Kendrick Meek: “I want to make sure that my Republican colleagues know, either in the leadership or the rank and file, that they know it…”

“I want to make sure that my Republican colleagues know, either in the leadership or the rank and file, that they know it is okay for you to call for an independent commission even though there is a Republican in the White House, even though there is an agency appointed by that Republican administration, because we are all Americans. We should have this independent commission to make sure that we are able to deal with the Federal response to natural disasters or terrorist attacks, whenever it may happen, or making sure that we can deal with some of the issues in the present. There are still 100,000 individuals that were affected by Hurricane Katrina that are still in shelters or displaced in some Red Cross emergency housing. The deadline for shelters to be empty was a couple of days ago, but we have trailer parks that are sitting empty. The trailer park has been established, the asphalt has been laid, the trailers have been delivered; but the people cannot move in because of technical issues of getting them in, need it be someone did not hook the power up to the trailer or the sewage is not where it is supposed to be. So there is still a lot of work to be done and lessons to be learned. Any American city, here in Maryland today, there was an alert about a possible tunnel attack. The week before last it was the New York subway station.…”