Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the Senate floor once again to ask all of my colleagues to come together, Democrats and Republicans, as Americans to do something we should have done weeks ago: reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program. The National Flood Insurance Program is a vital, necessary program to provide flood insurance to our citizens around the country to help protect their homes and property. Yet it was allowed to expire on June 1. So for almost a month, we have not had a national flood insurance program. What does that mean? That means there have been thousands of real estate closings that have been held up, unable to move forward. There are thousands of first-time and other home buyers who want to go to their closings, who are excited about everything that means, but because of politics up here, because of that getting stuck in the mud-- even though substantively it should be completely noncontroversial-- they cannot go to their closings, and all of this in the midst of an extremely serious recession. We should never allow this sort of lapse in the program, but when unemployment nationally is almost 10 percent, when we need every real estate closing we can get our hands on to help move the economy along and to try to get it to a better place, this is the last moment we should allow this program to expire. As we all know, this reauthorization has been held hostage, and there is no more accurate way to describe what has been going on.…”