Bob Filner: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just want to point out to the chair of the subcommittee--and I…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just want to point out to the chair of the subcommittee--and I guess the chair of the committee also--we're taking an important step today, but it is a small step. And the chair, the gentleman from New Jersey, mentioned other small steps. We aren't going to clean up this backlog, which approaches 1 million cases, without a major step, a major blowing up of the whole way we do this stuff. We just hired 10,000 new people, and the number of claims doubled. So we're not getting anywhere with this brute force kind of thing. I have suggested many times to just cut out the red tape completely, at least in the short term, to clean up the backlog, to say to those who have submitted claims that are backed up both by the medical evidence and with help from veteran service officers--of which we have thousands certified across the Nation--that we ought to accept those claims and honor the service of our veterans. Until we get to a mindset that says blow up the bureaucracy in this thing, we're not going to solve the problem. So all these small steps will be taking forever. Let's pass this small step today, but let us take on a much bigger honoring of our veterans as we just talked about on Memorial Day by saying, you know, some of you have died while waiting for this process to continue, some of you have lost your homes because you didn't get a disability check.…”