Mitch Landrieu: “I come to the floor to say a brief word about an extraordinary and very positive statement that the President of the…”

“I come to the floor to say a brief word about an extraordinary and very positive statement that the President of the United States made in the last 45 minutes as he gathered on the south lawn of the White House with a group of supporters of another very important bill--an issue we have actually debated for many hours and helped to usher through called the Conservation and Reinvestment Act. The President, just this morning, called on us, in a bipartisan fashion, not to miss the opportunity to push forward on this very important piece of legislation--one which his administration has supported and helped to design. The Conservation and Reinvestment Act is really Congress's way of responding to a need that the American people have and have expressed themselves clearly on over and over, from the South to the North, from the East to the West, in meetings, through polling information that we have, through calls made to this Congress, through letters written, through e-mails sent--to say to us that now is the time to set aside a small but significant portion of the surplus that we have to invest--not for 1 year, or 6 months, not occasionally when we can, but to invest permanently a stream of revenue for conservation programs in our Nation. I guess I can speak so passionately about this issue because the money we are speaking about investing is coming from offshore oil and gas revenues, 85 percent of which are produced off of the coast of Louisiana.”