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Floor Statement: Hurricane Ike, Energy, Military Voting Protection

Hurricane Ike, Energy, Military Voting Protection. - Wednesday, September 17, 2008 View video | Can't view the video?

Mr. President, yesterday I had the chance to once again to tour the devastated area in my state of Texas caused by Hurricane Ike, this time with the President of the United States and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary Mike Leavitt, along with David Paulison with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It had been two days before that on Sunday which I had done the same thing in Southeast Texas in the Beaumont area talking to the mayors and county judges in that afflicted part of the state as well as Galveston, particularly Orange County and Galveston County, on the southeast part of our state, which took the brunt of Hurricane Ike. 

I want to say that there are a lot of people who are hurting now in Texas. We have roughly two million people without power. Many people have left their homes under evacuation orders and don't know what the condition of their home is and certainly are dying to get back so they can assess where they are, whether they've been wiped out or whether there is something they'll be able to rebuild and recover from. But at the same time we know there are people who are in evacuation shelters set up by the Red Cross with FEMA's help and others where they're getting the necessities of life - food, water, and shelter. But these are the very same people who are eager to get back home to see whether their house is still standing, whether they can rebuild, as I say, or whether they're going to have to start from scratch. 

I just want to say that the emergency response by the state of Texas, primarily the governor and his team, as well as the leaders at the local level, the county judges and mayors, was really about as good as I could imagine it could have been. Unfortunately Hurricane Gustav, which turned out not to be as severe as many thought and millions literally evacuated, I don't think many people felt like Ike was going to be as bad as it turned out to be. So many people hunkered down in place and did not take the advice of the local and state leadership to evacuate. Unfortunately now they find themselves, roughly two million people, without power. Yesterday Mayor Thomas in Galveston pointed out that not only have the toilets not flushed since last Friday in Galveston, that it not only presents an inconvenience and a hardship, but it is also a public health hazardous.

We have many people who yesterday they decided to give the people a chance to look and leave. If they were worried about their homes, give them a chance to come back on Galveston Island, check it out and then leave. The air conditioning, the refrigeration, the basic services provided by power were not available. Unfortunately, I think if you saw, like I did, the entry and exit into Galveston Island was jammed with people wanting to come back under the look-and-leave policy. But the mayor decided, and I think wisely so, to suspend that because of the logjam. 

I do want to say in the worst of disasters, usually you find the greatest examples of the human spirit. Neighbors helping neighbors, faith-based organizations, for no other cause than serving their very basic mission, are out there making sure people are fed, making sure they're sheltered and doing everything they can to try to help people to rebuild their lives. We were fortunate in one sense that the storm was not as bad as originally predicted. At one point it was estimated that 125,000 homes would be lost, that the surge would reach up to 25 feet. That is, the water that is being pushed ahead of the storm would come up the Houston Ship Channel and cause massive flooding and destruction possibly loss of human life. While too many did, in fact, lose their life, it was not as bad as it could have been.

Texans remember, and history reminds us, that it was just 1900 when Galveston was hit by another hurricane where 6,000 to 8,000 people died. Fortunately this time the numbers were in the single digits in Texas. And because not only of the preparation, because of modern building codes which created stronger houses for those who did decide to hunker down, and also the search and rescue operation conducted by the state and Federal authorities working together to try to get people out who had been trapped, literally, without electricity, without power, without gasoline, we were able to get many people out and to safety in these shelters.

But it is important, I think, for the people of this country to know that no matter who you are or where you live, that we do have the systems in place, both at the local and state, but also at the Federal level to be of assistance to you if you need help. And now, of course, as I mentioned, many people are trapped really where they are. Maybe they went to a hotel. Maybe they went to a friend's or relative's house. With the President yesterday he announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal emergency response agency, had authorized people to basically stay in the hotel or motel, if that's where they were located, for up to 30 days while the power gets restored and while cleanup and maybe downed power lines are removed. So that ought to give people some relief that they're not going to have to look to money they don't have just to be able to pay the bill to stay in place if they're in a hotel or motel for the next 30 days if they come from the affected counties.

Now, because of the major disaster declaration that occurred, both public assistance in terms of helping to rebuild the affected areas in the state, but also personal assistance is available through FEMA. The first step is, we tried to announce to the public yesterday, but which because of obviously people don't have Internet access when their power's down. They don't have televisions to watch the announcements or maybe even radios to be able to know what to do. But it's important for the public to know, and I think not just in the affected regions, that they need to register with FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for personal assistance, and that's the first step to getting back to your house, making sure that any damages are appropriately assessed and making sure that the affected people get the help that they're entitled to under the law. 

I would just add in addition to the Federal Emergency Management Agency website and their 1-800-number, that if my constituents call any one of my offices either here or in Washington, D.C., which we kept open 24/7 during the storm, but also any of my regional offices in Tyler, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Harlingen, Lubbock or Austin, that we will get them the help that they need and that they're entitled to.

My hope is, Mr. President, as I've heard some rumors from the other side, the House, that Speaker Pelosi was talking about moving a stimulus package, a huge additional spending package of roughly $50 billion, that there would be some provisions in there for disaster recovery, for wildfires and other things. I would welcome that but with this caution, that we not allow politics and the opportunity to use this as a sort of Christmas tree for a bunch of bloated spending that is not necessary to restore people to their homes and to repair the damaged infrastructure, that this not be used as an occasion for politics. To me the most cynical thing that could possibly happen in Congress is that we look past the people that are in immediate need and we look for political opportunities to perhaps spend the taxpayers' money on programs that would not otherwise pass because they're somehow bundled up with emergency spending for storm relief.

There's one other thing I learned in this disaster that I think is very important as we look at dealing with our energy crisis generally with the high price of gasoline and the high price of oil, which is perhaps the number one economic concern of the American people today. The Gulf Coast is, indeed, a laboratory of energy that supplies the daily needs of our country. And when a big hurricane comes in, like this one did, of the 25 refineries, these are the places that actually make gasoline out of oil, representing more than a quarter of the nation's refining capacity, 17 of the 25 had to be taken off line because of the storm. In addition, nine different oil pipelines, these are the major oil pipelines that transmit oil from the Gulf to various parts of the country, they also had to be shut down because of Hurricane Ike. And these are going to have an impact on America's oil an gas supply.

Hopefully the preliminary indications are going to prove to be true and that there were no major environmental spills or problems associated with this. But, to me, it was just another reminder of how much Congress needs to remember that we cannot put all of the nation's energy, or at least 25% of it, in one place, and it is literally like putting all of your eggs in one basket. As the saying goes, if you put all of your eggs in one basket, you better make sure that you take care of that basket. The fact of the matter is as I think we look forward to hopefully removing the moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf, drilling and exploration and production of oil and building of refineries here at home so that we have to depend less on imported energy from the Middle East, that we will remember the lessons of Hurricane Ike, Hurricane Gustav, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Rita. Because, frankly, putting so much of our nation's energy capacity in an area that is from time to time going to be affected by these natural disasters is, I think, something we ought to take note of and do something about. And by producing the ability or at least allowing the ability for more development, exploration, building of pipelines, building of refineries in other parts of the country, and producing more here at home, we will, as we use less, by conservation measures, we can produce more American energy so that we are less reliant on imported oil from the Middle East.

I would just say that, you know, there had been a lot of interesting proposals being made, but I want to caution my colleagues against some of the proposals that claim to do more about drilling but which, in fact, create further obstacles to further American exploration and drilling. And, as a matter of fact, one of the initial proposals that we saw, and I know this was in good faith, I'm not questioning the good faith of the proponents but the effect of it would be to raise taxes and diminish domestic oil production and actually limit energy exploration. Now it's true we would go from 85% to roughly 70% of the Outer Continental Shelf that would be available for drilling under this proposal, but what we would in effect be doing is putting a 60-vote barrier on going into that other 70% in the future. I don't know if we're willing to acknowledge the fact that modern drilling technology will allow for the exploration and production of oil in one place, like the Outer Continental helf, why we would restrict it in other places on the Outer Continental Shelf or developing the oil shale out West or perhaps even in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a 2000 acre piece of frozen tundra in the middle of a 19 million acre wildlife refuge.  And that's something that I think can be developed in an environmentally responsible way.

Mr. President, I want to just move to another topic and just say that I am pleased that an amendment, which I have offered, that will protect military voting rights has been apparently accepted as part of the managers package on the Defense Authorization bill. This is a provision I offered last week and we've been unsuccessful getting a vote on it.  I'm glad that through negotiations and a bipartisan effort between the bill managers, Senator Levin, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee and Senator Warner, the former chairman, who is the Minority bill manager, that's been accepted as part of the managers' package.

The fact of the matter is that according to statistics compiled by the US Election Assistance Commission, only 992,000 of the 6 million eligible military overseas voters were able to request an absentee ballot for the 2006 election. Only 330,000 of those ballots were filled out and actually reached election officials. That means, in other words, that only 5.5% of the eligible military and overseas voters were able to fill out a ballot and mail it in and have it counted. 

To me, that's just a scandalous statistic and one that I'm glad that this body, in a bipartisan fashion, is going to respond to and say "no more." We're going to deal with this issue in a way that makes sure that those who are fighting, deployed in very dangerous places, that their ballot's going to count just as much as our ballots here in the Continental United States.

Today is Constitution Day, and it was 221 years ago today when the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia completed their work, and 39 of them signed it and gave us the very government that we have come to know, we have come to love, and sometimes there are those who say they have come to loathe it. But today we celebrate the very fact that we live in a country where people have the freedom of speech, that we have our political rights to petition government, where government's power is acknowledged to come from the governed. We, the people, as Lincoln said -- a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And it's not just the decision of a small group of people here in Washington, D.C. This literally is government of the people and representing all 300 million of us that live in this country that was created that day by that constitution.