Mary Landrieu: “I wish to continue and again thank the majority leader for his kind comments and assure him I am working with the…”

“I wish to continue and again thank the majority leader for his kind comments and assure him I am working with the Republican leadership as well to try to find a way forward to minimize the impact on many businesses and homeowners who will be negatively affected by the new requirements of the Federal flood insurance program. I have an amendment which has been filed. It is amendment No. 888. I will be offering it for myself and Senator Vitter. Senator Schumer and Senator Lautenberg are also cosponsors of this amendment. Hopefully we can get a vote. I do not mind trying to meet the 60-vote threshold. I understand that would be a requirement should we be able to move to a vote next week on this amendment. We will be working very hard over the weekend to get additional cosponsors on the first amendment I filed, which had a multimillion- dollar cost to it. We had 62 people who had committed to vote. So we have a strong network of Senators, Republicans and Democrats, who are very supportive of the effort Senator Vitter and I are leading to try to mitigate some of the harshest provisions of this bill that passed last year. The bill never was voted on in this Chamber. It came out of the Banking Committee. A separate bill came out of the House with a strong bipartisan vote. Then what happened was both bills never went to a formal conference. It got pushed inside of a larger bill.…”