Maxwell Frost: “Mr. Speaker, creating the Department of Homeland Security is a bipartisan idea and it remains a bipartisan priority, but…”

“Mr. Speaker, creating the Department of Homeland Security is a bipartisan idea and it remains a bipartisan priority, but building a big new 170,000 person Federal bureaucracy is a difficult project. After all, our goal is not just moving boxes around inside the government. It is to increase the security of the American people in the real world. To succeed, Democrats have reached out to work with the administration. Indeed, the entire House of Representatives has worked overtime to make sure we could get this bill to the President's desk by September 11. On a bipartisan basis, Members have recommended a number of important, good faith changes to the administration's original proposal. Republican leaders on the Select Committee on Homeland Security unfortunately rejected many of these bipartisan improvements, and they snuck in several ideological and partisan side issues, controversial riders that, in some cases, actually threaten the effectiveness of the Department of Homeland Security. That is why I, along with so many others, have argued from the beginning that the entire House needed the opportunity to vote on these controversies on the floor.”