Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his leadership and for yielding time. Clearly, when you look at the problems with the National Flood Insurance Program, what brought us to this point were a number of things. One was that the program continued to lapse over and over again. Multiple times, Congress had passed many patches and Band-Aids. And ultimately, we would like to see a private marketplace where people could go buy flood insurance. In fact, the Federal Government requires that people in many areas purchase flood insurance, and yet the only place you can go right now is NFIP. You can only go there to buy this, which is a requirement for people purchasing a home in many places. So if you look at how the implementation by FEMA is adversely affecting millions of people across the country--specifically, some examples we have seen in southeast Louisiana, in my district, point out these glaring inequalities that have to be fixed by this Congress for this program to work properly. In fact, many of the things that we all want to see to get to an actuarially sound program will be undermined if the FEMA implementation goes forward without the reforms that we have been building a bipartisan coalition to implement. And if you look at this--I will give you a couple of examples, Mr. Speaker, in south Louisiana.…”