Sheila Jackson Lee: “Certainly my deepest thoughts as well to the Hinchey family. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because I come from an area that…”

“Certainly my deepest thoughts as well to the Hinchey family. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because I come from an area that saw the greatest catastrophic flooding in the history of the continental United States. Someone asked me: I haven't heard anything from your State. I said to them: We are still hurting. We do have 120,000 to 130,000 homes still under water. People are living in shells. I am not selfish. I know what is going on in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Florida. We begged the administration to give us the amount of money in their request for what was needed, and we got $44 billion for every victim from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico to Florida to Texas. I can't stand for that, for the desperate people who are in need. I ask the President to reevaluate his submission and to submit to us a reasoned response to the devastation of this State and the other States. I ask the appropriators, who I know are very concerned, to come together to give us the emergency supplemental so that homes can be rebuilt, that homes can be bought out, and that, in fact, the infrastructure that is crumbling and caused the major flooding, that reservoir pools that flooded whole complete developments, can be fixed, that we can do infrastructure and save lives. The people of the floods beg of you, and we will be in the fight. ____________________”