Mitch Landrieu: “now that we have the amendment offered and the time straight, I wish to thank the Senator from Arkansas for her…”

“now that we have the amendment offered and the time straight, I wish to thank the Senator from Arkansas for her extraordinary leadership on this issue because this is not the first time she has come to the Senate floor. She has spent hours on the Finance Committee and hours on this floor trying to describe to our colleagues the critical nature of this situation. She comes from a State that was not directly hit by the hurricane but was, nonetheless, impacted, as so many other States were that had the goodness, the graciousness, the wherewithal, and the inclination to take on thousands and thousands of people from Louisiana and Mississippi, truly tens of thousands of people who fled for safety, for security, for food, and for shelter. It has been 64 days since Katrina hit and about 50-some-odd days since Rita hit, two of the deadliest storms in U.S. history. But it was not just the storms that did us in, not just the category 4 or category 5 storms of 175-mile-an-hour winds that did us in. It was the 17 levee breaks in one of the largest cities and metropolitan areas in the United States. And not just any city--an international city, an international region, the heart of the energy coast, the city that secures the mouth of the Mississippi River and, may I say, the parishes that surround the great city of New Orleans--Jefferson, St. Tammany, Plaquemines, St.…”