Political Quotes

“I will try to make my remarks short. I know several of my colleagues have places they need to be and have a time schedule they are on. I was involved in a committee hearing this afternoon and could not contribute to the debate on the floor on the Flood Insurance Program. I have about 8 months left in the Senate. I just want to remind us of what we have just done. We have solved a very short-term problem and made a long-term problem significantly worse. We did not really do our work because we were in such a hurry to take the political pressure off of the increases in the flood insurance rate. Addressing that issue was important, and I agree that we needed to make some adjustments. But what we did is we chose politicians to win and the future to lose when it comes to flood risk mitigation and flood risk cost for the American public. Are there some positive things in the bill? Yes. But what we did once again is we put our political positions ahead of the best interests of this country. The Biggert-Waters bill was a great reform bill. What happened is when we passed it, we did not recognize the tremendous rate increases many people would have. In the last 5 years in this country, we spent $1.6 billion at FEMA reevaluating all of the flood plains in this country. The whole purpose behind that was to really put a risk of what is out there based on what we have and slowly get to a point where we are actually measuring the risk.…”