Christopher Shays: “I have been in public life 30 years, and I was sitting in my office thinking, I am not sure I want to participate in…”

“I have been in public life 30 years, and I was sitting in my office thinking, I am not sure I want to participate in this debate because I am seeing people on both sides of the aisle for whom I have such tremendous respect wrestling with this issue; but it is not a good feeling on the House floor, and I cannot describe why. I was hoping that when we were going to debate the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that we would have an effort from day one to include both sides of the aisle. I felt from that process we would have a bill that we would be proud of. It did not seem to work out that way. For me, I have chaired the National Security subcommittee now for 6 years. When I took it over in 1998, we began in 1999, we rewrote the rules so that we would look at terrorism at home and abroad. What we did is we had 19 hearings before September 11, and we had three commissions that came before us and all three commissions, the Bremer Commission, the Hart-Rudman Commission, the Gilmore Commission, they all said the same thing: we have a serious terrorist threat; we need to have an assessment of that threat; we need to have a strategy to deal with it and we need to reorganize our government so that we can implement the strategy. And we did not really pay attention to it.”