Implementing The 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007
IMPLEMENTING THE 9/11 COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS ACT OF 2007 -- (House of Representatives - January 09, 2007)
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Mr. KING of New York. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time.
Mr. Speaker, as I said at the outset of the debate, I commend the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) on his elevation to the position of chairman. He is an outstanding Member of this House, and I look forward to working with him in a bipartisan manner throughout the next 2 years.
I must say, however, that I am deeply disappointed in the manner in which this bill was brought to the floor today and, indeed, with many of the provisions that are in this bill. I say that as someone who lost more than 150 friends, neighbors and constituents on September 11th, who has a number of staff members working for me who lost relatives on September 11th, so no issue is more important to me than getting homeland security right and making it work.
But during the previous 2 years, certainly during the 15 months that I was chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, it was bipartisan. Every bill that came to the floor went through subcommittee and went through the full committee. Port security legislation, FEMA restructuring, chemical plant security bill, all went through the subcommittee, full committee and were adopted by this House and were signed into law.
In addition to that, we had the risk-based funding bill which went through the committee and again passed on the House floor. It was blocked in the Senate. But the fact is, we got results, and we got them in a bipartisan basis. No bill came to the floor without full bipartisan cooperation from day one.
Now, unfortunately, for whatever reason, as part of the 100 hours show, the leadership refuses to allow any bipartisan input, no committee involvement at all, no subcommittee involvement and no amendments. And in doing that, it is not just a shot at us. We can survive that. We will be back in 2 years. But what I am concerned about is, what this does for the next 2 years and what it does to the Homeland Security Committee, because the 9/11 Commission specifically stated that a committee should be given primary jurisdiction. That should be the Homeland Security Committee.
The Democrats could have taken care of that in their rules package. They refused to do it. So the most important recommendation of the 9/11 Commission is not being enacted today. It is not being done at all. In fact, they are weakening the committee by bypassing the committee process.
I will use as one example what happens when a bill is rushed to the floor without the proper deliberative process. We talk about 100 percent scanning of all cargo coming into our ports. The fact is in the port security bill, which passed the House, passed the Senate and was enacted into law, we set up pilot projects around the world to find a scanning process that works.
The fact is there is no current technology that works at 100 percent. We don't have it. We want to find what works the best. Nowhere in the 9/11 Commission report do they call for 100 percent scanning. All of us want to have it. The fact is we are not going to be able to scan 11 million containers coming into our shores.
Now, last year when this was first raised by the Democratic Party, the Washington Post said it is a terrible idea. It is a slogan, not a solution. We hope lawmakers resist the temptation to use it in the election season to come.
Now, the Washington Post is not exactly an advocate of the Republican Party. Today in their editorial, they talk about what a tough job it is to bring about homeland security. They say it will not be done by wasting money on the kind of political shenanigans written into the sprawling Democratic bill introduced on the House floor today.
The Democrats don't offer a realistic cost estimate for the mandate they will propose, but the cost to the government and the economy is sure to be in the tens of billions of dollars and quite possibly hundreds of billions annually.
Luckily, the Senate will give more thought to its homeland security bill, the Washington Post says, but House Democrats can figure those odds as well as anyone, but why not score some easy political points in your first 100 hours.
Well, the fact is you shouldn't be scoring political points on the issue of homeland security. That is too important an issue to be trivialized the way you are doing it here today. Now I will, in the end, I will vote for this bill despite its faults, because I want to send a bipartisan message that the House stands behind homeland security.
But I will hope that in the future, we will have a Homeland Security Committee which is empowered the way it should be by the Democratic leadership, that a Homeland Security Committee, which I know the chairman wants to do, will work in a bipartisan way so we can address the scourge of Islamic terrorism as Republicans and Democrats and Americans and not having something rammed through to score cheap political points in the 100-hour circus.
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