Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, first I want to commend the gentlewoman from California on her heartfelt remarks on behalf of Rosa Parks and express my condolences to the Parks family and to all of the people who knew her. I grew up in a time in the middle of the 1960s, I was born in 1966, and consider it an honor and a privilege that I was raised with the rights and benefits that were the legacy of Rosa Parks. So thank you so much for paying that tribute to her. I rise in support of House Resolution 368, the resolution congratulating the State of Israel on the election of Ambassador Dan Gillerman as vice president of the 60th United Nations General Assembly. I was pleased to learn that this resolution passed yesterday with a unanimous vote of 407 to zero, and I am quite proud to be a cosponsor. I also wish to commend my colleagues, Representative Adam Schiff and Representative Steve Chabot, for their leadership in sponsoring this resolution. I look forward to a time when Israel is treated with respect and dignity and honor by all of the members of the United Nations.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. We have two more storms that have hit us since Katrina, Rita and Wilma; and it is not like they have fixed it. It is not like Brownie has gotten it right now and we have seen the fruits of continuing his contract. Now we have people who are sitting in the dark in my two counties that I represent, Broward County and Miami-Dade County. We have lift stations that are off, all 2,000 lift stations in my county have no power. The sewage is backing up. People have to boil water, but they cannot boil water because they do not have any power, or they have to add chlorine to their water. The ice and water trucks that were touted as being pre-positioned prior to the storm, they were lost, they could not find them because they relied on cell phones for communication. Now, hello. How tall are cell phone towers? I would think that if you have a cell phone tower getting hit by 120-mile-an-hour winds that perhaps you would anticipate that they would be damaged and you would not be able to use them. Where was the planning? I could nitpick every little detail; but, obviously, in the aftermath of a storm, there are going to be kinks, there are going to be problems. I do not want to be specifically critical of the response to this storm; I want to be more generally critical, because they have learned nothing. We have had the two additional storms following Katrina, and they have learned nothing. Sixty days have gone by. They have not fixed it. They have not made adjustments. Why? We have people who are sitting in harm's way who have suffered damage, and they continue the contract of the man who was clearly declared as incompetent and removed from being in charge of Katrina, but not removed from the payroll, and the stated purpose was so they could continue to get advice from him. A person who was not qualified for the job to start with, because his previous experience was being head of the Arabian Horse Association. You are absolutely right, Mr. Ryan. In terms of cronyism, that was the ultimate. You had a guy get a job because he was the college roommate of an ally of the President's and put in charge of the agency that has to be the command center for every agency in the government and directing their response to the aftermath of a hurricane, or any natural disaster. What happens is, if you put an unqualified person in that position, you are going to end up having the result that we saw in the aftermath of Katrina and the result that we have now seen in the aftermath of Wilma. Now we have Secretary Paulison, Acting Secretary Paulison, who is in place now. He is a constituent of mine, he does have the qualifications, he does know what he is doing; but Brownie is still on the payroll, and FEMA is now in the Department of Homeland Security. It is no longer an independent agency that answers directly to the President, that has the ability to direct things on their own. They have to run it up the food chain to the head of Homeland Security. When you put obstacles in the path of a decision-maker, it makes it harder to make the decision. And in the aftermath of a storm, you cannot have obstacles. Obstacles harm people. I am hoping that at some point someone in the administration decides that it is more important to take care of people than to accomplish their own agenda and their own goals.

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

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, we absolutely need accountability. There are people's lives at stake here. We are not here to be partisan. I remember a few weeks ago when Katrina hit and after Katrina hit, and you and I and the gentleman from Ohio had been on this floor day after day, week after week, and talking about what the government's response needed to be and should have been and what our process should have done, which is establish an independent Katrina commission so that we could get some of these things resolved. Because it is very nice that the President is going to come down and land his helicopter or fly Air Force One or whatever he is going to do because the airports have not been open so, hopefully, he is going to have a place to land. That is very nice. I remember the movie ``The Candidate,'' and Robert Redford's character is running against another guy for the U.S. Senate, and there is a big fire, and his opponent flies the helicopter down into the disaster area to survey the damage. And you know, the whole thing is a fiery mess and the guy flies in, surveys the damage, and flies out, looks important and impressive, and that is great. But what help did he provide to the people who were there? Did he grab a hose and start spraying? I am glad that the President is coming because he is the symbol of the United States of America, and there is one person in this country who everyone looks to, but it is only helpful if, when he sits down at the hurricane center and goes through that briefing, it is only helpful if he learns something, if the Federal Government and the administration learn something and change it for the next time. Because we were on this floor weeks ago offering our advice and our suggestions and our opinion about the aftermath of Katrina and how disturbed we were, because we said, and I remember using these words: there but for the grace of God go I, and now we have. Now it has happened to us. So it is our responsibility. Mr. Speaker, there are those on the Majority side of the aisle that will accuse us of doing this on a nightly basis to be political and to be partisan. No. It is the fact that particularly with natural disasters, natural or manmade disasters, you just know that at some point, especially where we live and in other parts of the country that are more prone to natural disasters, you just know it is going to happen to you at some point. I have talked to constituents, I have read constituents' comments in the paper, that it is all well and good that they come in and they do this review and this assessment, but it is only good if they learn something. One of the things, when I was at the Broward Emergency Operations Center yesterday, Tony Carper, the director, was talking about how they are trying to find generators, both the big generators that can help run the power grid while they are trying to get the power lines up and running again, and the small ones that people are going to need to run their facilities, and I asked him, I said, why, if we knew this storm was coming for so many days in advance, why did we not get those in position ahead of time? He said, because we do not have enough flexibility in our homeland security funding, because we get a lot of money for terrorism, but they are not able to use that money to respond to natural disasters. Well, we are much more certain on a regular basis that we are going to get hit with natural disasters than we are, God forbid, going to get hit by a manmade disaster. That is the kind of responsiveness that could have been fixed several storms ago. I mean, we have our eighth storm in 15 months. How is it that that was not fixed already? How is it that we still have people sitting in the dark? How is it that we were denied individual assistance after Katrina in Florida, when you had people looking through the roof at sky, both in Florida and in Louisiana, and then the very next time that we get hit by a storm, we have to fight to get individual assistance granted when all you have to do is walk out your front door or turn on the television and you can see 100 or 800 homes damaged, severely damaged. Do they not care? I mean, have they no shame? Have they no heart? It feels like that. It feels like they are up on high in the White House and Capitol Hill and it is not me, it is them. They are 1,100 miles from here and: my roof is not caving in, so I am okay. And I have money, I have water, I have ice, my kids are not going to get pink eye when I give them a bath and run water over their heads. I just, I do not understand. I do not understand why we had to spend the last 72 hours pounding on people, pounding on this government to get our folks some help. It is just inexcusable. It is incompetence. It is corruption, it is a crisis. We are going to have a whole collection, a whole necklace full of seeds by the time we are done with this year. God forbid. I hope that somebody decides to read the book, ``Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten'' and start remembering that we need to care about each other and that we need to be responsive and put partisan politics aside. It is not about the next election; it is about taking care of each other.

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

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is so right, and his comments have brought up so many different things that I want to say. But let us go back to what we have been talking about on this floor lo these last few weeks. We have been talking about the three or four Cs that are the real issue in this administration and in this government. We have been talking about corruption. We have been talking about cronyism. We have been talking about competence. I think what has happened in our community in the last few days just points arrows in the direction of every one of those C words. Let us talk about competence. The Governor can say, golly gee, our goal was to get up and running and be ready with all this water and ice and response and trucks and generators in 24 hours, and we will just have to work a little bit harder. Honestly, if they point to themselves as the model, if FEMA points to Florida as the model, and says that we are the most prepared State in terms of natural disasters, then they are owning up and saying, ``I am competent.'' We are competent. We are ready to do the job. I think if we traveled through South Florida tonight and asked people on the street, whom the gentleman and I have talked with, and asked them if they think their government is competent, I think the answer would be a resounding no, because these are some of the things that our constituents are having to deal with tonight, that our families are having to deal with tonight. the reality of getting hit by a Category 3 storm and not having the government respond to their needs is that in Broward County there is no potable water. The entire county is under a boil water order, which means that when I had to give my 2-year-old a bath the other day, I could not pour water over her head because the water could give her pinkeye. That is what I was cautioned about. We have to make sure that our children do not rinse their toothbrushes with the water because it can make them sick. We have a myriad of issues. We have water and ice and food needs. We have people in high-rises who have had windows blown out. We have trucks that have been lost. How could the trucks get lost? If they prepositioned them in strategic portions of the State so as to ensure that they could be moved out and sent to places that they know they are going to be needed, how is it that they could not find them and in some cases still have not been able to find them? Today in Miami-Dade County, which we both represent, although now I am told that Miami-Dade County does have drinkable water, except for Miami Beach, which I represent about half of, these are the water and ice distribution centers, Mr. Speaker, that we were supposed to be set up and fully equipped with water and ice. So let us peruse the availability of the supplies today. This is for the model State in terms of preparation and the prepositioning of hundreds of trucks to be able to be distributed as soon as the storm is over.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, it has been stressful, and that is the mildest word I can use, last several days. We both rode out the storm in our houses in south Florida. I have to say, if I had not been impressed by looking at the aftermath of Andrew, and I live in Broward County and so Andrew did not devastate Broward County like it did Miami-Dade County, we got grazed, but if I did not appreciate the kind of power Mother Nature has after observing the aftermath of Andrew and Hurricane Katrina on TV, I can tell you, being hit by an category 3 storm is awe inspiring. When you are cowering with your kids and husband and your family in your home and you are boarded up in your house, it feels like God is literally throwing bowling balls on the roof. It is an emotional, stressful situation. For those of us who live in structures that have been built under the south Florida building code since Hurricane Andrew and have a sturdy structure in which to live, where we were not worried about our homes caving in around us, and then yesterday when I had an opportunity to ride with FEMA on their preliminary damage assessment review and saw the mobile home parks in my district and across south Florida spanning the gentleman's district, and literally see that the walls caved in around the foundations of these homes and just furniture was left. Massive trees fell, falling completely over or snapping in half and falling on people's houses. We can urge people to leave their homes as much as possible, but human nature often motivates people to stay with their belongings and protect their home base. I just could not believe what might have happened. The fact that we avoided a huge loss of life is just a miracle. It really is. I have to say, the insensitivity on the part of the Governor as well as the President, both spanning from Hurricane Katrina to Wilma is just shocking. Governor Bush literally said today in our newspaper that he did not understand, and I will quote him: ``We had a lot of people standing in line yesterday that we did not like to see. That is why we tell people to have 72 hours of food and water so you do not have to stand in line.'' That was Secretary Paulison. Then the Governor said he did not understand why people did not heed the warning and get 72 hours' worth of food and water in advance of the storm. That is an easy thing to do. Well, I do not think Governor Bush was in south Florida for the several days, 6 or 7 days' progress that Wilma made across the continent and saw the lines in advance of the storm. And you know what, if you do not have money, if you cannot buy gas for your car or get to a store, it is going to be a little difficult to stock up on 72 hours' worth of food. When I went on this preliminary damage assessment, I will be honest, I am quite certain that a lot of these people could not afford to buy 72 hours' worth of food and water. So the insensitivity between the Governor's comments and the President's comments after Hurricane Katrina. The President said something similar after Hurricane Katrina. He said in advance of the storm, we warned people and it is our responsibility to get people prepared; but if they did not listen, there is not too much we can do about it. I guess like brother like brother. But what is the most disappointing, really, as someone who went through the storm myself and now have had literally thousands and thousands of constituents whose lives are affected who are sitting in the dark tonight as we speak who cannot hear our voices unless they are listening to C-SPAN Radio, honestly, it is just unbelievable that last week when we had our Florida delegation meeting, to listen to the supposedly organized and well-prepared preparations that FEMA and the State of Florida were putting in place to pre-position supplies that people needed. You would have thought that there would not be a kink in the works after the hurricane went through. Honestly, the reports that I am getting are so disturbing, price gouging of over $6 a gallon for gas in our districts. Where is the accountability? Where is the protection from the State government? We have trucks that have been lost for 2 days that they still cannot find, that they bragged to us last week that they were pre-positioning ice and water and meals ready to eat in Jacksonville and Homestead, but then they lost the trucks because the only means of communication they had available to contact the trucks was cell phones. Maybe they did not notice, but cell phone towers are tall; and the tall things in south Florida when they got hit by a category 3 hurricane fell down or were damaged. So that means communication went down. No water, no ice, no diesel fuel. Senior citizens older than 85 years old in Hallandale Beach stuck in their condominiums, the glass blown out of their places, no power, no food. The generators operating their power running out of diesel fuel. The mayor of Hallandale Beach had to call an emergency session of the city council and declare a state of emergency within her city so she could get ready to commandeer gas from a gas station to help those people. This is the model State for natural disaster preparation. If we are the model, and we have already seen what the model is not, if we are the model, we have a lot of work to do.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. In advance of the storm, 2,000 FEMA employees who were supposed to be ready to be dispatched to get this stuff distributed. We had the Miami Beach distribution center supplied. Metro Zoo in South Dade, no water, partial ice. Homestead Sports Complex, which is near where the trucks were prepositioned, no supplies. None. I mean, in Homestead they did not have water or ice, and the trucks were right there to start with. The Orange Bowl was supplied, but we had massive chaos in terms of the thousands of people that showed up to try to get access to that. We have Miami-Dade College North, which is in the north part of the county, no water, partial ice. Miami-Dade College Kendall, which is more towards south Dade, partially supplied, meaning they did not have enough water or ice for the people that showed up. And let us keep in mind that what they were distributing to people when they were able to get it were six bottles of water and a bag of ice. I mean, that is what people were able to take home while they are sitting in the dark with no ability to cool their food and keep it fresh. A.D. Barns Park, no supplies. Tamiami Park, no supplies. The Mall at 163rd Street, in both your and my district, no supplies. And Landmark Property, no water, partial ice. This is the model State for natural disasters. Let us talk about the IA, the granting of individual assistance or lack thereof. Why did the State of Florida, why did Governor Bush, not request automatic individual assistance for both the East Coast and the West Coast? He asked for that assistance immediately in advance of the storm for the West Coast, as if Wilma was going to hit a wall when she crossed over the West Coast and not cross over southeast Florida too. I mean, it took literally until 7:30 last night with the gentleman talking to Secretary Paulison, me talking to Secretary Paulison, who, by the way lives in my district and is a constituent, and obviously knows the devastation, and he was in Washington, and much to his wife's dismay, he told me. But we even have the acting director of FEMA living in our area, and they still were not able to get individual assistance granted. They literally went out on preliminary disaster assessments yesterday, as if you had to drive through a neighborhood to see the devastation. I mean, it was just so frustrating. This is what people are talking about when they say they do not feel their government is responsive to their needs, when they are frustrated beyond belief with the red tape. I mean, it is so simple. It is very difficult to respond to natural disasters, there is no question about that. We lived through the chaos in the last few days. But, come on, if you are going to hold yourself up as a competent model and you are going to say that you are the example to which all others should be held, then you have to live up to that example. Before I turn it back over to the gentleman, I just want to make sure we are not only talking about the one C, competence, we are talking about the cronyism too. I was interested to come across an article today that talked about how Mr. Brown, ``Brownie,'' who was ejected because of his incompetence from FEMA, Secretary Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, extended Michael Brown's contract for another 30 days. For what? The gentleman is on the Committee on Homeland Security. We had this partisan, dependent committee asking the right questions, supposedly, or at least that is what it was set up to do. How are they letting this happen? That is why we need an independent commission. If we had an independent commission, this would not have happened because there would be some accountability. Our constituents want answers. I want to go home and make sure that FPL has the ability as much as they can humanly do to get those lights turned on. They are telling our people they are not going to be able to get those lights turned on possibly until November 22 at the earliest. The other thing really disturbing that I heard and read in the Governor and the State and FEMA's comments today was that they did not anticipate the intensity of the storm and they made a mistake in their calculations. The director of the State EOC, Emergency Operations Center, said today in the paper that they made a mistake in their calculations and did not account for the size of our population in South Florida when calculating how much ice and water was going to be needed. We have the biggest media market in the State. There are more than 6 million people, 7 million people that live in our three counties, if you count Palm Beach too?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield further, let us not even let people believe that now that individual assistance has been granted and that it is being supplied. They do not even have the registration sites set up now. I was driving through the district with the FEMA folks yesterday and people were coming up with their houses crushed in saying, I have got to have some help here. I have a baby. I have a grandmother who needs medicine. When is FEMA coming? The poor guy who I was riding with, he does not know what to tell people. He said, ``This is why we are doing this assessment, ma'am. I understand we are going to try to get help to you as soon as possible.'' Now we are 72 hours out. Every day the Governor says it is going to get one day better. It does not feel that way.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to strongly oppose the Paul amendment and the civic engagement restrictions in the manager's amendment we previously debated. These will have a disproportionate and disparate impact on the State of Florida. I just came back from my district, where the damage caused by Hurricane Wilma has been extensive. Its effects will be felt for months, if not years. Thousands of Floridians are living in shelters, as thousands of homes in the State were severely or completely destroyed. People in Florida, Texas, the Gulf States, and across the country have been affected by these storms and have real life issues to deal with: food, shelter, clothing, fuel, lines for 2 and 3 hours to get fuel. I had to drive 150 miles today before I could find one gas station that only had about a half-hour line. These people need shelter. They are going to need affordable housing. They could care less about partisan politics. These restrictions are misplaced and unnecessary. They preclude legitimate nonprofits from accessing affordable housing funds at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans desperately need this assistance. We should not be clouding the need for affordable housing with partisan politics. I urge my colleagues to stay focussed on the issues that are at the center of people's lives and vote ``no'' on this amendment and ultimately support the gentleman from Massachusetts' motion to recommit.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. The gentleman just mentioned that if we are going to make sure that we are ready for the next natural disaster, often when you talk about events like epic proportions like natural disasters, you think of them in terms of their rarity. Since myself and Mr. Meek are both from Florida, and in the next 2 days we will face what is no longer considered a rarity in our State in the name of Hurricane Wilma that has now reached the point in history that it is the strongest storm on record with the lowest barometric pressure ever to be recorded in the Atlantic Basin and is expected to make landfall in our home State, possibly crossing over either mine or Mr. Meek's district over the weekend. One of the things that we have been emphasizing over the last several days and weeks is that the confidence of the American people in their government has been badly shaken. The gentleman from Oklahoma mentioned that we are not sure how people are expected to be able to have that confidence restored and know that the next natural disaster, or man- made disaster for that matter, that their government is going to be prepared both in terms of getting them ready to deal with that disaster or in the aftermath of that disaster. If you look at the results of Katrina and the aftermath of Katrina, certainly their confidence was not restored. If you look at the revelations that have come from the independent 9/11 Commission's Report, and now yet another report is about to come out from the independent 9/11 Commission that through their private educational foundation they are about to release a report that blasts the FBI for not implementing much of their recommendations. When is this administration, this Republican administration and the leadership here going to listen to the priorities of the American people and make sure that, in terms of disaster preparedness, whether it is man-made or natural, that we not add insult to injury in the aftermath of those disasters by cutting services and badly needed health care and badly needed higher education and assistance for the very people that were victims? And when are they going to make sure that they have adequate preparation to deal with those, the aftermath of those disasters? Right now we have not seen anything other than the development of a partisan committee in this institution to supposedly investigate what happened. Well, if you cannot even know that the FBI and that the administration is going to respond to the report that was issued from the independent 9/11 Commission, then certainly we would have little to no confidence that anything is going to come from a partisan investigation like the one that is going on here.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio. I feel a little odd over here. But, Mr. Speaker, if more of the people on this side of the chamber thought like me, then we would be improving things really significantly here. So I think maybe if I stand here long enough, maybe the philosophical brain waves will travel over here. It is wonderful to have our colleague from Ohio join us in the 30- Something group. We have been trying to encourage our fellow 30- Something Members to join us down here to talk about the things that resonate universally across this country. The gentleman is absolutely right, both gentlemen are. It does not matter whether you are in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Florida, Idaho, California, the things that we talk about on this floor during our hour are resonating and run deep in terms of their impact on Americans, whether you are from the right wing of the spectrum or the left wing of the spectrum. Let us take the cost of college. Obviously, people in our generation, whether they are raising children that are about to go to college, or whether they, in the case of people who are maybe closer to the ages of the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Boren) and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Ryan), who are closer to having been in college than perhaps the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I are, the rising costs of college are just really getting out of control. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) and I just turned 39 a couple of weeks ago, so we are in our last year of eligibility here. So listen, I am a woman, and I am acknowledging that. But there was an article in my paper today in the South Florida Sun Sentinel that talked about the cost of college having risen by one- third over the last 5 years. One-third. Parents have been preparing every year for yet another hit in their pocketbook. The average college costs today at a private college are $21,000, and almost $5,500 at a public university. It does not matter whether you are in a red State or a blue State, and I am going to claim Florida as a purple State. We are 50-50 right down the line when it comes to those elections, so I am not willing to cede that we are a red State just yet. We cannot have our college students face the double-digit tuition increases that have been rained down upon them, coupled with the deep financial aid cuts that have been proposed. That is what is coming out of this Congress right now. One of the things that we mentioned last night was that while we are very critical of the actions that are being proposed here by this Republican leadership, we do have our own set of plans, particularly in terms of how we would approach higher education and making college less expensive. We would make college more affordable in several ways. Our proposal would guarantee a $500 boost to the maximum Pell grant scholarship. We would give students the choice between either a fixed or a variable interest rate when they consolidate their student loans, and we would do so without raising costs for students. We would keep Congress's promise that was made in 2002 on the Republican watch, which still has not been fulfilled, to lower the interest rate cap on student loans at 6.8 percent. The Republican bill reverses that bipartisan agreement and raises student interest rate caps to 8.25 percent. We absolutely have to do not just right by our students, but we have to at least do what we say we are going to do. You cannot just talk about lowering the cost and expanding access to higher education; you actually have to follow up with action on it. And this Republican Congress and their leadership has been dropping themselves into a full- scale reversal and literally closing off access do higher education to Americans across this country.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I would suggest the Web site.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I was getting to cronyism, because there are a lot of Cs that are flying around this Chamber, including the first letter of the word Chamber. The gentleman from Oklahoma and I are freshmen, we just got here, we have been here 10 months. We have conversations on the floor all the time about how astonishing it is that this institution has a pall cast over it, that there is a shadow cast over this place by the culture of corruption, the cronyism, the ethical challenges that some of our Members face, the cronyism in the administration, the appointments of people who are not qualified for the job that they were hired to do. It is time to return this government back to the honest people, back to the people who are in it for right reasons, back to the people who went into public service to make the world a better place, not to line their supporters' pockets, with all due respect. That is literally what I have watched this place become both as an outsider and now as someone who has become a Member of this body.

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

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. And how he is perceived in terms of title?

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

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

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. I was pining for you as well.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Oh, congratulations. That is fantastic.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio for his comments, and he is absolutely right. Number one, I am sorry I was not able to participate with my colleagues last night. I was in my district. And when you are in the district, you really get a true sense of how people are feeling. The gentleman is absolutely right, there is a crisis of confidence out there in America. People really have had their confidence in their government's ability to deal with their everyday problems badly, badly shaken by one scandal after another, by one more bit of evidence of corruption and cronyism. What all of this points to is and is emblematic of is a system that cries out for reform. We absolutely have to have some reform here in Washington, and one of the first reforms that needs to occur is to change this partisan committee that is stacked with Republicans and is currently not being participated in by Democrats and shift it to an independent bipartisan commission that is going to be able to be objective and review what really happened. Every day that has gone by since Katrina's aftermath, a little bit more trickles out, a little bit more dribbles out, and if we are going to be able to restore the American people's confidence in their government's ability to respond to disasters like this, be they natural disasters or man-made disasters in the form of terrorism, we have to start by restoring their confidence and utilize a process that is going to be objective and that they know they can have confidence in in terms of the outcome, like the 9/11 Commission. There is a never-ending possibility of more disaster looming over us. Even now, we have Wilma, the 21st storm looming out there in the ocean, potentially about to bear down on Florida and then the gulf coast again, nearing this weekend. If we do not get the American people answers as to how the aftermath of Katrina occurred and make sure it does not happen again, it is not like we have the luxury of time being on our side. We have storm after storm. We have the fact that you never know when a man-made disaster is going to occur. By their very nature, they are surprise attacks. It means it is ever more important we reform the system and make sure that our government is ready to respond, that we have a comprehensive ability to do that. When we have people engaging in CYA, which is exactly what is occurring here, and when you look at the former Director of FEMA, who in today's paper it was revealed was more worried about his title in the aftermath of Katrina than getting the job done, that is deeply disturbing.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, I have mentioned this before and likened the lack of desire on the part of the Republican leadership here to establish an independent commission. For example, if the executives and CEO of Enron after the fiasco that corporation went through, it would be as if we said, Okay, Mr. CEO of Enron, you go ahead and investigate what happened at Enron and do a report and a full examination of the doings of your corporation and you get back to us and let us know what steps need to be taken to prevent it from happening again. We can do the same thing with Tyco. I think the gentleman is smiling, and people who might hear this description would be sort of laughing to themselves saying of course we would not do that. This leadership is saying of course we would not have an internal partisan committee that would investigate. For some reason that is not ludicrous to the people who run this institution. It would be ludicrous to anybody who was a rational person who would actually want to get to the bottom of what happened. One would think given the information that has come out slowly over the last weeks now that there would be some more deep, abiding concern. Let me go back to what I was saying earlier that came out today. Secretary Chertoff, according to The Washington Post, apparently belatedly named Brown the on-site disaster coordinator on the night of August 30 and declared Hurricane Katrina ``an incident of national significance,'' which is the highest order catastrophe under their new national response plan. This was the reaction of then-Under Secretary Brown and his assistants, ``Demote the Under Secretary to PFO, principal Federal officer?'' an outraged FEMA press secretary Sharon Worthy wrote Brown at 10:54 p.m., soon after Chertoff's decision. ``What about the precedent being set? What does this say about executive management and leadership in the agency?'' Brown's reply was, ``Exactly.'' Reading a little further, there are e-mails ``that show that the government's response plan, 2 years in the making, began breaking down even before Katrina hit the gulf coast. ``Before the storm hit, Brown's deputy chief of staff, Brooks Altshuler, said White House pressure to form an interagency crisis management group was irrelevant even though a task force and principal Federal officer are key parts of the plan.'' He says this: ``Let them play their `Reindeer Games' as long as they are not turning around and tasking us with their stupid questions. None of them have a clue about emergency management.'' Mr. Speaker, these are the people that were responsible for making sure that the people in that picture survived and actually got out and did not have to float in a refrigerator to save their own lives. This is what they were worried about, their own little title and the petty garbage that you would think is reserved for the smallest of issues.

Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, in our last few minutes, I want to just point out that the responsibility lies at the feet of the President. He has the bully pulpit to ask people who are among our wealthiest to make sacrifices. I represent a community that has a lot of wealthy people, and I know they say to me all the time, you know what, I am willing. They understand what the needs are. They get it, and I know we have an hour tomorrow night, that we are going to have an opportunity to come out here again. One of the things I think we should talk about, and I do not want to do a rush job on it, is there are steps we can take. There are things we can do to make people whole. There is a way that we can restore Americans' confidence in their government, and there are reforms that we can and must make. I hope we will have a chance to talk about that more tomorrow night because we have got to take this country in a new direction. It would be irresponsible for us to continue hurtling down the path of irresponsible public policy and harm that we are bringing on people who are already knocked to the ground, and now we are putting our boot on their neck to keep them that way.