Shelley Berkley: “I watched the testimony of former FEMA Director Michael Brown yesterday. By any measure, it was a shameful and…”

“I watched the testimony of former FEMA Director Michael Brown yesterday. By any measure, it was a shameful and disgraceful performance. More disgraceful is the revelation that after being appointed to a position for which he was completely unqualified, after doing a horrific disservice to his fellow citizens in Louisiana and Mississippi, after embarrassing our country in the eyes of the world, he is still on the payroll of FEMA. But after hearing Michael Brown's hearing yesterday, the need for an independent commission is even more glaringly obvious. The American people are demanding it. And why are they demanding it? Because we have seen that the Department of Homeland Security is fundamentally flawed. It is not working, and we need to know why and we need to know what to do to fix it. Just the scale of the disaster alone, it is important to never repeat that again in our country. The amount of money alone justifies that we do an independent investigation. $200 billion of our taxpayers' money is going down South, and we have no idea what it is being used for or how it is being spent. And the issue of cronyism needs to be explored. Eighty percent of the contracts for Katrina and Rita are nonbid contracts for no reason. Let us not be shamed as we were to the 9/11 Commission. Let us make this independent commission a reality now. ____________________”