Sylvester Turner: “I think our complaints are easy to understand. We feel very strongly that the 9/11 Commission presented us with a…”

“I think our complaints are easy to understand. We feel very strongly that the 9/11 Commission presented us with a package of 41 recommendations that the Commission and their cochairs all said are important. H.R. 10 only fully implements 11 of those recommendations. The Republican bill only implements 15 of them partially, and the Republican bill ignores or only mentions in passing the other 15 recommendations. The substitute that we offered on this floor implements all of the recommendations. It does it in an effective way, and it makes the kind of commitment that Democrats have argued for the last 2 years must be made to make America safe. We are investing today $20 billion more on homeland security than we did prior to 9/11, but in the last fiscal year, when we were investing that additional $20 billion, we were investing four times that in tax cuts for American families who make over $1 million a year. That is the wrong choice, it is the wrong priority, and our bill moves faster, it moves stronger in protecting the homeland than H.R. 10 offered by the Republican leadership.”