On the recordApril 9, 2019
I am honored to be a part of this Special Order tonight. I want to highlight the dire situation in my home State of South Dakota. Our State is just barely beginning to recover from dramatic flooding while, simultaneously, we are trying to prepare for the disaster to get worse as a blizzard this week will dump freezing rain and more than a foot of snow onto already saturated ground. Now, I have heard colleagues talk about similar and, in some cases, even more dramatic damage to their homes, and we have seen, in their States and in mine, commerce interrupted; we have seen livelihoods devastated; we have seen cattle killed; and, worse yet, we have seen human life lost. Now, within South Dakota, there have been many impacted communities, although perhaps none more dramatically than Indian Country. When I have talked to President Bear Runner, Pine Ridge; President Bordeaux, Rosebud; or Chairman Frazier from Cheyenne River, their texts, their phone calls, our face-to-face meetings, they are heavy with the frustration and the exhaustion, the irritation, the concern about what is going on for their people. Madam Speaker, put more appropriately, they are concerned for what is going on with our people.…
