THE DEMOCRATS VS. NATIONAL SECURITY:

Floor Statement on Homeland Security Legislation ( U.S. Senator Zell Miller, D-GA, September 25, 2002)

When the civil service system was established well over a century ago, it had a worthy goal: To create a professional work force that was free of cronyism.

Back then it was valid. But too often in government, we pass laws to fix the problems of the moment and then we keep those laws on the books for years and year without ever following up to see if they are still needed.

The truth of the matter is that a solution from the 19th Century is posing a problem in the 21st. Especially when this country is threatened in such a different and sinister way.

Presently, we're operating under a system of governmental and personnel paralysis.

It offers little reward for good workers and provides lots of cover for bad workers.

Hiring a new federal employee can take five months - five months. Firing a bad worker takes more than a year - if it's allowable at all - because of the mountains of paperwork and hearings and appeals.

A federal worker can be caught knee-walking drunk on the job and can't be fired for 30 days and then he has the right to endless appeals.

Productivity should be the name of the game and we lose productivity when bad folks hold onto jobs forever and when jobs go unfilled for months.

Don't we realize there is another disaster looming just around the corner where American lives are going to be lost? And another one after that? And that these attacks against Americans - against our country - will occur for the rest of our lives?

Would anyone dare suggest that is not going to happen? Would anyone suggest that 9/11 was some kind of isolated phenomenon never to happen on American soil again? Surely no one - even the most naive optimistic - believes that. Surely no one in this body believes that.

Over sixty-thousand terrorists worldwide have already been identified. And terrorist cells in some unlikely places like Lackawanna, N. Y. have been discovered. They are everywhere.

And when these other attacks come - as certainly they will - do you not think Americans throughout this great land are not going to look back at the last three weeks of dilly-dallying in the U. S. Senate?

And when they do, do you not think that some hard questions and some terrible second-guessing will follow?

I can hear them now. The talk show lines will be clogged. The blame will be heaped on this body. Why was the U. S. Senate so fixated on protecting jobs instead of protecting lives?

The U.S. Senate's refusal to grant this President and future presidents the same power that four previous presidents have had will haunt the Democratic Party worst than Marley's ghost haunted Ebenezer Scrooge.

Why did they put workers' rights above American lives? Why did that 2002 U.S. Senate - on the one year anniversary of 9/11 - with malice and forethought, deliberately weaken the powers of the president in time of war?

And then why did this Senate - in all its puffed up vainglory - rear back and deliver the ultimate slap in the face of the president by not even having the decency to give him and up or down vote on his bill? This is unworthy of this great body. It is demeaning and ugly and over the top.

What were they thinking of? What could have possessed them?

Don't ask then for whom the bell tolls, it will toll for ... us.

The blessed Senator Miller gets to the merits of the argument that scares Tom Daschle so. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 25, 2002 8:11 PM