Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in a few minutes we are going to be voting on a bill that has been put on the floor that would address many of the emergency disaster needs that have come our way this last year. In my State of South Dakota, it has been a year for the record books. We have had historically cold winters the last couple of winters. We had a historically wet spring and, if you look at the Missouri River basin, unprecedented amounts of runoff, to the point where we had flooding on the Missouri River throughout the entire basin, up and down. My State of South Dakota, of course, was impacted dramatically by that, as were many of the States in the basin, and I think, like a lot of parts of the country this year that have experienced weather-related disasters, there are a lot of people who have been hurt by that. In my State of South Dakota, we have a lot of homeowners in the Pierre and Fort Pierre area and the Dakota Dunes area and the Yankton area. We have had tremendous wet weather in northeastern South Dakota, and there are a lot of people who have been flooded up there. We have people in these areas of my State who literally have lost everything--their homes. It was not one of those situations where you get an event that comes through, it is gone quickly, and you can go in and clean up and recover. In this case, they were floods that persisted over long periods of time--in this case months.…”