Leadership Quote by Steve Israel

“After 9/11” is doing the heavy lifting here, less as a timestamp than as a moral shield. Steve Israel isn’t invoking the attacks to dwell on grief; he’s converting catastrophe into an argument for a very specific policy tool: a functioning market for terrorism insurance. The phrasing is tellingly managerial. “Businesses in my district” puts the emphasis on constituents and commerce, not abstract national security. It’s a legislator signaling that he’s listening to the people who keep payrolls running, storefronts open, and tax revenue flowing.

The key move is the word “firsthand.” It implies this isn’t theoretical beltway hand-wringing about risk; it’s lived economic disruption. After 9/11, insurers pulled back, premiums spiked, and lenders got skittish. Development deals stalled because financing often requires coverage that simply wasn’t available. Israel compresses that chain reaction into one clean lesson: when private markets can’t price a new kind of fear, the damage isn’t just physical, it’s systemic.

The subtext is a pitch for government backstopping - think programs like TRIA, where federal support stabilizes the insurance market after extreme events. He frames it as common sense rather than ideological expansion: not “bailout,” but “availability.” That word choice matters. It recasts state intervention as restoring normal business conditions, making a pro-market case for a public safety net. In a post-9/11 political environment, it’s also a quiet attempt to keep “terrorism” from being only a security slogan and force it into the budgetary, boring realm where policy actually happens.