Washington, D.C. - Mr. Chairman, the other day I heard the majority leader, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DELAY) assert on the floor of this House that the 9 /11 Commission recommendations legislation were being considered by the various committees in this House on a bipartisan basis.
Well, in the Committee on Government Reform, there were some areas of strong bipartisan agreement. As the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) said, one of those areas was the need to implement one of the central recommendations of the 9 /11 Commission report to develop a system of information-sharing among different Federal Government agencies that collect and analyze information. When you are trying to pull together information about a threat, it makes no sense for one agency to keep hold of its information and not share it. You need all the pieces to put together the puzzle.
Now, this bill, H.R. 10 as it was introduced, had nothing with respect to information-sharing. So I, together with some of my colleagues, offered an amendment in the committee to do exactly that. And on a bipartisan basis in the committee, supported by the chairman of the committee, and echoing the recommendations of the 9 /11 Commission, we unanimously supported that amendment and that recommendation.
Well, guess what? The bill left committee and on the way to the floor, that information-sharing amendment was stripped out of the bill by the House Republican leadership and replaced by what is just a hollow shell, virtual dribble, nothing of serious substance on that issue. Apparently, the real test being applied here by the House Republican leadership is not bipartisan cooperation, but where there is bipartisan cooperation on the committee, let us get rid of that provision of the bill, because it does not fit with the overall objective, which is to use this bill and use national security for pure political purposes.
Why would the House leadership remove a provision also contained in the Senate Collins-Lieberman bill to promote information-sharing? Why are they sticking up for creating separate turf and different fiefdoms among government agencies? That is a question they are going to have to answer to the victims and the families of the victims of 9 /11 .