Joe Lieberman: “I come to the floor to quite literally say amen to everything Senator Collins has said on behalf of our amendment and in…”

“I come to the floor to quite literally say amen to everything Senator Collins has said on behalf of our amendment and in respectful opposition to the amendment that Senator Clinton has proposed. We had a disaster, a catastrophe last year in Hurricane Katrina that was natural, and then we had a manmade disaster which was the shockingly inadequate response of the Federal, State, and local governments to that catastrophe that was called Katrina. So our committee spent months investigating, told the story, and considered what we could do to make sure nothing like the Federal Government's inadequate, incompetent reaction and response ever occurred again. We considered the responsibility that some have raised of taking FEMA, or a replacement agency such as we are proposing, out of the Department and making it independent again. But it made no sense to us. If you have a Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to be our major Department to prepare for and respond to disasters, natural and manmade, then why would we want to take the emergency management agency, which is all about responding to disasters, natural and terrorist, out of that Department? It would be, as I said at one of our hearings, like taking the U.S. Army out of the Department of Defense because you were not happy with the management of the U.S. Army, so you take it out.…”