Mary Landrieu

I think in RESTORE we found a balance, and I hope that those administering this will seek that same balance.

If we had not passed the RESTORE Act, all of that money would have come, under previous law, to the Federal Treasury.

I am so proud of our work on the RESTORE Act.

The time for action is now; we cannot afford to wait.

I insisted on that, Senator Vitter supported that effort, so that our local parishes can have some of this money to do some things.

It is imperative that we establish viable, effective, and accountable distribution mechanisms now to ensure that this unprecedented investment is targeted at critical projects that contribute to the overall recovery of the Gulf Coast.

We are going to insist in the implementation of the law that the legislative intent is followed.

Reserving the right to object, may I ask the good Senator from Oklahoma, since he has talked about three amendments, may I ask unanimous consent for my amendment, to see if anybody would object to it?

I would ask the Senator, does he know that some of us are very sympathetic with the amendments he is offering, and does he know some of us would actually really like to vote on some of those amendments? I am sure he is aware. Is he aware…

There is a lot of focus in my view on what large businesses may need, GE, IBM, et cetera, but not enough in this discussion on immigration reform.

Bridging the Skills Gap, How Stem Education Pipeline Can Develop a Higher Skilled American Workforce for Small Businesses.

I know but the problem is what you have correctly identified as the long-term pipeline.

What we are finding is they are not able to apply the mathematics that they learned.

I mean, we are getting ready to pass, potentially pass an immigration bill with an H-1B visa program that is probably not going to work for any small business in the country.

Now, you would catch that in an ACT test or you would catch it at an SAT.

For businesses under 50 to 100 people, because they are not going to be able to navigate...

The Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship will meet on May 22, 2013, at 10 a.m. in room 428A Russell Senate Office building to hold a roundtable entitled ``Bridging the Skills Gap: How the STEM Education Pipeline Can Develop a…

I am really going to focus, as I said five times this morning, on this immigration bill as it moves through and its impact to small business.

While I am a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, I am not going to support a bill that is overly burdensome to small business.

We do not want them evaluating themselves.

It is easy to fix and that is a very excellent suggestion, not that we can amend the bill in this Committee but Senator Rubio has a little bit of an inside track.

If anybody tries to put a small business owner in jail like in the next year, this Senator will probably lose it.

Absolutely. So, at 98.3 percent of the time in the fiscal year 2012, the employer got back an employment authorized response.

Can I assume that you all are learning more and more and more since we have had a little bit of this voluntary experience underneath our belts how to get that quickly back?

Out of 21 million queries last year, you only kicked back about 1.3 percent?