painted the same. They had nine of them that I could find, and who knows if there were others that might have been sunk or blown out to sea; but these boats are, I am going to guess, 75 or more feet long, maybe as much as 90 feet long; and I expect they are the kind that go out to lift the catch off of the smaller shrimper boats that were stacked up all along the levee, and most of them were destroyed.

But these tender boats, these larger ones, the yellow and blue ones, of the nine that I counted the day before yesterday, Mr. Speaker, there were two of them that were sitting side by side right on top of the levee, right dead center in the highway, one in one lane and one in the other lane, tied side by side 25 feet above the water. That storm surge had lifted them up and set them in the middle of the dike. And the other seven identical boats were all apparently tied together so that they would ride out the storm better, and they apparently stayed together.

But of those, three were floating in the channel and four of them were up on the dry. So of the nine, six were up on the dry, two of them in the middle of the highway up on top of the levee, and four of them sitting up, I suppose, 10 or 12 feet above the water level. We take somebody's lifetime work and lifetime dream and see something like that happen to it, yes, they can put it all back and they can recover; but the magnitude, the awe, the power of this storm was, again, beyond a person's ability to comprehend unless we go down there and look at that and study it.

But the water surged up the Mississippi and floated barges out on top

of the dike and took ocean-going vessels and put them up on the dry, large ones; and that was powerful. The wind blew so hard that it just blew all of the buildings over and stacked them up against the levee on the other side, shattered them, and took tree after tree. And the trees that stood, the leaves were blown off of them. They stood there with just branches, and a lot of times the branches were not broken so much as the velocity of the wind just plucked the leaves off and left a forest there that looked like December in Iowa, not September in Louisiana. So, Mr. Speaker, it was a disaster beyond my ability to understand the scope of it until I went and took a look.

By the way, that surge in the Mississippi River that floated things up over the levee, a surge also came back from the gulf side that did nearly the same thing or maybe even equal to the same thing from the gulf side. So they had water from both sides, a surge as high as 27 or more feet; and that water came so fast that actually last night I talked to a shrimper there in northeastern New Orleans who had five boats, three of which were up on the dry and mostly destroyed, and two of them survived. They were on the west of New Orleans. And he said that he had a friend that was in his house when that surge of water came, that wall of water came; and it was approximately 3 minutes from the time the water started to rise until he had to have a hole cut in his roof to get out through the attic when the water raised that fast. Only 3 minutes to get ready for that kind of a disaster because of that low pressure center and that push of that wind, Mr. Speaker. It was an awesome thing, and the scope of this disaster is also quite awesome.

Then after we came back from there, I went over to the Red Cross headquarters, their center, and in that center I walked around and talked to some people, looked at the resources that they had. And it was very well presented by the Red Cross people. I know some of them. In fact, I ran into six Iowans down there that were hard at work, saving lives and helping people and doing so in a very friendly and warm way. I do think we can be proud of these rescue workers. They are working 20, 21 hours a day. Some of them snapped. Some of them pushed themselves to the point where they snapped, and they have got to be taken off duty for a day or so; otherwise they will not be good for the rest of this disaster.

So, Mr. Speaker, I borrowed a cot from the Red Cross and laid down and got a little sleep. The next day was not a day to look at disaster from the air as I did here on the first day; but it was a day to go visit the centers, a day to visit the people, a day to have conversations with them and get a feel for what they had gone through. And as I walked through the gymnasiums that are the shelters for the victims of the hurricane, I talked to a number of the victims there, and found one that would like to come and be a truck driver, and he had a commercial driver's license. I think we can help a person like that. We carried some communications for some other people that were having a little trouble getting their communications out. I talked to people that were serving in the Red Cross center from places like Michigan, Ohio, I mentioned Iowa, Minnesota, California.

And I want to say a kind word about Californians. According to their measure or some report's measure, perhaps more than 50 percent of the Red Cross workers at least in that region are from California, and that is an opportunity to say a word about that kind of an effort that is coming out of that State. There are California people all over helping people from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.

The military took some criticism, Mr. Speaker, because it was alleged that they reacted late. But yesterday when I was in Slidell, Louisiana, and that is a town right near the Mississippi border, one of the guards in the shelter there was walking through, and I stopped to talk to him. I remember his name. He is Specialist Cunningham. He was part of the 311th Signal Battalion out of Mobile, Alabama; and I asked him when he came into the storm zone. And he said, Sir, we took off on Monday afternoon.

I said, How did you do that?

He said, Well, we came across Mississippi, coming to the west, and some of those places we could not get through the road. So they used chainsaws. They used Humvees. They used chains. They pulled trees out of the way. They cut their way through. In fact, General Myers announced to us that was how the National Guard got in. They chainsawed their way in. I met a specialist from the 311th Signal Battalion out of Mobile, Alabama that actually did that. And as I listened to him talk and the 300 people that are part of that battalion, that is the kind of heroism that did not just quite make it to the mainstream news media.

And when we look at an area that is 93,000 square miles, the size of Kansas, and we have a mainstream media that is concentrating on looking for the story, looking for the hot spot, trying to find someone that will step up in front of the camera and utter a complaint about the service that they are not getting, that is one element of this, and I will not deny that some of that exists; but there is a whole huge other element out there in 89,000 square miles of that 90,000 square miles where we have thousands and thousands of heroes, thousands and thousands of stoic victims of this storm, and thousands and thousands of people whose lives will never be the same, Mr. Speaker.

So as I met with them and listened to them, it reminded me of the times when I had seen lives shattered in other natural disasters, in particular our 1993 flood, and that touches a nerve and touches a cord with me because of my own personal experience with that storm, and I will save that for another time, Mr. Speaker, on my particular experience in the 1993 flood. But I believe that was the force that motivated me to go down there. That was the force that caused me to want to see this entire thing.

So after meeting with the victims and the future evacuees and having a conversation around there with the people working in the shelter, seeing the resources that they had, the organization that they had, the dedication that they had, they need a few more cots and they need a few more nurses and they are squeaking by and they are able to provide, but it is an uplifting thing to see a look in the eye of people who are fulfilling a sense of mission, a sense of duty, a duty to their country, duty to their faith; and it gives everyone strength to be around the kind of people that will commit themselves in that fashion.

Later on in the day I took a drive down into some of the worst damage, and that would be down along a levee that goes into actually northeast of the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain, south of Slidell. And down in there there are homes on the both sides of the levee. One might go for a half mile or a mile and not see a home intact, not see anything but the stubs of pilings where homes were where all of them had been blown away. And that disaster was so bad that we see the rare exception when there was a building that was held together that was intact.

I walked through there and looked at some of the things that I found, and some of the things that we see bring it home. They bring home what kind of suffering there is, and some of it is symbolism, Mr. Speaker, but I do have a picture here that shows some kind of symbol that these are real people.

This caught my eye, Mr. Speaker. This would have been an anniversary gift that was given, probably from husband to wife. It has two doves on the top, and it says, ``Happy Anniversary,'' and it is laying in the rubble, just like that, that is untouched; I just walked up, and this was yesterday afternoon late, and I took this picture. I noticed that one of the doves is still in tact here on top of this material, but one of the doves is broken and laying here. When I saw that, I had to ask myself the question, do we know if a fallen dove is a fallen dove? Is one of this couple gone? Has one been blown away and lost to the storm and one is left to survive, or are they both okay and looking for each other? This kind of a scene, a scenario of families that are separated has been replayed over and over and over again, Mr. Speaker.

So there is a lot of human suffering, and the breadth of this and the depth of this is not something that is understood yet by the American people or by

this Congress, which is why I bring this message to the floor of the House of Representatives, so that America can take another step to begin to understand the damage down there.

I will tell my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that I think we should do everything we can to rescue people, to help them recover, to place them, to make this next phase of their lives more comfortable, easier, give some sense of certainty and some sense of confidence. But, at the same time, those resources that go to that we cannot hold back, but we need a plan. We need an overall plan on, first of all, the question was asked whether we are going to rebuild New Orleans. And I want to hear from the people in New Orleans, the people in Louisiana and, of course, the people in this country. But as I look at it, I see a city that has a unique character and it has a spirit, and it sits there today awfully quiet with nothing going on, high-rise buildings, the Superdome, the core of downtown New Orleans simply standing there dormant, waiting for occupants, waiting for the water to go down and the services to go on and people to come in and occupy.

If we rebuild New Orleans to the size and scope that it was and the population that has been driven from there does not come back to New Orleans, then we will have some services that are overbuilt for the numbers of people that it will be servicing. If we rebuild New Orleans and start rebuilding homes that were destroyed, bulldoze neighborhoods where every house was destroyed and go back in and start building homes again and the disaster hits again, that is good money after bad.

So, Mr. Speaker, I propose that we put together a plan, a plan to save the city, a plan that would, I will say, construct the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain in such a way that a Category 5 hurricane cannot drive that water up into Lake Pontchartrain. Construct floodgates at the inlets of the canals, such as the 17th Street Canal, so that if something fails on the outlet, a hurricane levee protection of Lake Pontchartrain so that Lake Pontchartrain did fill it with water, that the flood gates will protect it so that New Orleans cannot be flooded again.

And I propose, Mr. Speaker, that we go in to every one of those 30 or 40 or more pump stations that are there and raise them up to an elevation high enough that no matter how severe the storm, that it cannot knock out the pumps and we would have a third way to protect the city.

This is not cheap, but New Orleans is a shipping city; New Orleans is a city with a tremendously pivotal economic location. It will be a city; with or without Federal help, it will be constructed as a city again, but we need to put the mitigation in place, the fail-safe system in place so there are actually three places to protect the city. The hurricane wall and levee for the outlet of Lake Pontchartrain, the floodgates along the top of Lake Pontchartrain to keep the water out of the city, and then disaster-proof the lift stations, the pump stations that are all over that city so that they do not shut down, so that we can protect the city.

And then, if perhaps 25 percent of the people do not come back to New Orleans, if they decide that they are going to make their future where they find themselves relocated, then those low grounds that I showed on the previous chart, that dark brown in particular, that area should be put to some other use other than houses so that we are not pulling people out of the water again. Perhaps it becomes a park. We will wait for some architect to come up with a good idea for that.

But I am for helping people, and I am for a long-term plan to do the right thing. I do not think we need to be in a desperate hurry to rebuild New Orleans in the shortest time possible. I think this is a long-term event, and some of this damage that took place was to work that was done more than 100 years ago. We can put this work together in a fashion that is sequential to protect the city of New Orleans and build for the future, and it can be a more vibrant city than it has ever been before. It can still have its unique culture, and it can possibly have a culture that changes, but a unique culture. It can be economically viable and it can bring to this Nation the component of glory that it has given to us in the past and be a great city to visit in and live in, but we need to have an intelligent plan.

It is Congress's job to do that, Mr. Speaker. It is our job to initiate appropriations, and it is our job to safeguard those appropriations, and it is our job to listen to the people of America and put a plan in place, Mr. Speaker. That is my message to the American people.

I appreciate the opportunity to address this House of Representatives this evening, and I look forward to many discussions about how we are going to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 51 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, September 14, 2005, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, I feel compelled to come to the Floor here and make some remarks with regard to Hurricane Katrina, what we have done here from Congress, and what we need to do in the future.

First, I want to say that as I look across the broad expanse of that disaster, the 90,000 square miles, roughly the size of Kansas, and I listen to the description that was delivered by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, that if you were going to do a military assault on a city, that storm did what a military assault would do. It went in on the wind and blew out the electricity and the communications, took the communications systems out, the power grid out, and then it cut off the transportation avenues in and out of the cities by taking out the bridges.

Then, once it had isolated the city, then it attacked, and that was the flood that went in and did such devastating damage, damage that we have not quantified to date and will not quantify for at least some months to come, if not years to come.

The work that was done down there, I know that the National Guard as early as a week ago Wednesday took chain saws and sawed their way into some of the communities. We have 70,000 military on the ground down there providing all of the assistance that they can. There were volunteers that came from everywhere, as the chairman of the Committee on Armed Services has said, so it is a huge human effort on the part of our people in this country. The donations have been flowing in. We have all reached out.

Now, having said that, Madam Speaker, I want to also qualify this

statement by informing this body, Madam Speaker, that I am a flood victim. I lived through the floods of 1993 in Iowa, and I had a business at that time. Actually, it did survive the flood, barely, with four major contracts going on simultaneously that had been under water intermittently throughout all the spring; and by July 9, they were all under water simultaneously, and I was looking at whether I was going to be able to survive as a business or not.

I have gone through this pain. I walked away from my own business and let it sit and went and helped other people on the other side of the State. I am not a person without compassion. I am also not a person without fiscal responsibility.

So when we were requested to support a unanimous consent agreement last week that appropriated $10.5 billion, I asked some questions on that, and some of the answers that I got were, well, it was $500 million a day, now it is $750 million a day, so we need to get FEMA through until next week, and then we can take up this issue in a rational fashion.

Well, we took up this issue in a fashion today, but I do not think it can be defined as a ``rational'' fashion. The $750 million a day became $2 billion a day, and when I asked the director of the Office of Management and Budget for an itemization of how they calculated this, we got asked to vote for $51.8 billion, with only about three line items in it: $1.4 billion, and I have it here, for the military; there is a $15 million set-aside, thankfully, for an inspector general to help audit some of this, but basically, we are looking at $50 billion in one line item that says, Trust us, we know what we are doing.

Well, after I asked for the line items in this, I got a sheet at 5:34 this morning, no time to drill down through this data. One of the things that we questioned OMB about yesterday was their announcement to us that there were 200,000 trailer homes purchased as part of that first $10.5 billion, for a cost of $3.3 billion, $16,000 a unit, roughly. There are only 30,000 temporary home trailers available for purchase in the United States; the balance of those 200,000 would need to be constructed. Apparently, the Federal Government has signed a contract for the delivery of the 30,000 and the construction of 170,000 units for the price of $3.3 billion. That is one of the ways that they are spending $2 billion a day, is to create trailer homes in a region where they may or may not be useful in the long term, approximately 100 miles north of New Orleans on the high ground, the dry ground, as I am told.

That is imprudent early spending of money; it is not disaster spending of money.

In addition, this appropriation that passed this House today has in it also a provision for $1.6 billion to go for another 100,000 trailer homes, none of which are built, and probably they are not contracted at this point. We do not have the oversight ability to be going in and spending $51.8 billion and doing so in an unchecked fashion.

I asked to slow down this appropriation process, do it a week at a time so we could evaluate where we are going. That is why I voted ``no.''

I am going to be part of this reconstruction effort, I am going to be part of standing with the victims of this flood, but in a fiscally responsible fashion.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. It is an honor for me to stand on the floor here with two of the three judges that we have from Texas to help guide us down through this constitutional path and my good friend, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Franks), who is a pure constitutionalist and whom I have the honor to serve on the Subcommittee on the Constitution with.

I have a lot of things to say about Chief Justice Rehnquist, and it is an honor for me to have an opportunity to say a few words here, but I would like to first start by recapping some of his life. That is a life just so well-lived and so impressive to see what he has done

and how he put it together piece by piece, almost without flaw.

Looking back through that life, we know that we have lost a great public servant just last Saturday, and it happened in the middle of the disaster down in the gulf coast. So some of the media was swamped by those current events, and this happened underneath that shell in a way that we need to raise this up and commemorate this man's life in a special way.

He was just a month short of his 81st birthday. He battled cancer that eventually took his life, but he battled it with the same determination that he battled for principles that we all here hold so dear.

The Chief Justice awed the Nation by never giving up, and he never retired. He continued his service to our Nation until the very end. He was consistent with his lifetime of service, and he also was consistent with the vision of the Founding Fathers in that these Justices would be appointed for life. They were expected to serve for life or until retirement. He served a full, full lifetime for this country and 33 years, and he was consistent and true to his principles all the way through. He was a noble and honorable American who was part of the Greatest Generation. Examining his lifetime and career gives us insight into this powerful figure.

He devoted the majority of his life to serving this country in numerous capacities, and I take you back to 1943 to 1946 where he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and there is no question he had an incredibly deep intelligence.

He attended top schools, earning numerous advanced degrees, and was consistently at the top of his class, and unquestionably served as a model for his fellow students.

He received a BA and an MA in political science from Stanford and another master's in government from Harvard. He graduated first in his class from Stanford in 1952, just two places ahead of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He served as a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson on the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1951 and 1952 terms and practiced law in Phoenix, AZ, from 1953 until 1969.

He served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel from 1969 until 1971. As Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, it was one of his primary functions to screen potential Supreme Court candidates.

When Justice John Marshall Harlan retired, a search went out for a replacement, and Attorney General John Mitchell, who many of us remember, he was Rehnquist's boss at the time, announced he had found someone suitable for the job. That person was Justice Rehnquist whom Nixon appointed to the Court. So at the tender age of 47, which at that time was a young age for those appointments, and at this time as well, he was confirmed as Associate Justice on December 10, 1971, by a vote of 68 to 26. I can only imagine there are 26 votes out there that would like to have the opportunity to reconsider that vote.

His first day on the job was January 7, 1972. He served on the Nation's highest court throughout seven Presidencies. In 1986, Chief Justice Warren Burger retired, and President Reagan nominated Justice Rehnquist through to the reins of the Court as Chief Justice. There was a confirmation debate and deliberation that ensued. He was confirmed as Chief Justice on September 17, 1986, by a vote of 65 to 33, another 33 that I believe would like to have a chance to reconsider that vote in light of the historical 33 years of service of Chief Justice Rehnquist.

We have gotten to know a little bit more about him in the last few days. His management style, his effort to be fair, to be a giving and forgiving boss, but one that was also a task master. As a result he was able to form a cohesive Supreme Court body. Even though they had a lot of different personalities and a lot of different kinds of common sense they brought to their jurisprudence, Justice Rehnquist pulled them together. He left quite a legacy.

In elementary school, he was asked about his career plans by his teacher, and what I think is one of the best prophesies I have heard of a career in some time, he replied, ``I'm going to change the government.'' Now some people say, I am going to change the government, they mean they are going to grow government or they are going to adapt government in light of modern contemporary values.

Chief Justice Rehnquist did change the government. He fought a rear guard action to preserve our Constitution, the text of the Constitution. He was a constitutionalist. He was a model of judicial restraint. He stayed true to the principle and the paramount principle which is strict construction. No matter what path the other members of the Court took, at the beginning of his career on the Supreme Court, Justice Rehnquist was often a dissenter on a Court filled with judicial activists. He held firm to the guidance that the Constitution itself provides and was eventually joined by allies who helped him hold on to some of the meaning of our Constitution's text.

He led the Court in preserving States' rights, which was referenced here, and I appreciate that discussion; but it started with U.S. v. Lopez, which struck down a Federal law banning guns near local schools. Now I approve of the policy, but I more approve of his constitutional decision in dissenting from the Congress's policy. In U.S. v. Morrison, which struck down substantial parts of the Violence Against Women Act, again something, a policy, that I approved of, but a constitutional decision that I agreed with, and I appreciate that restraint.

He was not yet there on the Court when Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 established a right to privacy. I wish he had been there on that day because that was the day that the Court turned to an extreme activist Court, established this right to privacy that had never been found in the Constitution before. It was discovered in the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution, meaning that we laypersons could not divine that. In fact, maybe some of the judges here could not have found that right in the Constitution either.

He was a staunch defender of the right to life. He authored Rust v. Sullivan, where the government can withhold funds from clinics that advocate abortion. He strongly dissented in Roe v. Wade; Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade; and in Stenberg v. Carrhart, which was the constitutional decision that found a right to partial birth abortion. Justice Rehnquist held the line against that. He needed more help on the Court. Most every day he was there he needed more help on the Court. He firmly rejected the extra constitutional right to privacy that his colleagues created.

Chief Justice Rehnquist also did something many shy away from today. He recognized that the free exercise clause of the first amendment is just as important as the establishment clause.

He authored the 2002 case that upheld school vouchers in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, and strongly dissented in the 2000 case that held that public schools could not allow organized prayer at sporting events, even if the speaker is a student, and that was Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe.

He joined the majority in Agostini v. Felton in 1987, which allowed public school teachers to provide remedial education in parochial schools.

Rehnquist dissented from the Court's 1985 decision that moments of silence in public schools are unconstitutional. That was Wallace v. Jaffree.

And in 2003, he strongly dissented in the Court's affirmative action cases, Strutter and Gratz, which we remember.

And I sat in on those cases and I remember watching him sitting on the bench as he deliberated on those presentations and oral arguments. He condemned the racial preference policies as a sham and a naked effort to achieve racial balancing. His position in 2003 matched that of the majority he joined in the 1978 Bakke case, which held that Federal law does not permit a university's consideration of race in admissions.

He was consistent from 1978 until 2003. He was consistent until the last day of his life. Justice Rehnquist opposed the reading of ``public use'' as being substituted for ``public benefit'' in this summer's Kelo eminent domain decision, which we have had much discussion about here on the floor of this Congress. And I think all of us have engaged in that. He argued the fifth amendment means what it says.

And I would support that statement that those 12 words in the fifth amendment of the Constitution, ``nor shall

private property be taken for a public use without just compensation,'' are some of the clearest and cleanest words that we have in the entire Constitution, yet the majority of the Court, with Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'Connor dissenting, held otherwise. I do not believe that the fifth amendment could be written more precisely, more concisely, and I would challenge the attorneys that we have across this country to write that better than it has been written.

Both the personal and case histories I have discussed here show that Chief Justice Rehnquist, whose passing we mourn, whose legacy we celebrate tonight, was a man of great principle and honor. I firmly believe that without Chief Justice Rehnquist's presence on the Court for the last 33 years, our Constitution would be unrecognizable. It is to him that we owe our deepest thanks for preserving our Constitution for future Americans to fully restore to its original text.

I would say that there was a time in my life when I had the privilege and honor to sit in the presence of this great man. I am not going to pose the question here into this Record tonight, but I posed a question to Justice Rehnquist that caused him to deliberate for quite some time, and he finally answered, ``I am going to elect not to answer that question.'' Now, I do not believe he elected not to answer the question because he did not know the answer. I believed he elected not to answer the question because of how the answer would reflect on the other members of the Court.

He had an ability to do a calculation on a question or a problem and boil it down to the root quicker than anyone that I have watched process these heavy legal questions.

He was a giant of a man. He lived a life that was well lived, and we are here to celebrate tonight and give great honor to a man who hung on to this Constitution as dearly and as strongly as anyone has been charged with when they take the oath to uphold this Constitution.

It has been an honor to be a citizen of this country for the 33 years that he has served us so well. It has been an honor to have worked with him, to have been in his presence, and to deliberate with him on those occasions, and an honor to be in the courtroom to hear the oral arguments and an honor to read the opinions that he has given us. He has left us a legacy.

He has also left us a duty and a responsibility to pick up this ball now, and where he has held onto this Constitution, it is our job to carry forward and reestablish the text of this Constitution that he held so dear, and that we all hold so dear.

Our prayers go out to the family. Our prayers of gratitude for the lifetime, the legacy of Chief Justice William Rehnquist will continue into the future.

As I say, it has been an honor to be serving in this government with a man like that, and I hope and pray that we will be able to carry on the legacy that he left for us.

Mr. Speaker, if the judges would yield, there is another anecdote that is worth mentioning, and I do not know if it has been passed along here tonight, but I think it demonstrates his sense of humor. And sometimes it was self-deprecating and sometimes it was succinct.

Several years after he had been appointed to the bench, he was asked what it is like to serve here on the Supreme Court. He said, Well, you spend the first 2 years here wondering how you got here, and the rest of your time wondering how they got here.

Mr. Speaker, there is a point that comes to mind, and I can get it quickly made. This right to privacy that was in the emanation's penumbras, in the shadows, was something that was never recognized by Chief Justice Rehnquist. That right to privacy will be presented to Judge Roberts, and he will be asked. In fact, he will be demanded to recognize that right to privacy as a condition of his confirmation over in the Senate, a very right to privacy that Chief Justice Rehnquist never recognized.

That is how they are going to try to amend the Constitution and the confirmation process over in the Senate. I think it is important to recognize that the legacy of Justice Rehnquist should be preserved in the confirmation process in the Senate as well.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, and I appreciate the gentleman yielding. I have been watching the gentleman on C-SPAN from my office. I was compelled to come over here. I want to compliment you for your leadership and the fact that you are down here on a regular basis carrying this message that the American people need to hear. It needs to echo across all this land, the border States that are well represented in this presentation here today, but also throughout the heartland of America.

It is an intense issue. I know that the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth) talked about a 9 to 1 survey that they want tighter border controls in Arizona. Your statistics, I think, would be close to that. We put out a survey a year ago last March to 10,000 of my constituents in a random mailing that went into these households, Democrats and Republicans alike. It was all on immigration. The question that was the most significant was: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most intense, how intensely do you agree with this statement: We should reduce legal immigration and eliminate all illegal immigration. If you counted the 6s, 7s, 8s, 9s and 10s as being agreeing in intensity, 97 percent of my constituents said we want to have less legal and no more illegal immigration.

I wanted to tell you that we stand with you in Iowa, we stand with you in the Midwest, we stand together as American citizens. It is time to defend our borders and protect our sovereignty. If you do not have a border that you control, you cannot have a nation. It is the core of this country. Law and order and respect for the rule of law is an essential component of any nation. I sit on the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, and I am pledged to going forward on this same cause. I look forward to locking arms with you and dozens of Members of this Congress as we move forward into this national debate that is so long awaited on immigration.