September 11, 2005

What People Tell Me

I recently completed a series of citizen hours in 12 cities and towns around the 6th Congressional District. I want to thank everyone who stopped by. Democracy can work only if people take the time to meet with their representatives to share their views.

Usually I do two series of town meetings and two series of citizen hours each year. During town meetings I discuss issues with people in groups while during citizen hours the meetings are one-on-one. The focus of citizen hours is problem solving - helping to replace lost Social Security checks, obtaining veterans benefits, appealing federal regulations, seeking information about the military academies and so on. But even with citizen hours being mostly about constituent service, I always learn a lot about what 6th District residents are thinking.

By the time of my last citizen hour on September 2 there were three big issues on people's minds. The newest concern was Hurricane Katrina, the plight of hundreds of thousands of people down south who were displaced from their homes, and the government's lackluster response to the emergency.

Federal, state and local officials have had decades to plan for a Category Five hurricane coming ashore near New Orleans. Katrina devastated an area the size of Great Britain, and it's inevitable that responses to the emergency would take time and include numerous errors. But still, if this is the best we can do with an event which we saw coming well in advance, how can we have confidence in our preparations for major terrorist attacks with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons? We simply must do better, and I support efforts to understand what went right and what went wrong so that we can be better prepared next time.

It should surprise nobody that high gasoline prices were the cause of many heated comments. Everybody knows that gas prices shot up due to disruptions caused by the hurricane. Thirty-five percent of U.S. oil production takes place off the Gulf Coast, numerous oil and gas wells, refineries and pipelines had to be shut down in anticipation of the storm, and a lot of work has to be done to bring everything back online.

But everybody also knows that gas prices were already quite high before Katrina. Many economists point out that the booming economies of China and India are putting enormous pressure on the world's oil supplies. They also note that the record high price for gas in 1981 was $1.38 which, when inflation is taken into account, translates to $3.03 today.

So, in inflation-adjusted terms, current high gas prices are less novel than they seem. Still, they are a tremendous burden on most Americans, and developing forward-looking energy policies is an urgent need despite our major recently-passed energy bill. For the near term, I've called for congressional hearings to see if illegal collusion by the energy companies has anything to do with current prices, and I am pleased that the House Energy and Commerce Committee is doing so.

Finally, of course, people are concerned about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's going to be a March on Washington in late September against our involvement in Iraq, and several people who are planning to participate stopped by my citizen hours and elsewhere to call for a quick departure of American troops.

However, most people continue to believe that we have to finish the job in Iraq. I know how hard this is. I've attended too many funerals for too many of our young troops to take this lightly. Still, there is a great deal of consensus among our neighbors that we can't allow the extremists in Iraq to take control of that country, use it as a sovereign base for further attacks on us, slaughter the Iraqis who have sided with us, and demonstrate to the world that we lack the will to win even when the enemy is remorseless and determined to destroy us at home and abroad.