[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 21491]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




     CALLING FOR INDEPENDENT COMMISSION REGARDING HURRICANE KATRINA

  (Ms. BERKLEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. BERKLEY. Mr. Speaker, I watched the testimony of former FEMA 
Director Michael Brown yesterday. By any measure, it was a shameful and 
disgraceful performance. More disgraceful is the revelation that after 
being appointed to a position for which he was completely unqualified, 
after doing a horrific disservice to his fellow citizens in Louisiana 
and Mississippi, after embarrassing our country in the eyes of the 
world, he is still on the payroll of FEMA.
  But after hearing Michael Brown's hearing yesterday, the need for an 
independent commission is even more glaringly obvious. The American 
people are demanding it. And why are they demanding it? Because we have 
seen that the Department of Homeland Security is fundamentally flawed. 
It is not working, and we need to know why and we need to know what to 
do to fix it. Just the scale of the disaster alone, it is important to 
never repeat that again in our country. The amount of money alone 
justifies that we do an independent investigation. $200 billion of our 
taxpayers' money is going down South, and we have no idea what it is 
being used for or how it is being spent. And the issue of cronyism 
needs to be explored. Eighty percent of the contracts for Katrina and 
Rita are nonbid contracts for no reason. Let us not be shamed as we 
were to the 9/11 Commission. Let us make this independent commission a 
reality now.

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