Political Quotes

“On the subject of investments, that is something that had not been done in this Congress. We talked about the 6 years prior to the new Democratic Congress taking over, one of the things that had been unresolved was a water resources development bill, which is the critical infrastructure needs across this country, the most obvious of which is the gulf coast in Louisiana and Mississippi, what happened with Hurricane Katrina and the unmet investment since that time. But all across this country, including in my district, we had severe flooding in western Pennsylvania in 2004 and again this summer. And we continue to have this discussion, and I am sure you have the same thing in Florida, that after the fact we come in and say, Why wasn't something done to prevent this? Why didn't we improve, in the case of western Pennsylvania, the locks and dams and the critical infrastructure that needs to be done to prevent the floods? Why didn't we bring in the Corps of Engineers and do the research and do the construction necessary to prevent the disaster from happening in the first place? Well, that hadn't been done. The water resources development bill, WRDA, the WRDA bill hadn't been done. In 2-year increments, it is supposed to be reauthorized. They hadn't done it in 7. So what did we do when we came into this new Congress? We made the difficult decisions and did the water resources bill.”