Eleanor Holmes Norton

That seems, Mr. Chairman, to be minimally necessary.

What in the world can you do if information that is true and will forever be true about your medical condition is out there?

if 41 of the 50 States already understand this, it does seem to me ... that we would want to bring forward a bill to make sure that this is done nationally.

This is a structural problem. Your mandate is to keep Louisiana, to keep Mississippi, from getting too much money.

It is unconscionable.

We cannot sit by and really hope that outsized disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 will never occur again.

Report is one thing, permission is another. If we get into permission matters, the supersized disaster we are talking about will be supersized repeated.

I was concerned that the inauguration was so big this time that there was, at first, the notion that the Reserves should be under some dual command.

these duplicative functions were cited as a primary cause of the failed response of Hurricane Katrina.

We are frustrated with the Agency not seeing the structural defeat.

What is a catastrophic disaster? Note that word: 'catastrophic disaster.' Think of it as a new invention.

There is no way to argue that we can ease up on Louisiana and Mississippi a little bit; because we have been at this for a long time.

We had to pass a post-Katrina act; we even had to pass a bill that never got through the Senate.

What did we learn from Hurricane Katrina, as well as from other disasters in the United States and around the world?

I can tell you this much, we are going to build a Department of Homeland Security over in Ward 8. It is going to be a LEED building.

With a new administration, I think it is a fair to ask, are you, Mr. Fugate, in light of the broad bipartisan criticisms of FEMA since Hurricane Katrina...would not a wholesale overhaul of the Agency be in order at this time to ensure that…

We need to get all of that extra help that you gave to Louisiana and Mississippi, and they will do it.

Let me indicate that the Appropriations Committee supports our view, it would support it many times over now, that we don't have money to spend on another top layer beside the top layer that is already there.

What is your objection to having all parties agree upon a procedure... considering that you are keeping $3 billion from the citizens of Louisiana?

the armed forces of the United States constitutionally is under the Commander in Chief, and that constitutional barrier is of some interest to us.

You don't have a right under the Stafford Act to be where you were before, to be close to work.

We could not even get the prior administration to acknowledge the structural problem.

Half a billion is on appeal, at least $3 billion is in dispute, and the notion that we would even discuss with FEMA things like ALJs...

Now, we have figured out, because industry helps us to figure out, we have real-time figures now about the payback.

you don't want Congress twice revisiting. Then you get us really mad, and you lose authority