I will make comments later. I see the Senator from New Hampshire is here. The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New Hampshire is recognized.

while the distinguished Senator from Michigan is on the floor, who is one of the best legal minds in the Senate, I wanted to engage him to further to take us through the delay tactics that are presently now underway. Given the fact that we…

we are here awaiting the action of the House of Representatives. We don't know whether the House is going to pass the John Boehner proposal, but regardless of what they do, we have the solution right underneath our noses. There have been…

yesterday the space shuttle Atlantis came back in the early morning darkness with those xenon lights illuminating that 3-mile-long runway at the Kennedy Space Center. That is a location that a century ago a set of grandparents of mine had…

I know that the Senator from Massachusetts has time. I just want to take this time while he is coming into the Chamber to say that you can almost hear in the background very foreboding music as we are counting down the days. Here we are in…

Now, I don't want this to happen again. And there are lot of lessons learned--that we learned from your state--that we didn't pay any attention, and it happened again.

If there's a spill there, do you know what runs right by there? It's the Gulf Stream.

But, you all let BP, basically, direct a lot of the response.

I think we're all saying that we should look at the Oil Pollution Act and see if there are amendments that are needed.

But the next time around we sure want a crisp, chain of command.

We had a failed decision-making apparatus. The Unified Command, to begin with, did not react as hard as people were working.

What we're trying to do here is lessons learned, so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.