Political Quotes

“I want to begin by thanking Senator Nelson, the senior Senator from our State, for once again raising this on the floor. I am glad to be able to follow him and to make many of the same points about the importance of acting on this. The Presiding Officer is from a State that has been impacted by storms. He knows that long after the cameras leave and long after the stories have been written, real people's lives have been disrupted, sometimes permanently, certainly in ways that we don't think about. We have come to think about hurricane damage as roofs being ripped off of buildings and trees in the road, and once those are picked up, everything is back to normal. What we don't recognize is that underneath all of that is the long-term damage done to a small business that went 2 weeks without any sort of income, so they closed. There is the impact we see in the Florida Keys, where there are a lot of people, for example, who have used their retirement savings to buy a small property that they rent out in the Florida Keys. It is very common. They buy a small townhouse, they rent it out in the winter for people to stay there, and then they use it in the summer for their family. Well, guess what. This winter they are probably not getting a lot of visitors. In some cases--I know of one in particular--there is all this debris from the storm that is sitting in the canal.…”