Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / The Congressional Spending Bill Which Could Have Been Passed

Transcript

The Congressional Spending Bill Which Could Have Been Passed · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:16
  All right, it's the third hour of the Morning Show with Preston Scott.
• 0:20
  That's Grant Allen and it's great to be with you. October third Tuesday,
• 0:24
  first Tuesday of the month, when her schedule allows. We are thrilled to
• 0:29
  share time with US Congresswoman Catchmick, Florida's third congressional district. Congresswoman, How
• 0:35
  are you. I'm doing good. How are you doing, Preston, I'm
• 0:38
  doing fine. Catch us up on the district and the recovery from Adahia.
• 0:43
  Oh man, it's a long road. I mean, anybody who has been
• 0:47
  through this, whether it was Irma or Ian and Michael and of course our
• 0:51
  folks no the aftermath of Michael all too well, it's gonna be a long
• 0:57
  road. But that being said, we have got to now being cleaned up.
• 1:00
  We're working with the core to try to get that those canals dredged so
• 1:04
  we can get back to some economic activity. I mean, you know this
• 1:08
  that that coast, that portion of our state is heavy in terms of commercial
• 1:15
  fishing, aquaculture, and you've heard me say it. You know, our
• 1:19
  oyster guys, our clams, clam farmers, they got devastated. So we're
• 1:25
  working to make sure that that that gets back up and running. Of course,
• 1:29
  FEMA is just not exactly the most user friendly agency, will say,
• 1:36
  but we are continuing to help people with appeals on their homes, their businesses.
• 1:42
  It's it's a challenge, but every day there's progress being made. And
• 1:48
  I tell everybody you know, it's not the FED, it's not the States.
• 1:52
  It's more of neighbors and community members helping each other rebuild. And that's
• 1:57
  the beauty of our part of the world. So it's going to be a
• 2:00
  while, but we're well underway. Thank you for asking. Is there a
• 2:04
  bright side in the sense that you know, in the wake of Michael,
• 2:07
  we experienced to the west of us the problems with FEMA, and for all
• 2:12
  the good that they do, there are just logistical nightmares. And years later
• 2:17
  we still get email from listeners struggling finding trying to get resolutions and so forth.
• 2:23
  Is there anything being learned from this cat that is going to make things
• 2:29
  better down the road for others? Yeah, you know, I think every
• 2:31
  storm comes with a lessons learned playbook. I was talking with Kevin Guthrie,
• 2:38
  who is the state Emergency Management Director, and he and I we always compare
• 2:42
  notes about hey, this is a part that's broken, This needs to be
• 2:46
  streamlined. Why the heck is this going on? And I think we've really
• 2:50
  come to the conclusion that setting it up where it's much more efficient, where
• 2:55
  you put in a claim than the Feds audited and it goes up chain and
• 3:00
  then it comes back down. It's a very slow process that tends to get
• 3:04
  bottlenecked. We should make it very easy, have one point where people,
• 3:07
  hey, we apply, it gets paid and then it gets obligated and refunded
• 3:13
  back to the state or the county, and instead it's this very complicated mess.
• 3:16
  So on the side of emergency management, we have some ideas and thoughts
• 3:23
  about how we can improve mutual aid and that type of coordination. There's got
• 3:29
  to be some work done in the private nonprofit entities that come in and help
• 3:36
  that coordination was a little bit it was it was not as streamlined as it
• 3:40
  could have been, and everyone comes in with the best of intentions, but
• 3:45
  then sometimes the best of intentions don't don't end up where they're needed most.
• 3:50
  So we have some ideas on the nonprofit side. On the government response side,
• 3:55
  it's going to be along road and the other part of it is,
• 3:59
  of course, the funding element. You know, they kept saying, oh,
• 4:02
  it's empty, the disaster relief fund is empty. And I said,
• 4:06
  that's unacceptable. You guys send money to Ukraine, redirect the money from Ukraine,
• 4:13
  and you know the oh, Congress someone, we can't do that.
• 4:15
  Yes you can, yes, you can't redivert the money. And so the
• 4:18
  notion that somehow FEMA was going broke totally unacceptable, Totally unacceptable and infuriating.
• 4:27
  So that's an element that we're working on up here. Not to mention the
• 4:30
  AGG disaster supplemental that is going to be needed to get our ag producers back
• 4:35
  on their feet, because keep in mind, FEMA does not cover anything AGG
• 4:39
  related. They don't cover the fencing, the pivots, they don't cover any
• 4:44
  of the lost crop. And in Florida, being a specialty crop state,
• 4:47
  were not eligible for the crop insurance that say, you're Midwest guys would be
• 4:53
  eligible for. So our producers took a pretty significant hit, looking at about
• 4:58
  a half a billion dollars in aglass alone, on top of all of the
• 5:02
  residential and commercial law. You're listening to the M A D radio network where
• 5:09
  you are challenged to make a difference each and every day. Would you do
• 5:14
  that for us? Please? Please, just a little just try it,
• 5:16
  would you? This is the Morning Show with Preston Scott, eleven minutes past
• 5:26
  US Congressman Kat Camic, Florida's third congressional district, our guest for a couple
• 5:30
  more segments. Kat, let me just throw one more thing on this hurricane
• 5:33
  post. Thing it occurs to me in listening to people you know I've covered.
• 5:41
  I think we checked something like eleven storm since I've done this show now
• 5:45
  over twenty one years, and emails following all of them, and one of
• 5:49
  the things that has occurred to me is we could solve a lot of problems
• 5:55
  with a copy machine. And let me explain, what if we set our
• 6:00
  system up in such a way that a victim of a disaster like this filled
• 6:05
  out a singular form, and we made copies, and they went to all
• 6:12
  of the different resources, public and private, and based on that one form,
• 6:16
  they then reach back to the person, the victim, and say,
• 6:19
  here's what we can do to help. It seems like one of the biggest
• 6:24
  obstacles here. It's almost as if we intentionally make it difficult for people to
• 6:29
  get help, and we need to turn that around. We need to be
• 6:31
  more servant oriented. Ask the victim to fill out one form and let everybody
• 6:38
  come to them press. And that's a great idea, I mean, and
• 6:42
  you hit it right on the head. The frustration not only is it I
• 6:46
  mean, you've been through these storms. It is not only just an incredibly
• 6:50
  stressful time. You've watched in many cases your entire home get destroyed. You're
• 6:56
  trying to pick up the pieces. And then you get multiple different agencies,
• 7:00
  multiple different organizations who come to you and they try to help, and I'm
• 7:04
  using air quotes on the worst help. Then you have to follow out god
• 7:09
  knows how much paperwork. And here's the rub on the federal side of it.
• 7:14
  As an individual, you fill out the form for FEMA. The game
• 7:18
  and again I use air quotes on game. The game is, you have
• 7:23
  to apply, get rejected, and then you take your denial and you have
• 7:28
  to appeal it. And we tell people you're probably gonna get denied because of
• 7:32
  some ridiculous reason. Fill out a form for our office, and then we'll
• 7:36
  help you push back on the agency on your appeal. That's ridiculous. I
• 7:42
  mean, the fact that I've had to tell that to people like, Okay,
• 7:45
  this is how the system is rigged, let us help you navigate it.
• 7:49
  That's ridiculous. I was, as you know, I've been up in
• 7:53
  Washington for the last three four weeks. I can't even tell you how long
• 7:57
  I've been up here. Seems like time is just going away. I met
• 8:01
  with a couple of the Maui victims and we had a hearing on the failures
• 8:05
  in Maui. And of course we've seen this and East Palisson, We've seen
• 8:09
  this all over the country where the response has been severely and sorely lacking.
• 8:16
  And when I talked to the FEMA victims, they said, I'm sorry.
• 8:18
  The Maui victims, they said, yeah, we've all been denied by FEMA.
• 8:24
  They just tell us there's nothing that we can do. We can't get
• 8:26
  back to our homes, we can't do this, we can't do that.
• 8:30
  And it's the exact same thing that us as Floridians go through. We get
• 8:33
  denied, we keep getting the run around. So your point about a streamlined
• 8:37
  on one page form brilliant. I mean, I think that that is goes
• 8:41
  to my point of we have got to figure out a way to streamline this.
• 8:45
  Well, it didn't complicated all the time. I can't tell you how
• 8:48
  many times I've heard a victim say I didn't know that help was available until
• 8:52
  after the time ran out on whatever help what it was. They don't most
• 8:58
  citizens don't even know where to go, no matter the best of intentions,
• 9:03
  etc. It's like have you ever seen the movie The Rainmaker. I mean,
• 9:07
  the federal government is the big insurance company. Deny, deny, deny,
• 9:11
  and hope that they don't fight you. And that's and that's where we
• 9:16
  are. And I just that's my solution. And I know I'm never going
• 9:20
  to be the sharpest knife in any drawer. I get that. But sometimes
• 9:24
  simplicity works, and I think that we've got this wrong and we need to
• 9:28
  just simplify. And it needs to be the burden of the government to say,
• 9:33
  here are all of these tax funded resources, and we're going to figure
• 9:37
  out what ones can help you, as opposed to them trying to figure out
• 9:39
  what they can get. Oh, you're right, because you have and I'll
• 9:46
  I'll use Horseshoe Beach as a great example. Seconds we were on the ground
• 9:50
  and you have all these trucks responding, you have an SBA truck, you
• 9:54
  have a FEMA truck, you have a nonprofit truck, you have the Red
• 9:58
  Cross truck, you have this truck. You're right, it's overcomplicated and the
• 10:03
  gig is in. You have to get denied before they'll actually help you.
• 10:09
  It's a total sham, totally needs to change. Twenty one minutes past the
• 10:16
  hour, I'm just gonna kind of channel my inner Mark Levin. Here we
• 10:24
  have the fine congresswoman from central Florida, Cat Cammick with US Florida District number
• 10:28
  three. So you tell me there was a bill that could have been passed
• 10:33
  instead of this ridiculous continuing resolution GOP. You do that really really well.
• 10:39
  By the way, and as we discuss, I'm gonna try real hard not
• 10:43
  to get so worked up that I say something like a bad words. Grant's
• 10:48
  ready on the dump button. Heel. No. Last, like I told
• 10:52
  you last Friday, Conservative had an option to jam the Senate with a bill
• 11:00
  that would have secured the borders, paid our border patrol agents, paid our
• 11:05
  military, cut all of our federal agencies by thirty percent minus Department of Defense,
• 11:11
  which would have meant we cut EPA thirty percent, cut ATF by thirty
• 11:16
  percent, cut all these ridiculous agencies and bureacrafts by thirty percent. We had
• 11:24
  a debt commission that would have been included in it, because the debt is
• 11:26
  absolutely killing us thirty three trillion dollars. And it was the deal that would
• 11:31
  have given us the time to actually finish the work of going through all twelve
• 11:35
  appropriations. But you know what, twenty one knuckleheads, twenty one Republicans said
• 11:41
  no, that's not good enough, that's not good enough. And we said,
• 11:46
  listen, if you don't support this, you know what's going to happen.
• 11:48
  The Dems are gonna jam us and we're gonna get stuck. And by
• 11:52
  we, I mean the American people are going to get stuck paying more money
• 11:56
  for Nancy Pelosi's budget. And that's the exactly what happened, because they wanted
• 12:01
  to play games, they wanted to put their political careers over the country.
• 12:05
  And I am frustrated, I am angry, I am pissed off because this
• 12:11
  is the type of game that gets played up here because then they turn around
• 12:15
  and say, oh, look how big and bad I am. I'm standing
• 12:18
  up, I'm saying no, you know what, you said no to your
• 12:20
  own damn freaking bill that would have done something, and then they want to
• 12:24
  be the victim. All of a sudden, it's the victim card. We
• 12:28
  had an opportunity to jam the Senate, to put them on notice, to
• 12:31
  say, no, we don't believe in security, in border security. Oh
• 12:35
  no, we don't want to cut the government at all. Oh no,
• 12:37
  we don't want to address the day we dared them and it was our own
• 12:41
  side that was playing chicken. They grabbed the wheel and turn they caused us
• 12:48
  to be in this situation. On the clean cr deal, out of course
• 12:50
  voted no because that just leads us continually down the path on autopilots towards fiscal
• 12:58
  insolvency. And for every American that's frustrated and mad about all the nonsense and
• 13:03
  bs that's going on up here, you should be mad. You should absolutely
• 13:07
  be pissed off. But people need to realize that we had a shot and
• 13:11
  it was our own freaking people that took it down because they didn't want to
• 13:16
  be part of the solution. You want to know why, because their power
• 13:20
  is derived from keeping the problems going the minute that they solve a problem,
• 13:24
  they lose their leverage, and they're more concerned with keeping the problems in Washington
• 13:28
  going than actually solving them. They'd rather raise campaign cash than actually do the
• 13:33
  work they were sent here to do. Kat The Republicans, to be clear,
• 13:37
  were other than this block. They were willing to send a bill to
• 13:43
  the Senate that they knew the Senate was likely not going to agree to.
• 13:48
  Yeah, yeah, and that would at that moment, that would have been
• 13:54
  us standing right there in front of every damn camera and telling the American people,
• 13:58
  you know what, we did our job in the House. It's the
• 14:01
  Senate that wants to keep funding Ukraine. It's the Senate that wants to make
• 14:05
  sure that they prioritize their liberal progressive agenda over everyday Americans needs. They want
• 14:11
  to keep the border open, they don't want to deal with the debt.
• 14:13
  It will have been on the Senate, and it's time to freaking take the
• 14:18
  gloves off and start playing a little bit of hardball up here. Yep,
• 14:20
  yep. That's we don't we lose our country. That's what we've been talking
• 14:24
  about is needing to put it in such a place that the Senate visa vive
• 14:30
  Joe Biden, veto it, shut it down, don't accept it. And
• 14:33
  then you turn around, you let the government shut down, and you point
• 14:37
  out the reasons. But now forty five days from now, we're going to
• 14:39
  be dealing with this right at Thanksgiving, right at Christmas, when historically the
• 14:45
  American people throw their hands up and say, screw it, we don't care,
• 14:48
  do whatever exactly. And that's the thing that just kills me, because
• 14:52
  I had some of the twenty one come up to me and say, well,
• 14:54
  it doesn't address the weaponization of government. I'm all in the damn Weaponization
• 14:58
  committee. You know what happens in this scenario that we got that we ended
• 15:05
  up because of those knucklehead twenty one. We end up perpetuating the weaponization of
• 15:09
  government. It didn't stop, it didn't get touched, it continues to be
• 15:13
  funded. And under the deal of last Friday, they said, oh,
• 15:18
  but it doesn't it doesn't deal with that. Guess what, you have to
• 15:22
  cut the freakingdo J spending A clean cr didn't do that. Our deal did,
• 15:30
  And instead they just go to a television camera, they go on Facebook
• 15:33
  or Twitter, and they say about how hard they're fighting, when in reality
• 15:37
  they just continue to perpetuate the same problem so that they can give the appearance
• 15:41
  of fighting, because the real work the dirty work of actually sitting down and
• 15:46
  cutting and going through the budget and figuring out ways to save money. Which
• 15:50
  by the way, I made a proposal as part of that deal last week
• 15:54
  to take the IRS funding money and do an offset with all the disaster so
• 16:00
  it would be paid for so all of our people could get their money immediately.
• 16:04
  For East Palestine, are Ian victims that still haven't received anything, our
• 16:10
  Idealia victims who haven't received anything, Maui, the Vermont flooding, all the
• 16:12
  disasters that have impacted Americans. Take the IRS money, use it to actually
• 16:18
  help Americans stop sending money to Ukraine. Novel idea. Congresswoman, always a
• 16:23
  good visit and legendary today. Thanks for the time, Hey, thank you
• 16:29
  so much. All right, Kat Kamick with US US congresswoman from Florida's third
• 16:33
  congressional district,