David Vitter

Unless businesses and jobs come back, people won't follow and we won't properly repopulate and get back on our feet.

I want to thank Administrator Barreto for being here today and for all of his work.

This plan helps small businesses, of course. It was adopted last week as an amendment and we appreciate all your work on that.

I think we need to ask some truly fundamental questions about why that didn't work.

I don't have a doubt in the world that all of these questions are going to be asked in a very forceful, focused way.

I want to make sure to get the job done on the ground in Louisiana and then very soon after that we can transition into figuring out exactly what went wrong.

We need to fix problems at this point and not fix blame.

There was absolutely no execution.

Due to the circumstances surrounding the Katrina disaster, I was in my home State of Louisiana yesterday and unable to vote for final passage of H.R. 3673, the emergency supplemental appropriations bill. Had I been present, I would have…

I think we've done that, particularly with General Honore who is active duty military a three-star general. I think that's making a dramatic difference.

I hear stories like that all the time and it's very unfortunate... but do I hear stories like that? Absolutely, every day.

I gave all of the organized government relief effort an 'F,' state and federal. I think it's turned a corner... Now today, we're going to have upwards of 40,000 boots on the ground in Louisiana.

A Governor has never attempted to use this authority. In the case of Louisiana, we have two licensed offshore LNG facilities and the Governor of Louisiana approved both of these facilities. Louisiana has lost thousands of jobs due to the…

That is correct. So, no changes to existing law are necessary in order for the Governor to approve or disapprove issuance of a license for offshore LNG facilities.

The Senator is correct. In Louisiana, there has been a tremendous amount of controversy involving the licensing of offshore LNG terminals recently related mainly to a technology for reheating the gas called open rack vaporization. My…

I would like to discuss a Governor's authority to approve the issuance of a license for an offshore LNG facility.

Yes, this first amendment is No. 802. My second amendment we can deal with much later on. We don't to have deal with it immediately.

No. The point which I just made was that this amendment is well within all of the numbers laid out in the Budget Act. That was the point I was trying to make.

If I could clarify and respond to the question, that is not my position at all. My position, which I think I laid out pretty clearly, is this amendment is well within all of the numbers within the budget. It does not bust those numbers. It…

OK, but I say to the Senator, I understood you had been given the floor until someone came to the floor to speak on the highway bill. About how much longer?

We will all remember Congressman Morrison very fondly, very proudly for his contributions not only to his part of Louisiana, to our home State, but to the Congress and to the country.

I certainly respect the perspective and thoughts of the gentleman about the IRS. I just want to clarify. Even under the amendment, we would increase the IRS budget over last year over $200 million, and I presume we are not going to give…

I simply do not have full confidence in that; and I think it is reasonable for me, for all of us, to lack that confidence given the past recent history of security breaches under this administration, and that is really the very important…

It is the intention of this legislation to address inflow and infiltration problems of the municipal sewer systems in the estuary that are adversely affecting the ecosystem of the basin and to provide the assistance necessary to focus on…