Mitch Landrieu: “The bill I am going to speak about in a minute is the Catastrophic Disaster Recovery Fairness Act of 2007, which I am…”

“The bill I am going to speak about in a minute is the Catastrophic Disaster Recovery Fairness Act of 2007, which I am proud to cosponsor with Senator Lott and others. We have been working on trying to get this bill cleared, and I will come back to that in a moment, but before I call this bill up for final passage, I would like to speak for a moment about the emergency supplemental bill that we passed. The Congress must--and usually does--and is required to take care of emergency issues. These are situations that, by the nature of emergencies, we cannot plan for. The war we are prosecuting and trying to win has extended well beyond the boundaries that many of us believed initially, so there are new costs associated with that war. There have been emergencies right here in the country that have taken place that could never have been predicted or anticipated. We are still recovering, as you know, from two of those very terrible storms, two of the worst to ever hit the United States of America, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”