During a speech on the House floor on Wednesday, Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) spoke about Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over her response to the flooding in Texas.
00:00Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address the House for five minutes and to revise and extend my remarks.
00:09Without objection.
00:11Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart to mourn the loss of so many lives across Texas.
00:18We lost the hope of our future, so many children, so many beautiful girls who just went to camp to have a good time, to bond with their friends, and to have that time that we all cherish from our memory and our own childhood.
00:38And too many lives have been lost, and we have the responsibility as members of government to have a look at why, what happened, what could we do better, and how can we make sure that things like this never, ever, ever happen again.
00:58What we know, unfortunately, is that partisan politics had a role.
01:04Republicans have historically denied the ongoing effects of climate change and what is happening in our country.
01:13Over the last decade, we've had more and more intense storms, unexpected, throughout the entire country, but surely in Texas.
01:21We've had freezes that have killed hundreds of people, and now we've had a one-in-a-hundred-year catastrophic rainstorm that produced horrific floods and tragic loss of life.
01:35And what happened in this policy is that Republicans, at every level of government in our state, failed the people of Texas.
01:44At the local level, they refused to have support grants from the Biden administration that would have put in place critical sirens and warning equipment that would have warned these kids at this camp to get out and flee and seek higher ground.
02:00What we know is that communities that accepted these resources, they all survived.
02:06The warnings worked.
02:07This community didn't want to accept help from a Democrat, and now we have hundreds of people that are dead.
02:18Requests were made from the state to help, ultimately, and our governor denied requests three times for over a million dollars each time that would have again tried to provide warning equipment, again failing.
02:35And now what we have in our federal government is FEMA.
02:40FEMA is designed to be there as a last resort for communities when these unimaginable tragedies strike.
02:48FEMA trains and provides our first responders, the first line of defense, the people that go in and risk their lives at a time when it is most dangerous.
02:58And they can't do it alone, and FEMA provides critical training, resources, and supplementation.
03:07FEMA is designed to have immediate response within a minimum of 15 hours.
03:13But under President Trump and his canceling of FEMA, defunding FEMA, firing FEMA employees, terminating hundreds of FEMA employees, it was over 72 hours before critical resources were brought into Texas.
03:3072 hours is critical when you're floating in a river and you need help.
03:3672 hours makes the difference between life and death in these situations.
03:43And Trump and our federal government failed.
03:47After Katrina, we saw how inadequate FEMA can be sometimes.
03:51We saw the disaster of government when it didn't work.
03:54And Congress put in place some measures to repeal and increase FEMA.
03:59And one of those was, you have to hire an experienced administrator of FEMA.
04:05Somebody knows what they're doing.
04:07Because this isn't a time to play around.
04:10And this administration hired as the director of FEMA somebody that never even knew whether or not a hurricane season existed.
04:17Somebody has no experience in this area.
04:20And then with our Homeland Security and Secretary Noem, she put in place measures, cost-cutting measures, that catastrophically impacted what the response was in this situation.
04:37Phone calls were never answered.
04:39The day after this flood happened, she canceled the contracts of the people that answer the phone when you call for help.
04:48That is not the response that this government needs.
04:52And we have to do better.
04:54So I am calling upon my Republican colleagues.
04:58I'm calling upon everyone in this Congress to have us come together.
05:02Because these tragedies don't just affect Texas.
05:05They can affect all of us.
05:08Weather is violent and fierce and deadly.
05:12And it's indiscriminate about where it strikes.
05:15But we have the ability to fix it.
05:19So I call all my colleagues to come together.
05:22Let's make it better.
05:24And let's make sure that these tragedies don't happen again.
