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The following is excerpted from remarks by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., last week on homeland security legislation under consideration in the Senate.

The Congress stands ready to pass legislation to create a new Department of Homeland Security. Passage of such legislation would be the answer to the universal battle cry this administration adopted shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks: Reorganize the federal government!

How is it that the Bush administration's number one priority has evolved into a plan to create a giant bureaucracy? How is it that the Congress bought into the belief that to take a plethora of federal agencies and departments and shuffle them around would make us safer from future terrorist attacks?

Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard. He has surfaced on audio tapes boasting about how he is plotting additional terrorist attacks against the United States, and yet our only response is to reorganize the federal government. Am I missing something here?

Eleven of the 13 appropriations bills have not yet been passed. Together they contain over $25.6 billion in funds to improve our homeland defenses. That's money to hire additional border security personnel, to purchase equipment at our seaports and airports to inspect packages for weapons of mass destruction, to protect our nuclear facilities, and to assist local police, firefighters and health care workers in case of additional terrorist attacks. ... But instead of pushing for these resources, the administration's top - and, seemingly, only - priority is a bureaucratic reshuffling of agencies.

The design of this hulking bureaucracy has been the administration's focus for the past several months. ... We have been told that if only we pass this legislation, all will be well. But like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, with his terrifying smoke and flames and roar, the reality of this too good-to-be-true proposal will eventually be unveiled.

My concerns about this legislation - and its several iterations - are many. It gives the president too much unchecked authority. It gives the secretary of the new department too much unchecked authority. It makes massive changes in government structure with little scrutiny and it allows those changes to be made without the approval of Congress. It threatens changes to worker protections that could have enormous and detrimental effects. ...

I still find it difficult to believe that the American war on terrorism hinges on the building of a new, huge bureaucracy. Our plan to eradicate a vicious, cunning nest of vipers is to reorganize the government? ...

Perhaps what we are lacking to make this new idea really resonate with the people is a powerful, stimulating slogan - a dramatic slogan like the kind of slogan we politicians slap on bumper stickers - one that would serve to inspire and unite our soldiers, and our citizens. Maybe we could draw from history to see how our new lust for a huge bureaucracy would fare.

I can picture Nathan Hale declaring: "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy." I can hear Captain John Paul Jones shouting, "I have not yet begun to fight for my bureaucracy." I can think of Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting his famous flag upon his ship with the motto, "Don't give up the bureaucracy!" I can just imagine Commodore Stephen Decatur returning from the war with the Barbary Pirates and offering his famous toast: "My bureaucracy, right or wrong." It just gives me chills to think of the people of Texas being inspired to fight with the stirring rally cry, "Remember the bureaucracy!" What about the professorial President Woodrow Wilson taking us into World War I with the proclamation: "The world must be made safe for bureaucracies."

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, I guess political expediency has now become the mother of bureaucracy. ... We ought to be ashamed to offer our people a quick bureaucratic pacifier instead of taking our time, and working thoughtfully and carefully on an effective and lasting plan for the protection of the American people.

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