Political Quotes

“I am going to truncate my remarks to 5 minutes. I came to speak on the supplemental and the great needs in the Northeast. Generally, because I know there are other Senators who have other items to discuss, I will come back at a later time for extended remarks. I wanted to come to the floor just to say to all of my colleagues that I hope we can be patient with one another, supportive of the tragedy that is unfolding in the Northeast related to Superstorm Sandy, which I think has caused greater destruction than maybe many people in this Chamber and this Capitol realize. While Katrina--something that I am very familiar with, a storm that hit us over 7 years ago, in August of 2005--received headline after headline after headline, week after week after week, television station after television station, Superstorm Sandy, because it hit a more dense area that is potentially not as--I don't know--as camera friendly, and maybe because of some of the other things that have subsequently happened, the terrible shooting and other issues in the country, I am not sure the public quite understands how devastating this storm has been for a very important part of our country. I will try to frame it with just a few statistics that might grab people. In my State, when Katrina hit, in one weekend we lost 18,000 small businesses. To us, it was a nightmare. We have about 1.2 million people in our metropolitan area and 18,000 small businesses represented a tremendous loss.…”