[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 18663]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         HURRICANE SANDY RELIEF

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New 
York (Mr. Rangel) for 2\1/2\ minutes.
  Mr. RANGEL. I was just asking my friend, Joe Crowley, is there a 
legislative possibility that we could bring this to the floor. I think 
everybody has enough compassion for the Speaker after what he's been 
through with his own party trying to get some bills to the floor to 
understand that anything, even something this enormous, could have 
fallen between the cracks. What a great opportunity to say let's try to 
put these pieces together.
  In any event, nobody has said it's impossible to do it; and if it's 
just a question of pride in terms of party unity, I can't think of 
anything at this time that would be better served than to have all of 
America especially thank the Speaker for reconsidering trying to help 
the lives of tens of thousands of American people.
  Once again, I don't know what my chances are going to be getting into 
Heaven, but the absence of listening to the compassionate support of 
the religious community is deafening to me. I know their strong 
position about same-sex marriage and about women controlling their 
bodies and all of those things. And I say, if you write the book, you 
have the rules, do what you have to do.
  But, my God, when it comes to caring for people, not New York, New 
Jersey and Connecticut, not just the United States, but all over the 
world, can't there be some people that have compassion to know that 
this is what God expects us to do? That's why we say, in God we trust, 
because we're supposed to take care of fiscal calamities, which we 
fail, but the compassion is not in the parties, it's in the people. And 
these people could be your neighbors today and someone else's neighbor 
tomorrow.
  And this great United States, what a great insurance policy to have, 
to have friends from different communities, different backgrounds to 
know, as we say in the hood, we got your back. That's what it's all 
about. People all over the world, when they have a problem, no matter 
what the political differences are, know that America will have enough 
compassion to put aside those differences and to send out our men, our 
women and our firefighters over there, to do what, to help.
  How do we possibly explain to our kids and grandkids that when it 
came to Americans, when it came to people who fight and die for this 
country, that we not only didn't help, but worse than that, we turned 
our back on them?

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