Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That is exactly right.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, this is what has been going on in this chamber for years, I mean, since we got here, since the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I got here, and the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) got here. Everything has been partisan. The committees have been partisan. Eleven-nine they want the oversight committee to be, which means basically the Democrats do not have any say. If you have the majority in the committee, that majority party will dictate everything that goes by an eleven to nine vote. We saw it happen with the prescription drug. We saw it happen with all these other ones. The bottom line is the committees that are set up now in Congress do not have proper oversight, do not reflect, I think, the will of the American people and I think ultimately do not reflect the truth of what is going on.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. These are facts.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And, Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, it is important to understand that there is not the oversight that he talked about earlier tonight and we talked about last week; there is not the oversight of the contractors. We have got Halliburton. The same people that have been the contractors in the war, the same process, the same procedure, is the same thing that is going on down in the Katrina States. So we are taking the workers and we are saying they cannot make the prevailing wage here with 8.8 percent, even lower in some of the States, and then we are also not going to have the oversight of the contractors. So what are the contractors going to do? They are going to squeeze the worker. They are going to take the money without the oversight. They are going to get everything that they want. And I do not think that the American taxpayer is going to be happy with that. If people have got problems with this, give us a ring here on the Internet: 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov. Send us an e-mail. We are going to continue this discussion in the weeks and months to come because we are not going to sit by and let this administration steamroll the workers that want to go back and help rebuild their own community.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We have a constitutional responsibility to make sure that this institution has proper oversight. Article I, section 1, this House right here governs the country, the people. And 11 to nine in the committee is not going to be sufficient. So we are going to keep the pressure on, and we are going to make sure that this administration adheres to the standards that the American people want, not what the majority wants.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Nonpartisan.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Smarter than us.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Why justify this? Why give some kind of credence or credibility to this nonsense that is going on? This is America, and so America should have 50-50. The Presidential election was about 50-50, and we should all be right down the line.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Those union dues, and let us make that quite clear, the argument against having Davis-Bacon involved in FEMA is that the money will go to union dues in those States. And 4.2 percent of the workers in Mississippi are union workers, and this administration is trying to give us a bunch of bunk that the FEMA money is going to go to union dues when only 4 percent of the workers are involved in unions. It is bunk.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We need some adult supervision.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, he highlighted a point. This outfit that is in the executive branch right now, it is all politics. It is all politics all the time. It is not about policy. It is all about politics and trying to keep the Republicans in the majority. And I think when we see that five out of eight of the top appointments at FEMA are political hacks, I think when we look at passing a drug bill that does not have any cost controls for the drugs, does not allow for reimportation, all politics all the time. Weapons of mass destruction, go through all the war information we had before, all politics all the time. How do we sell this to the American people? Whether it is true or not, irrelevant. We need to go to war, and we are going to say whatever we have to say to get it done. Now, as the gentleman mentioned earlier, talking about Davis-Bacon, Davis and Bacon were two Republican Members of Congress who passed a prevailing wage law that allows for when Federal money is being spent in a certain area that the Feds will pay the prevailing wage of that area for the workers. Because if they are paying Federal money, then they should obviously be paying for whatever the going rate is in that area. So what the President did was he repealed the prevailing wage provision, basically saying that we are not going to have any oversight over the contractors. We are going to send them billions of dollars. Halliburton is going to get their money. We are going to pay them whatever we have got to pay them, $50 billion, $100 billion without any oversight from a bipartisan commission here; and at the same time as we are not overseeing what the contractors are doing. We are going to repeal the basic provision that allows for workers to at least make a decent wage in that area. And today in the Hill newspaper, these gentlemen from Americans for Tax Reform are saying that this repeal will make it obvious that Davis- Bacon is nothing but dead weight. So here these guys are wasting all of their time, all their energy on putting the screws to the workers, guys in New Orleans that are now living in Baton Rouge or in Mississippi or in Houston who want to go back home and help rebuild their community and make the going rate in their community, the prevailing wage in their community, and these guys are wasting all their time and energy trying to screw them to the wall instead of overlooking and seeing what Halliburton is doing. We are using the same administrative process with the reconstruction of Katrina as we have been using in the war, which wasted billions of dollars, no oversight of Halliburton, no oversight of all of these people who make tremendous contributions back to the President; and to have the audacity, with the great human tragedy that is there and the human suffering there, to say that you are going to waste your time and your energy making sure the workers do not get their fair share because that is dead weight, that is wasteful government spending. These are the people who are going to go back and be able to actually do some work. It is tremendous. It is unbelievable. It is all politics all the time with these guys, and this is just one more component of that. They want to get rid of the unions, they want to get rid of prevailing wage. This one gentleman in here, he says something along the lines of it is a waste of money because the Federal money will go to the worker and if it is a union worker, the union worker will pay union dues per hourly wage. You have to be kidding me. These union workers pay like 5 cents an hour to go for the union dues, 10 cents an hour, it depends on what union you are in. But to say that this is somehow going to bankrupt the government by paying a gentleman or a woman the prevailing wage and, at the same time, billions and billions and billions are getting wasted without any kind of oversight from a select committee in Congress is a joke, and I think it just keeps reinforcing ``all politics all the time.''

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Unless the majority wanted to help us.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. There is not even subpoena power.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Everybody knew.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, The Washington Post reported, just to support the gentleman's argument, five of the eight top Federal management agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since 9/11. Five of the top eight FEMA people had no emergency management experience at all. What did we think would happen if we had this kind of tragedy? I still say it had a lot to do with the number of electoral votes in Louisiana and Mississippi than anything else. Because if it was Florida, with all due respect, they would have been there with billions of dollars prior to. If it was an election year, everybody would be down there, and the President's brother would be running around campaigning. I think it is terrible that we have this kind of cronyism going on. We understand. We are not simpletons. We know that a President appoints his friends who make a lot of donations to posts in the executive branch. We know that. That is how it goes. But to appoint these people to FEMA? During a rise in hurricanes? Come on. It is irresponsible. As far as the committee goes, as far as having a committee, CNN Gallup Poll taken a few days ago, 70 percent of the American people supported an independent panel to investigate our response to Hurricane Katrina. That is 70 percent of the American people, 70 percent of those responding. I think it is important for this body to recognize that this toothless tiger, this paper tiger that we passed today, H. Res. 437, is not what the American people want. They want an independent investigation, bipartisan, equal power among both parties to investigate it so there is no coverups, no whitewashing going on. That is what the American people want. Mr. Speaker, I would like to start talking about something that I think is very important. We are going to do this. This country is going to make sure that we rebuild. The problem that we were talking about with the administration is a big hurdle for us. The money is another hurdle. I cannot believe that with all of the challenges that we have right now in this country that this President cannot go to the wealthiest Americans, his top campaign contributors, and ask them to give back just a wee little bit of their tax cut that they got over the past 4 or 5 years, just a wee little bit to help us fund Hurricane Katrina, to help us fund the war. We are giving millionaires hundreds of thousands of dollars back, and our deficit is ballooning. Now, today, it is reporting we are going to need another $50 billion to keep the war fund going. We are already hundreds of billions of dollars into the war, and now we have Hurricane Katrina. Hindsight is 20-20, but you do not get into elective wars that bog you down because you just never know what is going to happen. We do not overextend ourselves, because we do not know when a Katrina is going to happen, when a national tragedy is going to happen. That is prudent leadership. And now we are running budget deficits as far as the eye can see. We are borrowing the money from the Chinese and the Japanese. We are giving our country away, and we have got to pay interest on it. And one would think, and I hope, as the President is talking right now, that somewhere in his speech he has the guts to ask the wealthiest people in the country to help us here because we need help. I ask the President to take the leadership role that the American people have given him and have the guts to ask the wealthiest people in the Nation to help us rebuild the gulf coast, to help us fund this elective war that he got us into. We pay them back. They have got their tax cuts. We do not even have to take all of them back. We just need a few hundred billion dollars to pay for the war and to pay for Katrina. Have the guts to ask them for it. If they are in the health care industry, I am sure they are doing okay. If they are in the oil industry, I am sure they are doing just fine. Record profits as far as the eye can see in the oil industry. The greatest quarterly profits, billions and billions and billions of dollars for BP and a lot of these other folks. The big money people are doing okay. But those little kids on the covers of those magazines, those are the ones that we need to help. And to not have the courage to ask the wealthiest people in the country to help out, I think, is poor leadership. So I think as much as we are talking about restructuring and trying to figure out what we are going to do and how we are going to make the government run more efficiently and how we are going to take care of FEMA and fix the problems that we have been talking about here the past few weeks, a component of that is what are we going to do with our budget deficit. Because, again, this was something we have been talking about with the 30-somethings for months and months and years even now. So I ask the President to please ask these people to contribute. They are the only ones doing really well in the country right now. Ask them to help out. I am sure in the gentleman from Florida's (Mr. Meek) district, as in my mine, people who do not have a lot of disposable income are the ones bringing the canned goods. And I am not saying that the wealthy people are not doing it. Of course they are. But right now our government needs funds, and we need the wealthiest in the country to contribute. And we have got to have a President that is willing to ask them to help out. And to see the disparity between those who have and those who do not highlighted through this whole tragedy, I think, really is a call for all of us in public office, especially those in high-ranking leadership positions, like the President, to make the proper request; and we need to ask those who have been doing very well to contribute to this fund.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague is exactly right. What happened here today, H. Res. 437, is a tragedy. What happened right here on this floor today is a tragedy for the exact reason the gentleman just mentioned. Now, for those people who are at home and who may not completely understand the whole situation, this body is run by the majority party, which is the Republican Party. And the majority party appoints to the committees members to the Committee on Ways and Means, the Committee on Appropriations, the House Homeland Security Committee, the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs, and all these different committees and subcommittees. The majority appoints more people to the committee than the minority, so they basically control the committee process in the House of Representatives. Now, some committees have subpoena powers and they can subpoena witnesses. But they will only subpoena witnesses that the majority party wants to subpoena. If the minority party would want to subpoena somebody, they could not because they could not get the power out of the committee without majority party votes. So the majority rules. What is happening in this Congress and in the House and in the Senate is that the Republican Party controls both Chambers. So the Democrats in the minority have no subpoena power. And what has happened over the past few years here, and the great example is the later Clinton years, with Ken Starr, with the House Committee on Government Reform, the Republican Party that controlled this Chamber, they were the ones conducting the investigation into President Clinton because they had the subpoena power and they had the opportunity to do it. So what we were trying to say, what the minority party was trying to say, the Democrats were trying to say with H. Res. 437, is this select committee that will oversee and look at how the screwups went about down in the gulf coast should be equal. It should be Democrats and Republicans both having equal subpoena power to oversee the process, because the record for the majority party over the past few years has been atrocious. Now, let us look at a couple of things. We have talked here many, many times regarding the war, with the weapons of mass destruction, all the prewar intelligence. Has anybody looked into this in a real way, in depth? Subpoenaed witnesses? Anybody? No. Has anybody been fired? No. How about the Medicare bill that we passed at 3 in the morning. Everyone was told here it was $400 billion. It ends up being 700 or $800 billion after we already voted for it. This majority party does not have the credibility, I say to my colleague, the credibility to oversee what is going on here because they are going to do nothing but whitewash this thing. Get out the Brillo pads because we are going to scrub this thing clean, and nothing is going to happen and the country is going to be worse off for it. So, my colleagues, H. Res. 437 is a joke. It is a joke. And there will not be proper investigation. I just could not believe the debate on the floor today. The gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Taylor), a Democrat who lost his home, for God's sake, was here. He is saying, should he not, as a representative of a State in a congressional district that lost lives and homes and property and everything else, should he not be able to subpoena somebody, just like every other Member of Congress, if I am on that committee? Or should the Democrats, who many lost constituents of the 700-some that we lost, and some of those people were actually represented by Democrats, should the minority party not have the opportunity to subpoena somebody? But, no, this thing is going to get scrubbed. Where is the transparency? Where is the equal opportunity? Where is the bipartisanship? What this bill says is there is going to be nine Democrats and 11 Republicans.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I am going to make a prediction. The hour is late, but I am going to make a prediction. The American people will not allow, will not allow the Republican Party to get away with having another white wash. They are not going to allow them to scrub this up and cover this up and clean it up without having proper oversight. Seventy percent of the people in this country want an independent commission to look at this, or a bipartisan commission to look at this. And I think until that happens, the Republican Party will continue to get pressure from the American people. I think the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) is going to stand strong. And, quite frankly, again, we should not appoint anybody to this commission. Eleven Republicans, nine Democrats, we do not have an ounce of power on this thing, and we will get slammed just like we do every day down here, and the end result will be a FEMA that continues to be inept and inadequate in its response to natural disasters. So I say that the American people, that 70 percent of them who want this independent commission will not let this go, will not let the corruption and the cronyism continue. Mr. Speaker, 30somethingdems@mail.house.gov., send us an e-mail. We will be back here next week for a couple more nights and keep hammering away. We are not going to let go until we get the kind of commission that the American people want, that is only fair, and that will best fix the problems that we have in FEMA right now, because it will have proper oversight.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. This thing is a paper tiger. It is going to be a song and dance. So let us get ready. Get out the music and the popcorn because this is going to be nothing but a dog and pony show. I do not think anything is going to happen here, and it is going to be consistent with a lot of the other pieces of legislation that either came through this body or did not get reviewed. So I just want to say to my colleague from Florida how disappointed I am, how disappointed the Democrats are, and I encourage the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), our minority leader, to continue her stance and not appoint anybody to this committee. This is a toothless tiger. It is a washing machine to clean up this mess politically. I hope that our leader stands her ground and our leadership and our party stand their ground and just say that this is a joke and to appoint people to this committee would literally be contributing to the problem and lending our credibility to this issue, which I think is a joke.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Are we not using the same formula, the same administration processes that we used during the war and are using during the war. The same exact ones that we lost billions applying this system or using this system for the war, we are applying the same system now.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Article I, section 1.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. I appreciate you carrying the load a little bit here while I was away. One of the issues, and I do not think you have touched upon it just yet, is President Bush's decision to repeal the prevailing wage provisions that are normally intact in which anybody who would be working down in that area, the workers who would be down there getting paid, would get paid the prevailing wage of that area. President Bush has rescinded that requirement; and so now there is talk of people going down there who will be making wages much, much less than the prevailing wage for Federal Government projects that live in that area. So, in essence, these people who have been hit by the hurricane, who have been moved out to Baton Rouge or Houston or wherever, who want to go back to that community, go back to New Orleans and work, they are not going to earn the same wage that they would have earned had they been there before Katrina hit. And I just think this is kind of symbolic, or one example of what has been happening. And you talked about some of the corruption. You talked about some of the contracts. This is absolutely ridiculous to tell these people who are trying to reconstruct their lives that they should not be making the prevailing wage of people who live and work in that community. And, believe me, the money in the South is not that high of a wage. So it is not going to cripple the Government. This is Federal taxpayer money that is going down there. And what is happening is, in many instances, for the rebuilding effort, and I was having a talk with some of the electrical workers tonight, basically what is happening is the wage is going to be so low it just has to go down to minimum wage. So you have, say, a union electrician who is going to make $20 to $25 an hour. The union wage may be $25; the prevailing wage may be $20. So they would make $20 on a Federal project. Well, if you eliminate and you rescind that regulation, that worker will make $10 or $15 an hour, maybe no benefits. It can go all of the way down to the minimum wage. And what is happening now is that workers are looking at coming in from some of these other foreign countries, from Mexico, from some of these other countries. So the contractors who are getting the unbid contracts are going to start hiring foreign workers to come in for the rebuilding process and paying them a little bit above minimum wage, displacing workers who have lost their family who need to go back and rebuild. Part of the reconstruction effort should be to try to get a little bit of money in the pockets of those people who want to go back and help rebuild the city. I mean, my goodness, that does not seem like too much to ask. I know many Americans feel like that. Even through a tragedy, and you want to go back, you should be working. Here are these people that want to go and actually work that are having their wages cut, and it just seems to me that is very shortsighted. It is, again, another bend in favor of the contractors, who, you know, have a job to do but not at the expense of everybody else. You know, from the beginning here, and I am sure you have already touched upon all of the appointments of the members of FEMA in the upper echelon of FEMA, all political appointments, and we all understand that that happens, we are not trying to play dumb here. But give the guy an appointment who is not qualified, give him the ambassadorship to a country that has got a lot of beach front property. That is where you go. You do not put him in charge of FEMA. That is criminal what happened here. You know, again, I do not how far you got in, but I think the main point from the past few weeks and the review of this was the administration saying, how are we supposed to know the levees were going to break? And we find out that last summer FEMA sponsored a simulation called Hurricane Pam, was the name of the simulation, and it brought a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane up through New Orleans and what would happen. Well, in July of 2004, the FEMA simulation said the levees would break, there would be flooding, millions of people displaced, and all of the tragedy that we watched on TV over the past couple of weeks was simulated to happen if New Orleans got hit by a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane. Then for the administration to come out and say how were we supposed to know is so disingenuous. Then you look at FEMA. It is packed with political hacks, political appointees, an equestrian horse show organizer is supposed to be in charge of the most important emergency management organization in the country. I think it is criminal. I really believe it, and I choose that word specifically. It is criminal because that short-sighted appointment led to people not getting the kind of treatment, the immediate response that was needed. We have been looking at this for a while now, over the past couple of weeks and have had a chance. You would just think, and I will yield here in a second, your job, what you should expect from your Government is that you pay taxes. And your taxes go, and some get wasted, just like in corporations or anything else. Some of the money gets wasted. But your money goes to FEMA, and you should have an expectation that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be able to have a person in place that just deals with Hurricanes in the Gulf, because there is a hurricane season every year. So what happens if a hurricane hits New Orleans? We have hundreds of people employed here who make good money from the taxpayers. You have to meet your responsibility. So I feel like the President's appointments hurt. I think the unbid contracts are continuing the process. The elimination of the prevailing wage is another slap in the face of those people who have been hurt and want to go back and actually work and earn enough money to rebuild their families and their communities. I think this is continuing to go down the wrong road. I hope that some of what we are talking about here tonight brings that to light, and hopefully we can try to change it. Listen, we want to work with the administration. We want these people to get help. That is why we are here. We are not here to demagogue. We are not here to beat up any one side or the other. But they are in charge, and they are not making the necessary changes that need to be made. Our constitutional responsibility, people send us here to do this, is to make sure that we keep those people in power in check. They do not seem to be listening, and they do not seem to be following some basic, I think, business procedures that would otherwise be implemented.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. If I may make a couple of points. I agree with the gentlewoman so much and this 30-something Group has really improved since the gentlewoman has gotten here. I just want to make two points. One is the Davis-Bacon provision, the prevailing wage issue. Davis and Bacon were both Republicans, so this is not a Democratic issue. This is just something that seems to be fair. If Federal money is going to a certain area, they should pay the worker the wage that is prevalent in that area. That is number one. And, two, and I know we have all talked about this, the disparity in income between those people in this country who have and those people who have not is tremendous. I hope that the good that we can derive from Katrina is that. And, third, and the most specific point that I want to make, is that this has shown that our government has gone backwards as far as administration and execution; and we see it every day here. We pass a prescription drug bill that is spending $700 billion worth of the taxpayers' money and does nothing to allow for reimportation that would drive drug costs down or does not allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to buy in bulk because the pharmaceutical industry has a strangle-hold on this place. We do not see the proper reforms on distribution of health care. We do not see the proper investments in medical information technology that would help drive down the cost of medical care. We have a school system that is based on a society that is agrarian, and kids are supposed to go home in the summer and work on the farm; and only three or four percent of the country still works in agriculture. These are things that are structural problems. And I think the FEMA issue just shows and highlights and puts the spotlight on it. It is because there is money, and there is political appointments, and we have got to get our friends in, and we have so many friends that gave us so much money that we even have to put some in FEMA, which probably should not have political appointments, but we have so many debts that we owe. I have an uncle that I had a very interesting conversation with and he may be watching right now and I think my aunt is watching for sure who worked for Proctor and Gamble for God knows how many years. And we had a nice conversation one night about how this political body and political decisions are made every 2 years. We run very short-term political decisions that are made. The same in the business community. What are our next quarter profits going to be? Very short sighted. And I think we do not get the country back on the right track until those of us who are in this body are willing to make those long-term structural changes that need to be made to adjust the way government is administered in a 21st-century economy based on technology and knowledge. That was the issue with FEMA. If we ran a Hurricane Pam situation in 2004, where was the breakdown in getting that information to those people who needed to actually make a decision once there was an actual hurricane in that area? What was the breakdown? Until our government begins to run in an efficient way and in a way that is reflective of the communication abilities in the 21st century, the technological advancements, and everything else, we are going to be behind the eight ball whether it is FEMA, education, health care, whatever it may be. We have got to start making decisions that have a long-term impact on making our government run more efficiently. It should be able to run a heck of a lot more efficiently than it did in the 1930s and 1940s. And that is our job. I really believe that the 30-somethings have a responsibility here because we grew up in an age that was much different than most of the people in here grew up in, with computers and technology and cell phones and now the ear pieces and what else is there. But we grew up in that different kind of scene than the echo boomers who are going up now, we have a responsibility to try to apply that technology to government. And I think my friend from Florida wants to be a part of that.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, today I pay tribute to the life and work of community leader Attorney Clair M. Carlin of Youngstown, Ohio. His life was marked by distinguished service to his country, the state of Ohio, and the Youngstown area. Mr. Carlin was born on April 20, 1947 in Sharon, Pennsylvania to Charles W. and Caroline Vukasich Carlin. While acquiring his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from The Ohio State University in 1969, Mr. Carlin served as a Second Lieutenant in Ohio State's ROTC program. In 1972, he graduated from the U.S. Army Signal Officer Basic Course at Fort Gordon and simultaneously obtained a law degree from the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Mr. Carlin subsequently attended the Military Police Officers Advance Course in 1979 as well as the Command and General Staff College in 1980. Until 1982, he served in the Army National Guard. Throughout his career, Mr. Carlin held many distinguished positions including Special Counsel for the city of Youngstown and the Ohio Office of Attorney General, Hearing Examiner for the Ohio Department of Taxation, State Director of Catholic War Veterans, and Law Director for the City of Newton Falls. Additionally, Mr. Carlin served as the President of the Ohio Academy of Trial Lawyers and was the Governor of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. He was also a member of the American Bar Association, the Ohio State Bar Association, and was President of the Mahoning County Bar Association. Finally, Mr. Carlin contributed greatly to his community. He was an active member of the Mahoning County Volunteer Services Agency Board of Directors, the Ohio Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the American Legion Post in Poland, Ohio. Mr. Carlin's proudest personal achievement, however, was attaining the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. Mr. Carlin was a loving husband to his wife, Pamela Rodehaver, and a caring father to his children Elizabeth, Alexander, and Eric. So today, I wish to honor Mr. Clair Carlin whose life's work prevails as a model for all.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I think this gets back to a basic concept that we have seen over the course of the last couple of years here. The outfit that runs this body and that lives in the White House and this administration, they just hate government. They just hate it, and they think that if it was gone and abolished, everything would be fine. So, if you bring that attitude to government, that government cannot do anything good. And then your philosophy leads you to a point where you put an attorney for Arabian horses and a guy who used to run horse shows in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that is where that philosophy takes you, and then you get someone who is incompetent to handle the job, not a professional emergency management specialist, but just a political appointment, because government is for supplying our friends with graft, and that is all this is. Now, the gentleman mentioned something, and I want to go through this and I read a little bit of this article earlier. And this is Dr. Mayfield and what he said. He participated, he and his staff participated in a 5-day Hurricane Pam exercise, which was sponsored by FEMA and the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness last July, that assumed a similar storm as Katrina would hit Louisiana, and they called it Hurricane Pam at the time, on July 23 of 2004. So FEMA released, after they simulated this Hurricane Pam in Louisiana, FEMA announced the exercise and basically summed up the simulation. Here it is, quote: ``Hurricane Pam,'' and this is FEMA talking in July of 2004. ``Hurricane Pam brought sustained winds of 120 miles per hour, up to 20 inches of rain in parts of southeast Louisiana, and the storm surge toppled levees in New Orleans. More than 1 million residents evacuated, and Hurricane Pam destroyed between 500,000 and 600,000 buildings. Emergency officials from 50 parish, State, Federal, and volunteer organizations faced this scenario during a 5-day exercise held this week at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.'' Then, a year later, this same government says they had no idea that could possibly happen. How disingenuous is that? You ran a simulation. You war-gamed Hurricane Katrina and you called it Hurricane Pam a year ago. And then you come to the American people and say, the best you could come up with is, who would have thought the levees would have broken. Thinking everybody is stupid? Thinking this would not come out? It is criminal, criminal, what happened. You put an Arabian horse purchaser in charge of FEMA, you war-game it the year before, and the guy still does not know what he is doing, and people died because of it. That is the sad part of this whole thing.