WASHINGTON - During a statement on the floor of the House of Representatives yesterday, September 7, 2005, Congressman Artur Davis (AL-7) sharply criticized the federal response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Davis further called on the President to address a joint session of Congress and to convene a service at the National Cathedral to honor the numerous lives lost from Hurricane Katrina.

The text of that statement can be found below.

Mr. DAVIS of Alabama. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) for yielding. I certainly thank all of my colleagues in this Chamber who have expressed solicitude to me. But, frankly, that solicitude is better spent on my colleagues from Mississippi and Louisiana. My State of Alabama was gratuitously spared virtually all of this damage. There are certainly people in my State who lost power, there are people in my State who were hurt. But God did not create all suffering on the same scale, and I know the difference between what has happened in my State and what has happened to my colleagues.

I am very proud of the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), I am very proud of the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) for all of the work that they do in this Congress, but particularly for their fortitude in the last week, because, Mr. Speaker, we have been able to sit at these things from a distance. We have been able to talk as compassionate people about these losses.

But the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) have the very hard work of going into their communities and talking to people who are in pain and saying, ``I will use my power to try to help you,'' and seeing the tears in response. So it is they who very much deserve our solicitude tonight, and I am proud to serve with them.

Mr. Speaker, I want to make three points that I think are related. The first one is this:

So many of the people who died -- and we understand that the numbers of the dead will likely exceed 10,000, the largest single disaster in American history -- so many of the ones who died had lives that did not put them on the front page of the newspaper. They had lives that were relatively anonymous. They were hard-working people, trying to make it through their lot in life, and all of a sudden they were cut down in blameless circumstances.

The challenge of leadership, though, is to give an honor and a place to those who die in tragic circumstances. The challenge of real leadership is to lift the anonymity and to put honor on the table.

One of the things that I wish we would see in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker, is for the President of the United States to do what he did the last time our country was seared, to come and gather the House and Senate together in this body, to address the Nation and the Congress, and to paint a vision of how we can do better next time and a vision of how we can rebuild these people.

I would love to see the President go to the National Cathedral, a place he went 4 days after September 11. When he went to the National Cathedral, he gave a status to those victims and lifted them up to a certain place of honor. I would love to see that done for the people in your State of Mississippi and the people in the great State of Louisiana.

These were innocent, hard-working Americans who lost their lives in part because of nature, but in part because of the errors of our government. And it is that second point that I want to turn to tonight.

The country needs this President to admit that his government failed; the country needs this President to come here and say that the standard that was set by FEMA last week is one that was unacceptable for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana; and the country needs this President to name this as the disaster that it was. I cannot say it nearly as eloquently as our friend and colleague, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), but our country is embarrassed when we have power and do not use it intelligently and effectively. Our country is embarrassed when we have the means, the capacity and the ability to know what was happening last week, and still fail to adequately respond to it.

I have heard some of my friends and colleagues on the other side of the aisle say that they were pleased and satisfied and thankful for the job that happened last week, and I would simply differ with them in this one sense: Can we truly be pleased with the lack of response, the constant underestimation, the constant miscalculation? Because if we are pleased with that and we consider that to be good work, our standard is far too low.

The final point that I want to make, I say to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), is one that perhaps should be more obvious to us. The fissures that already exist in our society become even more painful and more acute when there are stresses in our society. Last week, as so many people in this Chamber have said so well, the people who were left in the Superdome, the people not evacuated in time, so many are the people we often do not see. And we owe this next quote to Mr. Brown, the head of FEMA. Mr. Brown said that we learned that there were people that we did not even know existed.

Mr. Brown did not mean to be profound when he said that, but he was unintentionally so, because he did learn and his administration did learn last week that there are people that they did not know existed, who live in the cracks and fissures in our society. And that ought to pain us.

The last point that I want to make, and it is the point I want to hang over this Chamber as we think over this next several weeks: We owe people in this country a better place than the margins of life. There are people who, because of their own faults and their own demerits, end up in a particular place. We understand that. We know that. The Bible tells us that. But we ought to be strong enough and bold enough as a country to not let people who are trying to live their lives fall into the margins because we do not care enough to build a net around them. The absence of a net in New Orleans, the absence of a net in Mississippi, the absence of a safety net in much of the South, was laid bare last week, and we ought to be moved by that.

I will not cheapen this tragedy by saying there is a silver lining in it. Too many people died for that. But I will say that I hope that we draw some inspiration. I hope that as we go about fashioning a strategy for relief, that we fashion a strategy for relief that can lift up the weakest of these people and the least of them.

But I hope as we move past Hurricane Katrina, and, frankly most of us in this Chamber will find a way to do that -- it is the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) and the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Jefferson) who will continue to live with it -- but for a lot of the people in this Chamber, we will be able to move past this. We will be on to the next crisis of the month or the next political cause of the month.

But I hope as we move on, we carry this lesson with us, we carry this notion that if we are a just country, we cannot be a country where being left behind and being left out has the consequences that happened in the gentlemen's State of Mississippi and in Louisiana last week. If we are to be the country that we say we are, we have to do better by all of our people.

The final point before I yield back my time, I turn once again to the President and his leadership. This President would not serve himself or our country well if this is turned into an attack on the mayor of New Orleans or the governor of Louisiana. This is not the time to make false comparisons and to wonder whether the governor and the mayor did not do this or did not do that, because there is something we ought to understand: The governor and the mayor lived in the midst of a crisis.

The people who sat comfortably in this city last week were removed from that crisis. They were in a position and had the level head to do better, and they came up with the sea of incompetence that we saw. So how dare we look at the mayor and the governor sitting among their people in the midst of all of this and blame them, when people sat in this city far removed from the danger and could not do better?

 Mr. Speaker, again I thank the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson) for his leadership, and I hope that his constituents, and know that his constituents, appreciate it. I thank the gentleman for his work as the ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, because it ought to be said, What is the measure of homeland security if we cannot find a way to secure our own people in the midst of danger?

-###-