Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “I can tell you I just strutted in from helping my first graders with their homework. Just so you know, I have my…”

“I can tell you I just strutted in from helping my first graders with their homework. Just so you know, I have my priorities straight. I spent a couple of minutes listening to your exchange and cannot help but chime in here and express my deep concern which I know my good friend from Florida (Mr. Meek) shares as well. We had our Governor and FEMA represent our delegation in advance of Wilma. You have got Katrina and we all are very familiar with the lack of preparation clearly and the aftermath of Katrina and the disaster literally of the aftermath of Katrina but then you fast-forward a couple of months to Wilma when we had 2 months that FEMA could have learned from some of those mistakes and dealt with the preparedness issues that they were really poor on and the aftermath response issues that they received incredibly poor marks on. You would think that they would have fixed it. But in our case, our Governor and FEMA represented to us that we were the model State. I say this not to be too specific about any one State's preparation, but FEMA and the Florida government represented that our State was the most prepared. We can tell you that if our State and their response to Wilma is the pride and joy, is the model for preparation in disaster response, then we should all be deeply concerned about the other 49 States and their preparedness and potential response for a natural or a man-made disaster like a terrorist attack.”