Justice in Policing Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASSIDY. Mr. President, right now we are debating the Great American Outdoors Act, which would be great if only it were balanced. My problem with the Great American Outdoors Act is that it spends billions on places where we vacation, but the authors of the bill would not allow a few million to be spent to protect the places where we live and we work and we help create livelihoods for many.

There is an amendment that would do that that is bipartisan and that would not take any money away from the billions that the bill is already allocating for those places where we vacation.

First, let me kind of make my point. Forty-two percent of Americans live in a county or parish adjacent to a coastline--42 percent. Eighty- five percent of Americans live in a coastal State. But of the billions that go into the Great American Outdoors Act, of those billions, 50 to close to 60 percent are spent in seven States, seven localities, and if you exclude Washington, DC, and areas around Washington, it is not spent on coastal areas.

We are spending billions on places where we go to vacation, but the authors of the bill will not allow millions to be spent to protect where we live. That is foolish public policy. We should be investing in coastal resiliency.

Now, of course, the irony is, we are going to spend billions on the coast. Why? We have seen it. Harris County flooded--that is Houston; Florida flooded, the panhandle, other parts of Florida; Puerto Rico; the American Virgin Islands; North Carolina; South Carolina; Georgia; Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey and New York; Hurricanes Rita and Katrina on the coast of Louisiana; also Mississippi and Alabama.

We are going to spend billions. We are going to spend billions, but we are going to spend those billions in the wrong way. We are going to spend those billions on the coast repairing damage that could have been prevented if we had spent millions now.

I draw attention to a flood wall, a levy, in Terrebonne Parish, LA, which was recently completed. So we had a high-water event where flooding came off the Gulf of Mexico. Ten thousand homes were not flooded because that flood protection had been erected. Ten thousand homes were not flooded.

All I am asking is for the authors of this bill to allow a few million to be spent where people live, where people work, where people help others earn their living, and they can still have their billions to spend on the places where we vacation.

I don't want to minimize the need to take care of our national parks. When someone speaks of a leaky roof, and if you fix it early, then fixing it early keeps the damage from getting greater--that makes sense. We should find a way to pay for it, but it makes sense that you would do that. How much more so when we are speaking about coastal resiliency?

I was told recently that the Army Corps of Engineers wants to build a $3.5 billion floodgate in Miami to prevent Miami from flooding--$3.5 billion. We are going to spend billions on the coast; it is just a question of whether we do it in reaction, or whether we do it in kind of ``we have to fear the worst,'' or whether we do it like in Terrebonne Parish--building a flood wall now so that 10,000 homes don't flood.

It is my disappointment that the authors of this legislation will not allow this bipartisan amendment to be added.

By the way, we have heard that Democrats are OK with the amendment, but for whatever reason, the authors will not allow it.

Let me show you one other thing, just to make the point. The Great American Outdoors Act actually has two pots of dollars, if you will. One is for deferred maintenance--again, 50 to 60 percent of that goes to seven States. But this shows where the Land and Water Conversation money goes.

These are the coastal States. This is where people live, and these States, on average, per capita, get $7.53 from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. These blue States in the interior--some of them populated, some of them not--on average get $17.66 per capita. We are sending money to where people don't live to fix vacation spots, which are important, but it is not where we live, and we are not spending money where people do live, where their homes are, where their cities are, and where, if we don't enhance resiliency, we are going to spend billions when the hurricane hits. This is foolish public policy.

By the way, some of my fiscal conservative colleagues--and I consider myself a fiscal conservative--have weighed in against the Great American Outdoors Act, saying that we are not paying for it; we are pretending to pay for it. We are taking dollars that would otherwise go to the Treasury--otherwise go to the Treasury--and pretending like they are new dollars. That is actually true. But what we can also say is that if we add the amendment, the Coastal Act, which I worked on with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse--he has been a great partner to work with-- we actually would be paying for it. We would be paying for it by putting in the coastal resiliency that will prevent the future billions from having to be paid to pick up the pieces after a hurricane hits a populated area.

I will speak again on the floor tomorrow, but I just want to make the point that the Great American Outdoors Act spends billions where we vacation, fixing things that we don't wish to get worse. The Coastal Act does not take away from these billions--these billions that are spent on places where we vacation; these billions spent where people do not live--it just spends millions, a paltry few million trying to add resiliency to where we do live, to where we do work, to where we do create livelihoods not just for ourselves but for others, and that is a fiscally sound, fiscally conservative way to spend dollars. That would save Treasury money, and it would save lives and maybe give people a little extra money to spend in these parks we are spending billions to fix up.

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