Mitch Landrieu: “I come to the floor before we move to the final stages of this debate to thank my colleagues for their extraordinary…”

“I come to the floor before we move to the final stages of this debate to thank my colleagues for their extraordinary help in putting into this bill, which is a major piece of legislation--attempting to help communities throughout the country deal with the added rate of foreclosures, the spiraling downward of so many neighborhoods due to a variety of different circumstances--and I think it is important that the Senate act today. I particularly thank the chairman of this committee, Senator Dodd, for his patience and his tenacity in getting us to this point and for putting in many good provisions into this bill that will be a help to homeowners, to communities, in some instances to lenders, who got themselves into difficulty because, again, our goal is to try to reinvigorate the housing markets, to stop the slide. Particularly, in the case of Louisiana, we still have a significant housing crisis that did not start with the foreclosure crisis but started when 250,000 homes were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”