[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Pages 19810-19811]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSE TO HURRICANE KATRINA

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, there are many things we do not yet know 
about the Government's response to Hurricane Katrina, but two things 
are very clear: The Federal Government's response was unacceptable, and 
the victims and all Americans deserve to know why.
  Following 9/11, preparedness for national emergencies was supposed to 
be a priority for our Government. Americans were made to believe that 
the Government was doing everything it could to prepare for terrorist 
attacks, natural disasters, and national crises. Katrina makes it clear 
that we failed. We must find out why, and we need to do it soon, to 
make sure that devastation, such as caused by this hurricane, never 
happens again, whether natural disaster or act of terrorists.
  When we faced a similar situation after 9/11, Democrats and 
Republicans came together and established an independent blue ribbon 
commission. I am sad to see the Republicans now want a different 
approach. We don't know the details of their approach. I have been 
talked to on a couple of occasions very lightly about having either 
chairmen, ranking members, and a few members from some of the 
committees to get together. It would be a joint task force of the House 
and the Senate.
  I have great confidence in the Senate committee structure. The 
chairmen and the ranking members are where they are based on the rules 
of the Senate, something that is called seniority. Democrats do it a 
little differently than the Republicans, but it is still basically a 
seniority system. So that is why I have confidence in the HELP 
Committee, with Mike Enzi from Wyoming, a fair man, and Ted Kennedy, 
the ranking member, a fair man; also, Homeland Security with Susan 
Collins and Joe Lieberman.
  I could go through the whole committee structure we have in the 
Senate. They do good work together, as indicated by what has been going 
on in the Judiciary Committee with the relationship developed with 
Senator Specter and Senator Leahy. At a very difficult time in the 
history of our country, with two Supreme Court vacancies, they are 
working their way through this. I do not think it is the time to invent 
something new.
  Yesterday, the Republicans unveiled very briefly their proposal to 
investigate the events of last week. They called it a bipartisan 
commission. I do not have the details of this--there are no details--
but what little I do know raises serious concerns about whether their 
proposal will provide Americans the answers they deserve.
  I went through how Senate leadership is picked with the committees. 
That is not how it works in the House anymore. I can remember being 
elected to the House of Representatives and meeting a wonderful man by 
the name of Cliff Young, who served in the House a number of terms, a 
Republican Congressman from Nevada. After leaving the House, he later 
served more than 20 years in the Nevada State Senate, became the chief 
justice to the Nevada Supreme Court, and served there for more than two 
decades. Cliff Young told me: Harry, when you come back to Washington 
in the House of Representatives, there are two things I want you to do. 
No. 1, use the gym. You need to keep your body strong. And No. 2, do 
not do anything to change the seniority system because in that large 
body of 435, stability is needed. The one thing that gives that body 
stability is seniority.
  That has been thrown out the window. Now the leadership in the House 
on the committees wants whoever appears to be the nicest to the Speaker 
and to the majority leader. If they do anything wrong, boy, they are 
booted out. We have examples of that. They would not even let Chris 
Smith from New Jersey have a subcommittee because he did not vote the 
way they wanted him to on a number of issues. He is gone. That is not 
what we need to be looking at after the disaster that took place in the 
Gulf Coast.
  What has been proposed is not bipartisan. It is like a baseball 
player saying, we have a great deal here. The game is going to move 
more quickly and I think it will turn out pretty well. I am going to do 
the pitching and I am also going to call the balls and strikes.
  This is not the way we should do things. It may speed up the ball 
game, but one does not get the results that are fair.
  We have a Republican President, a Republican House, and a Republican 
Senate. We should not have the pitcher calling the balls and strikes. 
The President has already said he is going to lead an investigation of 
what went wrong. On its face, that is flawed. It is flawed to try to 
change what we are doing in regular order. It is wrong. We have a role 
for committees. We have a committee structure in place to investigate.
  I have had somebody ask, well, why should Secretary Chertoff have to 
appear at a committee in the House and then one in the Senate?
  That is the way we do things around here. That is what oversight is 
all about. We have the ability to do things on a short-term basis under 
what we call regular order, have Congress itself, in its role in 
oversight, do what is done in the ordinary course. We have seen what 
happens when this administration investigates itself or any 
administration investigates itself. It simply does not work.
  There are serious concerns about this so-called Republican approach. 
That is why Americans deserve answers independent of politics. That is 
why Democrats and Republicans preferred an independent commission for 
investigating 9/11. It took awhile before the President signed on to 
it, but when he finally did, we got great people such as Hamilton and 
Kean. They did a wonderful job as the chairmen of this 9/11 Commission. 
They came up with facts that have been supported. They spent a year 
with a staff that was adequate to come up with what went wrong on 9/11.
  We are ultimately going to have an independent bipartisan commission 
to study what went wrong with the Government's response to Katrina. 
There is no question about that. So we should move that along and get 
it done as quickly as possible. In the meantime, have the committees of 
jurisdiction in the House and the Senate do what they are obligated to 
do by virtue of their role in history.
  I would hope that on this issue we can move forward on a bipartisan 
basis. If we use the model of the 9/11 Commission, the majority still 
gets the edge because with 9/11 what happened is the President picked 
the chair. As it turned out, the Republicans had one more vote on the 
commission than did the Democrats, but it worked out OK. While that may 
not be perfect, it is certainly more perfect than this very awkward 
presentation that has been made in the last 24 hours about this so-
called bipartisan commission. That is Orwellian. That is not 
bipartisan.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Minnesota.

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