Political Quotes

“the only tragedy in this debate is it has taken us 12 months after 9/11 to move on organizing our homeland security and 5 months after the President challenged us with a plan to bring together 22 agencies with 170,000 employees and a $38 billion budget. The only tragedy is we passed this in June and here we are today finally getting around to doing the job of the American people. This may not be a perfect plan, but I can guarantee this is better than what we had before 9/11, and even what we have today. It addresses the issue of coordinating our intelligence. In fact, one of the four key components of this new agency is something we in Congress called for in 1999 and 2000 and which the administration back then looked at us and laughed. It is required in this plan to have a coordination of intelligence and data fusion. This plan provides for support for our first responders. In fact, for the first time, the President has called for $3.5 billion of new money to support local emergency responders, police, fire, and EMS. It provides for transportation security and the transfer of technology and the research necessary to understand emerging threats like chemical and biological weapons. This new piece of legislation finally implements a program that we paid for back in 1997 to use our satellites above to detect wildland fires so we can go into those areas of the West and deal with them immediately. That should have been done 5 years ago.”