Political Quotes

“I thank my colleague from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Mr. Marino) for organizing this Special Order here this evening. And I know that Representative Marino, like myself, is hearing from our constituents back home in Pennsylvania. They live, many of them, in areas that are surrounded by properties that are habitually and repetitively flooded. They pay their flood insurance premiums faithfully each and every year, and they are being negatively impacted by FEMA's implementation of the flood insurance reforms that occurred. Last year, the reforms to the flood insurance program were passed because, since 2006, the Government Accountability Office has warned that the program was putting taxpayers at a high risk because of losses from Katrina back in 2005 and subsequent disasters. And since then, the program has been subsidized by the taxpayers and currently owes the Treasury--we heard earlier this evening perhaps as much as $30 billion. And as the GAO stated, these risks are the result of structural weaknesses and how the rate structure provides funding to the program itself. As a result of this, the House and the Senate came together, and they reformed the program in some very important ways. However, just because the National Flood Insurance Program was in desperate need of reform does not mean that we should just simply walk away and consider our jobs to be done.…”