Garret Graves

And, most essentially, we need that $2 billion Community Development Block Grant program so that we can try to go in and convince these people that the right thing to do is to stay in their communities.

We need to do the Comite River diversion program. We need to erase the backlog of $724 million in emergency dollars through the Department of Transportation.

We have to get a supplemental done. Without a supplemental, the government will never have the ability to set up a program to match the unmet need that people are going to have.

It is absolutely unacceptable to think that we're going to find a way to charity ourselves out of this thing.

There is this unbelievable perception out there that the cost of inaction is free.

We're going to donate in charity and volunteer our way out of the fourth most costly disaster in the United States--flood disaster in United States history.

I don't think that can work that way.

I just want us to be fair and try to work in a way to just get people what we can give them right now.

If our first thought is always that America's citizens are looking for a way to beat the system, then we're never going to make any progress.

What do we tell those people? Is the Stafford Act sufficient to respond to this disaster?

I did call Congressman Graves. We did get water.

So homes will be not only--have they been not only underwater, now they're going to be underwater and people walking away and their jobs.

We got together and rescued our own people. We did it.

The Stafford Act is entirely insufficient to respond to this disaster.

This is an entirely insufficient situation.

This is not Louisiana. This is not Baton Rouge. What you saw today, number two, we cannot, we should not let this shooter dictate what happens here and how we respond and proliferating hate.

This is not our community. This is not how we respond, and learning that the shooter was actually from Missouri confirms that.

I think it will. I think it needs to until we get a better handle of exactly what the threat is.

This amendment makes it clear: as affirmed by the Supreme Court today and mentioned by the committee chairman, Puerto Rico is different from a State, and the Supreme Court affirmed that today. It is not a State. It is a territory of the…

The Federal Government is causing the problems, from an economic and from an environmental perspective.

Why in the world would we want to bring the Federal Government and their record of success into an area that actually has an excellent record of managing resources for energy development, commercial and recreational fishing, and multiple…

As Congressman Duncan mentioned, the largest dead zone in North America is off the coast of Louisiana.

The Federal Government, through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--their actions in regard to the management of the river system in south Louisiana has largely resulted in the loss of about 1,900 square miles of coastal wetlands.

Is that because the offshore energy production does not affect our coast?

Why is Alaska more important than the Gulf Coast, and why are the western states more important than the Gulf Coast?