Political Quotes

“Madam President, I come to the floor again to urge all of us to join together on a bipartisan basis and to reauthorize the national flood insurance program, to do it now, to do it quickly because time is running out. On May 31 the entire National Flood Insurance Program will expire. When the clock strikes midnight that day, it will be gone unless we act, and act we must. This is an important program for the country. In my neck of the woods, in south Louisiana in particular, almost every real estate closing is dependent on this program because those properties need flood insurance for there to be a closing, which is very typical in many other parts of the country. So here we are trying to get out of a real estate-led recession, trying to bolster the economy, and we are on the verge of letting the entire National Flood Insurance Program expire yet again. What is so frustrating about this is there are not big disagreements about how to get this done. This is not an overly partisan issue; we are not bitterly divided. This is merely an issue of getting floor time in the Senate. The House acted last year in a bipartisan way, and the Senate committee on which I serve has acted. I have worked very closely with my subcommittee chair Jon Tester, and we have acted in a bipartisan way. We have put together a good 5-year reauthorization bill, but we need to move this on and off the Senate floor to get this done before the end of the month.…”