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SOUTH LOUISIANA – U.S. Congressman Garret Graves visited communities in Ascension, East Baton Rouge, Lafourche, and Livingston parishes today as local officials continue to monitor water levels in nearby rivers. Meanwhile, the House Natural Resources Committee held a meeting to push legislation that would kneecap funds that stem from offshore energy production and that are put toward hurricane protection, coastal restoration and flood control.

Below is a clip from Graves' opening remarks, taken outside the Springfield Fire Department that was staging highwater vehicles for search and rescue missions in surrounding communities. Today's markup was the House Natural Resources Committee's opportunity to amend the at least $3,500,000,000,000 ($3.5 trillion) package currently being considered by the U.S. House that would expand social welfare programs. No funds were considered for Hurricane Laura and Ida recovery, but don't worry, $25 million for butterfly conservation was prioritized.

Click here or above to watch the opening remarks, or find text below:

Graves Full Opening Remarks:

"Mr. Chairman I apologize we had to find somewhere where we could get a good enough cell connection using both AT&T and Verizon because we just got hit with the fifth most powerful hurricane in U.S. history and the most powerful one to hit [Louisiana] ever. Winds preliminarily recorded to be up to about 190mph, so you can take what's going on up in New York and New Jersey and you can throw in a little bit of wind action there.

"Cell phone service is out across most of the area – South Louisiana. We don't have water, we don't have sewer, we don't have electricity. … And in fact, we have active search and rescue operations going on as we speak because cell phone service is down, so we don't even know where the hell people are right now because we can't get in touch with them.

"Doing welfare checks all over the southern part of the state because we can't even communicate with one another. 911 systems down, emergency operation centers without communications, and last I saw 60 percent of our gas stations without fuel with people sleeping in their cars outside of gas stations overnight in order to re-fuel their vehicles and their generators. … Quite frankly, the fact that I'm fricking sitting here right now even spending time with y'all is ridiculous.

"This legislation what it does is it actually is probably a final nail in the coffin to the industry right now that's struggling because 95 percent of the offshore industry energy production is shut down – 95 percent. There's somewhere like 20 percent of the nation's refinery capacity – it's shut down right now. And so this legislation comes in and tries to further kill it and then all this does is benefit Iran, it benefits Russia, it benefits China.

"And you sit there and say, ‘Oh you're just being dramatic and it's just rhetoric.' Well, I mean look at what's happened. We talked about this. The exact things that we said about increasing global emissions, increasing energy prices, becoming more dependent upon other countries – that's exactly what's happening.

"You called it rhetoric – it's exactly what's happening right now. It's dumb founding to me that people could think these things are good ideas. Like where does this come from? You know people say, ‘What happened in Afghanistan was just a one-time thing or a bad decision.' No, this is applying stupidity and the afterthoughts of Afghanistan policy across every other area of government.

"Mr. Chairman, this isn't political just stop. We have people that are dying right now. We have people that are trying to live in homes without roofs, homes that have fallen down, and you're sitting here and doing a markup to spend however many gazillion dollars you want to spend? This is just really ill-timed, it's insensitive, it's not paying attention to the realities on the ground. I urge you just have a little humanity and just take a break. This is just stupid that I've got to take time from doing what I need to be doing to help get people the resources [they need].

"We just met with the fire chief … and they don't even have water. They just got a fuel tank. And we're sitting here talking about marking up trillion-dollar legislation. If this were in your district this wouldn't be happening, and you know it. And I just urge y'all to just take a step back right now and be a little sensitive to what in the world is going on please."

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