Floor Statements

Mr. President, it is with great sadness that I come to the Senate floor today to reflect upon the passing of Benny Powell, Jr., an esteemed jazz trombonist from Louisiana. Louisiana and the Nation lost a musical icon on June 26 when Benny passed away, but he lives on in our memories and in the music that he created.

Born March 1, 1930, in New Orleans, LA, Benjamin Gordon Powell, Jr. first set his sights on the parade drum. At the time, his mother was working as a maid in the French Quarter and she played the piano. Thankfully, his mother quickly realized his enthusiasm for music and encouraged Benny to play the trombone. By the time he was 14, Benny had landed his first professional band gig. He was tremendously musically gifted, even from such a young age.

Benny has said of the trombone that he loved most how expressive the instrument was. In an interview with the Times-Picayune in 2001, he was quoted as saying that, ``It's like a voice. It can go from a whisper to a roar.''

Benny has performed from coast to coast with a variety of musical figures. In 1961, he played at President Kennedy's inauguration. He has recorded or performed with Frank Sinatra, Screamin' Jay Jawkins, Lionel Hampton, pianist Randy Weston, in Broadway pit bands, and for many years in the house band on ``The Merv Griffin Show.'' However, he is probably best known for playing with Count Basie from the early 1950s through the early 1960s. Since 1944, he taught at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, passing along his gift to aspiring young musicians. I know younger generations were encouraged and inspired by his talents, strength and wisdom.

There is a deep rooted musical tradition in New Orleans that Benny's music exemplified by his clear passion and rich sound. We will miss his inspiring gift. As we reflect on his life and his contributions, our prayers are with his daughter, Demitra Powell Clay, his sister, Elizabeth Powell McCrowey, and his grandchildren, Faith and Kyle Swetnam. May we all find some solace in the part of Benny that continues to live on in his music.

Mr. President, I would like to talk about the underlying bill that we are actually on today, which is the extenders package.

The Democrats negotiated in very good faith with the Republican Party to try to figure out a way to get tax credits, tax cuts to businesses that we all need to make sure continue in terms of research and development. These are credits they have relied on to keep not only their businesses open but keep them hiring. There is a long list. They have been well explained on the floor. They are all very popular with both sides of the aisle. They have been negotiated over and over.

The Democrats have, in good faith, argued or debated with the Republicans that we need to get these extended for the purpose of stimulating our economic growth. But we have said there is one that we are not going to pay for because, A, we don't have to pay for it; and, B, because it is an emergency. So everything in the extenders package is paid for. Every single item is paid for. Although some people don't like the pay-fors, every single item to extend a tax credit--not new spending on the part of the Federal Government through bureaucracy but tax credits--is paid for except for the unemployment benefits because it is an emergency.

With 15 million people out of work, it is an emergency. For anyone on that side to come to the floor and say Democrats are big spenders and we can't pay for anything and we don't know how to run the government, we

have put a great package together. But there is one thing that is not paid for, and that is unemployment because it is an emergency. That is what this debate is about, whether they are going to vote for it. If they don't want to vote for it, it is completely at their feet that people in America today, who have no benefits, will not get them for the Fourth of July. They will not get them as we celebrate the birthday of our country. If they are not going to get them, it will be because the Republican Party decided that we, as a Congress, are going to have to find a way to pay for unemployment benefits, when they never paid for even 1 year of any war they helped lead us into when their party was in charge.

So I hope the leadership over here holds the line. We are going to pass the extenders package the way it was presented. They can continue to vote no on it. That is their choice. But everything in this bill-- many things very important to the State of Louisiana, such as flood insurance--is paid for and is now being held up; for example, the placed-in-service date which keeps four or five of our major housing projects from being built. When I say housing, I mean neighborhoods, really, being rebuilt. That is being held up because this side is trying to make an issue of finding a way to pay for unemployment benefits when it is clearly an emergency, clearly qualifies as an emergency, and in the past was always clarified that way. That is what part of this argument is about.

As one of the managers of the small business bill, which we are moving to, I am very hopeful and will make sure that the extenders debate stays separate from the small business debate. Now that the extenders bill has been set aside, we have another bill we believe we can move forward with more bipartisan support for, and I want to thank the Republican Senators who helped to move this bill to the floor: Senators Grassley, Voinovich, Snowe, Collins, LeMieux, Lugar, Bond, and Brown of Massachusetts. These eight Senators have negotiated in extremely good faith with both the Finance Committee and the Small Business Committee to bring a package to the floor that will actually help create, we hope, millions of jobs in our country.

I want to make one editorial comment before I speak about the small businesses, and as a Senator from Louisiana, I feel compelled to do so.

I have helped to manage and craft, along with my committee members-- and I am very proud of the small business piece of this bill. There are three pieces. There is the finance piece, there is a small business package, and then there is a treasury piece. I will discuss all of them briefly in just a moment.

We have worked hard over this year trying to come up with some things that the government could do that wouldn't cost that much money but could spur growth in small business. As the Presiding Officer knows, it is not the big businesses that are creating jobs. They are still laying off people or are putting in efficiencies, which means holding the line. Even as they get more contracts, they are not hiring because it is not what big business does. They have enough cushion to hold what they have, but small businesses are affected immediately by contractions and expansions. They can't afford to hold three or four people on their payroll without a contract, so they let them go. But the minute they get a new contract, they will hire them back. They are immediately tied to the daily, weekly, and monthly jolts in this economy.

That is why we see that 65 percent of all new jobs created since 1993 have been by small business. When we want to look out from 2009 to the year we are in, 2010, and to 2011 and 2012, which the country is depending on us to do, we should focus our attention where the jobs can be created. Mr. President, that is in small business. So that is what we are here this week and next week to do, and these eight Senators have said yes, basically, to small business in America. The package isn't going to be what all ten of these Senators would write if they could write it themselves, but they understand this is a good package. It is a worthy package to pass--the small business, the finance, and the treasury package--to get small business moving again.

I feel compelled to comment, before explaining some of the pieces of this bill, that it is concerning to me that while we are on the Senate floor talking about a small business package, back home in Louisiana and in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, because of events almost beyond the control of any of us here, we are facing a real economic challenge with the oilspill in the gulf and the subsequent moratorium that was laid down by the administration on deepwater drilling. I have to say right now there are, in fact, about 50,000 to 60,000 jobs immediately at risk while that issue is being worked out. So while I am here on the Senate floor to help create millions of new jobs--and I believe this bill will do that--we also want to be mindful of not losing the jobs we have in trying to come up with some very quick, appropriate responses to the BP spill--the Deepwater Horizon spill--and the call for safety in the gulf. We need to be getting our people back to work.

I spent all morning in the Energy Committee on that subject, and I am proud to be leading and helping with some suggestions in that regard. But I have to say I want all the Members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, to understand there is an economic calamity brewing in the gulf that needs our immediate attention. We can do more than one thing at a time here, so we are going to continue to move forward on the small business bill because small business in Louisiana will be helped, as well as those in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and small businesses all over this country.

There are a couple of important components in this overall bill. Again, I thank the members of my committee who voted these items out 17 to 1 and 18 to 0. Senator Snowe, the ranking member, did a magnificent job of working with the Republicans on our committee. We had many hearings and several markups. In the underlying bill, one of the most important provisions is the Small Business Jobs Creation Access to Capital Act. It increases 7(a) loans from $2 million to $5 million, 504 loans from $1.5 million to $5 million, and microloans from $35,000 to $50,000. If I had my way, I would like to see that go up to $100,000. Why? Because small businesses need access to capital. They must have access to grow.

If we want small businesses to be able to grow, they have to be able to expand by borrowing more money at relatively low interest rates on favorable terms, and then they can start hiring people to get the jobs necessary to, A, end the recession; and, B, as Senator Stabenow has said so beautifully all week, to start paying the deficit down.

What the Republican Party doesn't understand is that one way to pay the deficit down--not the only way but one way to chip away at it--is to get more people working so they can pay the taxes to the local, State, and Federal Government and we can then take that tax money and apply it to deficit reduction. Yes, we have to cut spending. Yes, we have to stop giving out tax cuts we cannot afford. They never want to do the tax cut piece, and they do not do the cutting piece well either most of the time. But what they need to understand is that creating jobs, both private sector and public sector jobs, where it is appropriate, generates taxes to the local, State, and Federal governments. Then we can begin chipping away at the deficit--a deficit they left, by the way.

When the last administration came in--when President Bush came into office--he was handed a surplus. We handed him a surplus of $5.1 trillion and said: Mr. President, here is a world at peace and here is $5.1 trillion in surplus; the economy is creating jobs.

When he left office 8 years later, he handed the next President a deficit twice that big, with Wall Street in collapse, two wars that hadn't been paid for, and a mess here at home--and they want to ask why we haven't fixed all that in a year and a half? It is quite humorous to me. I know President Obama is smart and good--though I don't agree with him on everything--but I don't think any human being could fix the mess they left in just a year and a half.

We have been plodding along trying to fix different pieces of it, but it hasn't been pretty. All of it isn't working, but we are trying. Most of it is working. That is what the American people expect of us. They do not expect

us to get it 100 percent right every day, but they do expect us to move forward; to say, yes, we will try not to say no and not to lecture Democrats about deficits they created.

Having gotten that off my chest, I want to say here we are in our small business package. I am very proud that eight of these Republican Senators joined us to get on the discussion on the small business bill. This is going to do a lot of good for a lot of people in many places, let me say, not just New York and not just Wall Street. This is a Main Street bill. This is about creating jobs in little towns in Oregon as well as little towns in Louisiana, small towns in Washington State and Maine. That is what this is about.

The second piece is the export piece. This is a very exciting chart to me. I am maybe not as good as Kent Conrad is with charts, Senator Conrad, but I like this one very much. This chart shows the potential of small business in America. Just think about this. We have so many, millions and millions of small businesses, but less than 1 percent of them today are exporting. This is tragic, if you think about it. If we can get a few percentage points, up to 3 percent, 4 percent, 5 percent of small businesses in America exporting their products, using the Internet, using favorable tax provisions that will help--that are in this underlying bill--using new support and technological support from the Small Business Administration, from volunteer organizations such as SCORE, university-based technical support programs that can go to our small businesses and say: You sold 50,000 pairs of shoes last year but you sold them all down the road. We can help you sell them to China or sell them to India. Think about the possibility of that. And it is real.

That is what this bill does. Senator Snowe has done a tremendous amount of work. I am extremely proud of her work on the export portion of this bill. Again, large businesses, percent of firms that do not export, 58 percent. This number could be increased. But the exciting opportunity is small business. But sometimes they are intimidated, as you can imagine. They don't know how to negotiate with foreign governments. Some of the things we are going to do in this bill will help them move that number up and they are going to be able to grow.

Third, the contracting piece. I know some people on both sides of the aisle believe government is too big. Sometimes I agree with that and think it is too. We have to shape it, make sure it is efficient and effective and muscular, not flabby and big but bold and muscular, so it can do things it needs to do that the private sector can't do. But one of the things all governments do is spend a lot of money, and it is not just money to hire their own employees, it is spending money for the private sector. We contract out a lot of our work. When the Government has a job to do, we do not always do it with government employees; we contract it out. I do not have the exact numbers in front of me but it is billions and billions of dollars. We are the largest--if you put us in terms of a corporation--the largest corporation, potentially, maybe in the world. So the contracting provision we have in this bill says: OK, Federal Government, if you were a business, if you could contract with more small businesses, meet your small business contracting goals, then we could create a lot of jobs in America because it is, again, the small businesses that are creating these jobs.

If you give a big company a government contract, they might absorb it into their infrastructure. They are so big, they have millions of employees, or hundreds of thousands. But you give a contract to a small business, you know what happens? They might have five employees. If they get a very nice size contract from the government, they will hire 10 people to implement that contract and they will do it right away. So we have some contracting provisions in this bill that I am, again, very proud of. They have broad bipartisan support.

In addition, in this bill, which is paid for, is an additional $50 million for the Small Business Community Partnership Relief Act which gives $50 million in addition to women business centers, microloan intermediaries. It weighs or reduces the non-Federal share of funding so that for 1 year States all over this country can start enhancing and improving their Women Business Owners' Center, their Minority Business Centers, the centers that are in universities all over the country. I am sorry I do not have a map to show what the Secretary or Administrator of the SBA fondly calls our bone structure, because it is a great structure in the country. It is not just isolated little offices of the SBA.

If you can imagine, so many of our universities have small business development centers and SCORE chapters, which is retired business executives, senior executives who volunteer to help younger businesses. There are hundreds of these chapters around the country.

If you could imagine a map of the United States, you could see, if I could show where these centers are, there are centers at universities and SCORE chapters and community banks, almost within a few miles of any citizen. Any citizen could find a SCORE chapter or a university or a local bank. This bill is sending funding and help to all of those places. Again, not just on K Street here. There are lots of jobs on K Street. In fact, there are so many buildings going up on K Street, I am amazed how many. It never stops. There are lots of buildings going up, maybe, on Wall Street--lots of office space. But where I represent, there are empty spaces. There are lots of vacancy signs.

This bill is trying to push out money, not to the Federal Government but to our universities, to our private sector partners to help them tweak--help support small businesses to help small businesses grow. I am very proud of that piece. The job impact analysis was something Senator Snowe wanted. We worked with her. On everything we do, this is going to be a way to say, in this bill, how many jobs will actually be created, to record them so we can be accountable to the American people for that. I am happy she put that in the bill.

Going back to the 7(a) loan program, this is the major loan program of the SBA. As you can see, it has been sort of a happy and sad situation here over the last couple of years since 2008.

When Congress acts and puts money in this program, loans to small business go way up. When we dilly-dally and cannot agree and the program expires, loans go way down. When we get our act together again, it goes up. I wish this chart did not look like this. I wish it looked straight up, like this. Right now it is down beneath where it was before the stimulus act was passed. It has fallen below the ARRA average of $172 million. It is down to $154 million.

We need to get it back up. When we initially announced that the Small Business Administration was expanding the amount you could borrow, reducing the fees so you did not have to pay as much, and giving you a 95-percent guarantee rate, those loans are good loans. Small businesses need them, particularly because credit card companies are not lending the way they used to or charging you too much for the money they do give you. Credit lines are drying up. This is the core of the small business bill. I hope we will see this number go straight up.

Banks all over our country want this program. Many of them--not every bank participates, but I would say about 1,000 or 1,200 out of the 5,000 banks participate in this program, and they are very excited about getting this funding back in place so they can begin to loan money again to small business.

There are many other things we can do and should do. One of the amendments I have filed--I wish I could have gotten this in the base bill, but even as the chairman of the committee you can't get everything you want in the base bill. So I have agreed to offer one of these as an amendment.

I am very proud to have Senator Cochran's support, Senator Wicker's support, Senator Vitter's support. It is a bipartisan amendment. What it would do is provide in the small business bill interest loan relief for the gulf coast outstanding disaster loans from Katrina and Wilma, Gustav and Ike, from Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

There are 13,207 loans. I will take a moment to try to explain it. I will try to wrap up in about 5 minutes.

There are currently today 13,207 small business loans that were taken out by businesses all along the gulf

coast. Some of these loans are to fishermen whose boats were destroyed and they had just bought the new boat or fixed their net from some of these hurricanes. They were just getting back into the water. The water was coming back, the marsh was coming back after Katrina and Rita, and then all of a sudden the Horizon BP disaster happened.

The same people who were affected by these hurricanes and who may be affected by hurricanes in this season--which unfortunately promises to be a very difficult one--these are the businesses that are struggling to pay these loans on top of the economic disaster they are experiencing. So I am asking the Senate to please give some forgiveness--in the loan forgiveness, but give some special help to this group of loans. What we are asking in the amendment is 3 years of an interest rate reduction; not loan forgiveness, so the taxpayers will be paid back the full principal amount of all the loans these individuals and businesses have made. But if we could give them a little interest relief--let me give a specific example.

I actually took Karen Mills, our Administrator of the SBA, to Louisiana on several occasions to impress upon her the seriousness of this situation. I took her to see the Bergerons, who run a gas station in Lakeview. This entire neighborhood was destroyed, 8,000 families. Three of my brothers and sisters lived in this neighborhood, with four children each. They lost everything, their homes, their clothes, everything was completely destroyed. That was true of their 8,000 other neighbors. This gas station--the Bergerons came back. They operated one of the most successful gas stations in this neighborhood. In order for people to be able to rebuild their house, because they had fled to higher ground hundreds of miles away, families would drive long distances after work to come and gut their homes in Lakeview and try to rebuild their homes. But when they went to go back, there was no gas station for them to fill up their car so they could get back to where they were living until they could get home.

So the Bergerons, like a lot of what I call the pioneer businesses-- the hardware stores, the gas stations--said you know, I have been here 40 years. Mr. Bergeron is in his 70s, still very active, but he said I am going to go back and open my gas station. So he went to the SBA and got a loan. The problem was, he did a great thing, but his business came back so slowly. But without his business no one in the neighborhood could come back because there was no place to get gasoline. He is paying on his loan $1,000 a month. If this passes, his note will go down to about $400 a month. It will give him a little bit of relief because right now in his same neighborhood he has a lot of people who work in the fishery industry or the seafood industry or the oil and gas industry, so some of his customers cannot come and get as much gas as they want to because they are being affected now by this Deepwater Horizon.

I am begging the Members of the Senate to please help this particular group. I wish we could afford to do for everyone in America but not everybody in America right now is on the gulf coast. But these 13,207 people are and we need to give them a little breathing room. That is one of my amendments.

I am going to yield the floor after I make a comment on a nominee. But that is one of the amendments I am going to ask the Senate, when we get an opportunity to offer amendments, to please give us a chance to help these small businesses. It is a temporary relief for them, but I think it is something they deserve and will help this region that has now been hit again.

Nomination of Winslow Sargeant

Mr. President, at this time I want to talk for a minute about Winslow Sargeant.

He is a gentleman who has been recommended by the President to serve at the SBA, in the advocacy position at the SBA. He comes highly regarded and highly recommended. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in electrical engineering and a background as a very successful small business owner. He is managing director of Venture Investors, a Midwest venture capital country with a concentration in starting up health care technology companies.

Dr. Sargeant has a great deal of support from a wide variety of individuals and businesses that I will submit for the Record.

With more than 80 percent of job losses coming from small firms, I believe this is someone who should be in the Office of Advocacy. For some reason, he is being held up by the other side.

I understand there are nominations being held up on both sides of the aisle, but I wanted to ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider--I am going to wait and ask for unanimous consent. I am not going to wait long, but I will continue talking for a few minutes. I will wait for a few minutes, but at some point I am going to ask for unanimous consent that he be moved ahead because here we are on a small business bill, and here is the man whom the President has nominated, who obviously is well credentialed, has tremendous support, who is being held up. We do not really understand why he is being held up, so I would like to know, and in just a few minutes, I am going to ask for him to go by unanimous consent.

In the meantime, I will speak about one other potential amendment to the underlying bill. This amendment is coming from Senator Boxer, and I am so excited that she came up with this idea and this amendment. I think it has a lot of potential, and I think many Members might support it.

Senator Boxer called to my attention that there are many small businesses that operate out of their homes, and if you think about it, there are many people who operate their business out of their homes but particularly women who are trying to raise children, they are still the primary caregiver--not the only caregiver, but in most homes the women are trying to balance being a good wife and a good mother and also contributing to the bottom line of their family income. So a lot of them might be running small businesses out of their homes.

Well, it has come to our attention that in order to take the tax deduction that is rightfully there for anyone, man or woman, who works out of their home--it has come to my attention through Senator Boxer that it is not really very easy to take that deduction. In fact, it is so complicated, to my knowledge, that many people don't take it. Think about that.

If we are really supportive of family values, of people being flexible; if we don't like spending a lot of gasoline traveling back and forth to work and we are kind of trying to encourage people to stay at home and work if they can--many women who are very well credentialed because the government spent a lot of money on our universities getting them the degrees they need, are home raising three, four, five kids, and they can't travel a long time to work, so they set up a business in their home. Senator Boxer's amendment would help them by simplifying this deduction.

I am hoping Senator Boxer will come at some time to the floor over the next couple of days--I am sure she will--and explain the details of this, but I think it would be an excellent provision to add to the small business bill because again, remember, this underlying bill is cutting taxes for small businesses, specifically cutting taxes for small businesses; it is supporting the small business programs to create more of them, both in our country and their export potential; and then it is giving--the third leg of the stool--$30 billion to banks in America, voluntarily. It is not TARP-like, nothing about TARP; it is $30 billion to small banks in Oregon, Louisiana, and other places to be able to then take that money and lend it to small businesses. That is the essence of this bill.

I am very hopeful we can add a couple of amendments to an already very good small business package. So I am hoping Senator Boxer will come at some point and explain this amendment.

My colleagues are here to speak, I guess, on either the extenders package or the small business package. I see the Senator from Ohio, who has been very supportive of small business. Of course, Ohio is one of the States that has been hardest hit, and Michigan has been very hard hit in the underlying economy. So I am very happy to have, hopefully, their support on the underlying bill.

But one more comment about the moratorium. And I started off by saying I am proud to be the chair of the Small Business Committee advocating for small businesses in the country. I think the small business package, the finance and treasury package that we have on the floor will deliver to the American people how to, in a very fiscally responsible way, help us create the jobs we need. But one of the points--and I am going to be very brief because I see the minority leader here, but at the same time I want to say again that the moratorium on the gulf coast--and the Senator from Kentucky will, I believe, agree with me on this point--the moratorium on the gulf coast is really hurting many small businesses now.

I know we have to get this drilling safer and it has to be very safe. The people of my State want that. The people of the gulf coast want that. But we hope sometime in the next few weeks to clarify or fix or modify this. The Federal judge, as you know, has ruled that the moratorium is lifted, because the Federal judge did not agree with the actions taken by this administration, nor do I. So while we are debating a small business bill, I am very hopeful that as soon as this small business package can pass, we can get on to getting more people back to work along the gulf coast who have been affected by both the moratorium and this bill.

Unanimous consent Request--Executive Calendar

I ask unanimous consent for Winslow Sargeant to be Chief Counsel for Advocacy, Small Business Administration; that the nomination be confirmed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the nominee be printed in the Record; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume its regular legislative session.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley.) Is there objection?

Mr. President, I begin by complimenting the senior Senator from Massachusetts for a remarkable tribute to the late Senator Robert Byrd. It was beautifully delivered, beautifully written. It captured the spirit of this wonderful Senator and highlighted just a few of the extraordinary accomplishments in his life. I was privileged to be on the floor to hear it delivered by the Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I was here earlier today, following Senator Baucus's handling of a portion of the small business bill. I am pleased to share in that responsibility on a small business bill that is not immediately before the Senate because, remember, we came off it temporarily to talk about the unemployment measure that is pending about which Senator Harkin just spoke.

I want to return to the small business bill because at some point, after a vote on the unemployment measure before the Senate, we will get back to a very important bill for you, Mr. President, and you have been a leader in this area, as well as many of us.

I want to speak for a moment about a couple of provisions of the small business bill. The bill itself has three major pieces to it. There is a piece that came out of the Small Business Committee about which I spent some time this morning talking, the elements of strengthening the SBA lending programs, expanding the limits for the amount of money that businesses can borrow. There is a piece that is coming out of the Finance Committee that is broadly supported. Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley have done a great job. Basically, it is tax cuts relative to small businesses that can help them with tax provisions. Then there is a piece that has come from the Treasury, the White House, the leadership team, about small business lending.

I want to talk for a few minutes about a piece of the small business package, and then I want to talk about the bank investment program, the $30 billion program.

First of all, one of the most important aspects of the small business bill is the extension and the expansion of 7(a) loans. To put this in plain English, these are the loans that the Small Business Administration partners with banks to make what we call floor plan lending. It is any business that has inventory--maybe it is a tractor company or a manufactured home company or a boat, marine industry with a small business owner--and you have some of these in Illinois, I know, Mr. President, and I have many of them in Louisiana--that has to buy inventory and put it in their showrooms for when people come by and they look at the product.

Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to speak on a couple of different subjects. Briefly I wish to say a few words about our extraordinary and great colleague who has left the Senate and left this world, but his spirit will be here for many years to come and his presence will be felt here for decades, if literally not centuries, and the extraordinary contribution that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia has made to the Congress, to the Senate, to our country, and to the world.

My colleague, the Senator from Rhode Island, gave a beautiful tribute a few minutes ago. I was in the Chamber and listened to what he said. I wish to add that not only did Robert Byrd rise up through educating himself--in these days that is almost a foreign concept to so many people. You go to school, you get a degree--but he did all of that and more. He read so much. He was so curious about so many aspects of life, not just politics, not just government, but industry, art, and music that literally he was one of the most inspirational human beings I have ever had the pleasure to know or ever read about in that sense.

Senator Reed said he lifted himself from literally an orphan status in one of the poorest communities in the world, West Virginia. Parts of it are much like a few parts of our country that are extraordinarily poor, even by world standards.

He came from a very humble, orphaned beginning with virtually no chance at anything much, and ended up, we know, sitting at that desk, which is one of the great desks of honor in this Chamber. As people who work here know, the longer one is here, the closer one gets to the center aisle. Since he held up the center aisle literally with his presence every day, one cannot get any more senior than that desk. We look at it now these days and are reminded of him.

He lifted himself, he lifted his family, but I would say in that earnest curious way, he lifted an entire State and an entire Nation. There are not many individuals who can say that their life actually did that. But Robert Byrd is one of them. West Virginia today is lifted so much higher. The children of West Virginia, the families of West Virginia, the communities of West Virginia literally were lifted by the strength--the spiritual and intellectual strength--and courage and tenacity of a man for whom there is no peer in this room relative to that, and our Nation across decades, through many of the great trials of this Nation. He lifted this Nation to a better place and was such a strong man and such a great man that he would even admit when he made some very bad mistakes, which raises him even higher in my eyes.

He said toward the end of his life many times that his stand on civil rights was not right. He apologized profusely for being on the wrong side of history on that issue. He did not make many mistakes such as that. But he was such a great man that he admitted when he did.

Senator Reed recalled that he always called him ``captain,'' but Senator Byrd had a way of referring to each of us in a special way. He would always say to me: How are you today, Senator, and how is that fine father of yours, Moon Landrieu? It would always make me feel so wonderful that he would say he was such a great mayor. How is Moon today and how is Verna? Can you imagine a gentleman with so much on his mind that he would always remember to me the parents I have and that we both admire so much? It was a special way about him.

Finally, when Katrina happened and all of us on the gulf coast were devastated--frankly, I could not find a great deal of comfort at the level of the administration that was in power. I never thought they quite understood the depths of the destruction that occurred. It worried me then and it still troubles me to this day. But the first meeting I had with Senator Byrd, when I was trying to explain to him how devastating this situation was--because it wasn't a hurricane, it was a flood and the Federal levees had collapsed--he just sort of put his hand out and said: Senator, have a seat. He said: I do understand, and I am going to work with you. I am going to help you. I am going to be here for the people of Louisiana and the gulf coast as we try to get this right.

Mr. President, we were shortchanged by other Members of Congress and by the White House. They never quite understood. When the first allocation of funding was given out, it was just an arbitrary number thrown out that we were going to take $10 billion and help the gulf coast, but no State could get more than $5.4 billion. Well, when you looked at the facts at the time, the numbers were so disproportionate to the injury that Louisiana and our people had suffered, had you done it on just a disaster basis--which we should have done in calculating it--we should have gotten $15 billion relative to that distribution.

When I brought those numbers to Senator Byrd, he said: We are going to work on it. And you know what, Mr. President, he did. Unbelievable as it might be to the people in this Chamber, because he was a very powerful chairman of the Appropriations Committee, he could actually do it, and he did.

I didn't have to explain that much or beg that much. I just had to present the data to him that showed this is how many houses were destroyed, this is how many homes were lost, this is what the President gave to X, Y and Z; what do you think, Senator Byrd? Is it fair for us? And he said: Absolutely. So he gave us literally billions of dollars.

Today, St. Bernard Parish, the city of New Orleans, and parishes all in the southern part of the State are recovering because of one person, Senator Byrd, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, who said: We are not going to leave you at your hour of greatest need.

I will never forget, and my State will never forget, the generosity and the courage it took for him to stand with us through that difficult time. So I wanted to, in a small way, add my voice to the many tributes that Senator Byrd has received, and those are the most important ones that I wanted to share today.

Mr. President, as we continue the important work of the Senate this week on a number of important bills, one of them being the small business package that is before this body now, we are always mindful, as we come to the floor with the beautiful flowers on Senator Byrd's desk, of the great loss we are all experiencing. His colleagues here and in his home State of West Virginia, the Nation and, as you know, many people around the world are mourning the death of a great Senator, a very well-known Senator, a very well-respected Senator, and a very historic figure.

So as we all do our work today, it is with heavy hearts that we work. I told my staff today walking into the building, it seems so empty and particularly quiet, and it is because of the great respect this Senator enjoyed in his life and now enjoys in his death.

But as even Senator Byrd would say if he were here, the work of the Senate, which he loved very much, needs to go on because it is the work of the people in a very special way. It is in that spirit that I come to the floor to briefly talk about a bill we are attempting to move to.

It is a major piece of legislation. It has three distinct components. It has been in shape and in the works for many months now. A part of this bill has come out of the Small Business Committee. I am extremely proud, as the chair of that committee, that the package we have contributed has been built on strong, solid bipartisan support. In fact, many of the provisions came out of our committee 17 to 0 or 17 to 1 or 18 to 0. We have had tremendous cooperation on the part of my ranking member, Senator Snowe, who has been to the floor several times in the last couple of weeks, joining me in talking about the importance of focusing the congressional efforts and Congress's efforts on small business, on Main Street.

We have spent a lot of the last year and a half dealing with the big companies, the big companies on Wall Street, the big banks, the big insurance companies, the big health care companies. We have had to deal with it because it has been in a state of crisis where Wall Street was going to collapse, the financial structures were collapsing. We had to act quickly. The health care tragedies or stresses were clearly visible, and we had to work our way through that. But now it is time for this Congress, at this time, this summer, to focus on small business, because these are the businesses on the front line of the battle against this recession. And this is a battle. It is a battle to end this recession, to fight and win our way back to prosperity. Much of this can be accomplished if we would focus on the businesses in our neighborhoods, on Main Street, on the farm-to-market road, the small business owners driving those pickup trucks, delivering supplies and equipment all over America, in urban areas and in rural areas.

We would be very much helped if we could get our minds and our hearts on them, because they are going to be the ones that lead us out of this recession. Small firms created 65 percent of all new jobs from 1993 to 2009. It was true in the early 1990s. It was probably true if you would go back to the 1980s, probably true in the 1970s. It is true today. Job creation is not going to come 1,000 jobs at a time. It comes one at a time, two at a time, or three new jobs in small businesses all over America.

What we do here on tax policy, on strengthening the Small Business Administration, on freeing up capital for them, is going to make the difference between whether this recession comes to an end. So I am pleased about the work that has been done.

A portion of our bill has come through the Small Business Committee. A portion of the bill has come through the Finance Committee. I have to take my hat off to the Senator from Montana, Max Baucus, and his ranking member, Senator Grassley, former Chairman Grassley, from Iowa. They have worked nonstop and overtime on a number of bills that have to do with our Tax Code. But they have set aside this special time for their committee to work on tax relief, tax extensions, tax relief for small businesses to add to this package.

So it is a portion of tax cuts and tax relief for small businesses that is so

important, to strengthen the Small Business Administration programs that we know have been effective, not just throwing money at government programs but targeting the government programs that we know work because we have studied them, and we have gotten reports from not just the government bureaucrats--and there are many good ones here--but we have been hearing from businesses: Senator, this works for me. Can you get us more of it? That is what this bill is about.

Then finally there is a piece that has come from the leadership, from the President himself, from the White House, through the Treasury Department, to say: What can we do to leverage some assets of the Federal Treasury to create a $30 billion lending pool, not for the big banks--they have gotten enough of our money and enough of our attention, as far as I am concerned--but the small banks on Main Street. There are 8,000 of them. They are the ones that need a little help, a little financing to help them, not on their bottom lines in terms of their stability because they are quite stable. I am extremely proud of our small banks around this country that did not go belly up. They are strong. They have money to lend. We want to give them some additional funding to lend.

I am proud that the Independent Bankers Association has sent us a letter, which I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record.

The Independent Community Bankers Association has sent to Senator Snowe and me a strong recommendation. They say: On behalf of 5,000 members and our State partner community banking associations, we strongly support the proposed Small Business Lending Fund, and urge prompt passage of this important legislation. The nation's 8,000 community bankers are well positioned because of their established relationships with small businesses in their communities to use the funds to get credit flowing.

Under the proposal that is being brought to the floor today, banks with less than $1 billion in assets could receive capital investments up to 5 percent of their risk-weighted assets, and those with between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets could receive up to 3 percent.

We know community banks are the ones that small businesses do go to, some with more success than others, and that is a speech for another day. But I do know there are a number of bankers who say: Senator Landrieu, Senator Snowe, we want to lend to our small businesses, and if you can help us with a few things, we could do a better job.

In addition, we also know that small businesses use their credit cards for capital. We also know our small businesses go to family members. They dig into their own savings to find the money needed to initiate or support their business. We also know they go to their uncles and aunts. Financing through family members has been a traditional way that small business owners use, and credit unions.

So everything we can do now--we cannot have a relief to the great uncle and aunt bill. That is a little bit out of our reach. But we can help our small banks, our small business agencies. We can look hard on credit card companies and their practices and make sure they are doing right by businesses. We are trying to do all of that one step at a time.

Let me take a minute or two to explain a few pieces of this bill. This is one of the most important components. This chart is startling. Two of the most important programs that SBA operates are the 7(a) and 504 loan programs. These are the loan programs that all of the Federal Government--these are the programs that focus most directly on small business loans in America. They allow a 90-percent guarantee and allow the waiver of fees.

We did this, when the recession started, so a small business could go into a bank and say: I have got a great idea. I want to expand; even though my neighborhood is a little bit in the doldrums, and even though my product is not in great demand today, I think it will be in the future. Can I have a loan? And the bank officer says: Well, we do not quite have money for you. But let me look in the 7(a) program. They can get a 90-percent loan backed up by the Federal Government, and these loans can be made without fees.

This is how low we were in 2008. We were only down to $200 million in loans back in 2008. You can see through the recession how low this was. When we acted, we acted back here in 2009 and started doing some increased guarantees, reducing the fees. It worked. We spiked the number of loans up to almost $1.2 billion.

But as you can see, Congress's actions have a direct effect on this lending to small business. Look here. Now we are down below where we were 2 years ago. This bill will move this number back up, and this bill will help this number stay up. This represents thousands of loans to small businesses, without which they cannot create the jobs that we need and the country needs to get us out of the recession. This is a very important component of our bill. I am very proud of that component.

One more chart we will show. This is a startling chart. I have used this several times. I hope people understand the potential for growth. There is real potential here.

Right now in America, 1 percent of small businesses export. Think about that. We are only 4 percent of the world's population, so 96 percent of everybody else lives somewhere else. The market is very big outside of America, although we are a very important market. So we can help our small businesses learn to be better exporters. With the Internet, now it becomes so possible for them to export products, with first day, short delivery times, all on-time delivery from airplanes, trains, trucks that can deliver products everywhere. Plus, there are so many ideas now with services. The small business here that has a great idea on the Internet, it becomes a great idea in Vietnam or in Korea or a country in Africa. They can sell those products. So this bill does a great deal, with Senator Snowe's help, where she did pioneering work in this area to help us give technical assistance to more small businesses and help them become experts on exporting so they can keep the money, the profits, and the jobs right here at home.

My colleague has been good about waiting, but I wanted to share a few of the aspects of this important bill. We are going to be voting I hope today at about 2 o'clock or so. We hope to get the 60 votes necessary to move to this package.

As a manager of this package, I can say Senator Baucus as well, we are open to amendments people might want to have to perfect it. But we believe this is a very good, solid package to bring up. It is time that we focus on the small businesses of America. They deserve our best efforts between now

and the end of the year or as long as it takes. They have not gotten the attention they deserve. So if we can get 60 votes, we may not be able to get all our work done this week, but we believe in the next couple of weeks we can get the work done on this bill.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for about 15 minutes. It might go to 20 minutes.

Madam President, I come to the floor today to add some comments to the Record about this horrendous environmental and economic disaster unfolding in the gulf and to try to provide some additional perspective on behalf of the people I represent, the people of Louisiana. I have been proud to represent them over the last 14 years in the Senate, and in that capacity I have had the opportunity, on a variety of occasions, to speak up strongly for our neighboring States, the gulf coast, America's working coast--a coast that does the work of this country in many ways. We produce most of the oil and gas off the shores of our Nation. We provide a great percentage of petrochemicals that are relied on by men and women in every part of the world, including those in our own country.

I could go on and on, from agriculture, to seafood, to navigation of the Mississippi River. We work hard down South, and we are proud of the work we do.

We are extremely troubled, as you can imagine, by what is happening today. I would like to share just a few thoughts and potential suggestions for a way forward.

It has been 66 days now since the tragic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon that unleashed one of the worst manmade disasters this Nation has ever witnessed. Every day you can simply turn on the television or many sites on the Internet and find pictures, disturbing pictures of that well still gushing uncontrollably into the Gulf of Mexico.

Millions of Americans, including 105 million who call the Louisiana coast home, watch, in some ways helplessly, as this brown sludge washes up onto our beaches and into our marshes. It is not only staining our lands but threatening our way of life. We must move decisively.

This is an emotional issue for me, for many people I represent, from the broad political spectrum of liberals to conservatives, Democrats to Republicans to Independents, from individuals to families, people of all ages. We try to debate the appropriate way forward.

It is important for us not to lose focus that 66 days ago our Nation lost 11 men. More importantly, more directly, 21 children lost their fathers, and hundreds of families lost members, friends, and coworkers. They lost these men, and we will keep them forever in our memory.

We must also remember these 11 men were just like literally thousands of other men and women who put on their blue jeans and overalls and work outside for a living on the land and on the water in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and all over the United States, who engage in difficult work, and at times dangerous work, to produce what our country needs to operate--many of us can work in the comfort of air- conditioning in buildings like this.

In fact, in my State, there are more than 300,000 men and women working in the oil and gas industry alone. Every day, they go to work with the risk associated with offshore and onshore development, but they understand what I understand, that this country needs to produce more, not less, oil and gas domestically for our economy and, I would contend, for our environment--and I will get to that point in a minute--and for our national security.

As I said on the floor of the Senate last week, I fully supported a thorough review of offshore drilling safety standards. Obviously, we need them. Not only do we need new standards, we need to enforce the ones we have. I have welcomed the efforts of Department of Interior Secretary Salazar to rewrite, reorganize, and retool an agency that has fallen down on the job, and in some ways been part of the disaster--in many ways. We now have a new agency emerging, and we most desperately need it.

However, if we are going to ensure that an incident of this magnitude never happens again, this new agency--whatever it ends up being called--must train, recruit, and pay the most qualified people to carry out this new urgent mission. Robust oversight, greater transparency, strong safety standards, and high ethical standards must be maintained.

This administration did not inherit, obviously, a perfectly well run, well-tuned agency. It inherited a mess. I share their desire to see it cleaned up, retooled, and refocused. I commend the Secretary and the new appointee, Michael Bromwich, whom I had the opportunity to meet for the first time this morning, in their efforts to do so. That is an important step forward and one this Congress seems to be willing to take, both from the Republican and

Democratic sides of the aisle. I am looking forward to working in a nonpartisan way as we strive to find the right way forward.

But the President and his administration have imposed a very arbitrary and, in my view, ill-conceived 6-month moratoria on new deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico--the only place in the country now where we drill in depths, and one of the few places that allows drilling off the coast at any depth of water. The first well was drilled off our coast 12 feet off the shore many decades ago in just a few feet of water. Now, as we know, we are drilling in thousands of feet and have successfully done that, safely done that, for now 20 years--until this undescribable blowout that has occurred.

In Louisiana, unfortunately, we are coming to terms with what a prolonged moratoria will mean for our families and our businesses, large and small, and it is not a pretty picture. It is painful, it is frightening, it is upsetting, and it needs to be told.

A 6-month moratoria on all of these 33 rigs that operate in the Gulf of Mexico will wreak economic havoc on this region. Right now, there are thousands of people out of work--fishermen, oystermen, boat captains, recreational. They cannot fish. It is not safe. No one is coming down to Louisiana. They are going to Florida. They are going to Mississippi because there are actually beaches that are still clean and available for people.

But in Louisiana, we do not have that many beaches actually. We have America's great wetlands. These boat captains have--I have met with them on many occasions. As to these people, their clients contract with them months in advance. They do not come down to sunbathe and take their kids on a few little rides here and there and then occasionally rent a boat. They come down to rent the boats to fish in some of the greatest, most wonderful fishing places in the world. They are closed down.

In addition to them being closed down and not being able to work at all in many instances--these are small businesses that can generate anywhere from a few thousand dollars a month to millions of dollars a month, and companies worth millions of dollars--the President and the administration have slapped down an ill-conceived 6-month moratoria without any real timeframes.

I am encouraged that just this morning--I came to the floor right after the energy hearing--Ken Salazar, who continues to have my great respect and support despite my differences of opinion with him on some of these issues, spoke before our committee and said that based on the judge's decision, with which I agree, and comments made by the Secretary's own experts that ``a blanket moratorium is not the answer. It will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation's economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill. . . . We do not believe punishing the innocent is the right thing to do''--these are not Mary Landrieu's words. These are not words from the congressional delegations that represent the gulf coast. These are words from the Secretary's own experts.

We urge--I urge--the Secretary and the President to listen to these men who submitted the first report and try to find a better way forward.

Marty Feldman--a judge I know well--I hold in the highest esteem. He is more conservative than some Members here but, nonetheless, has served with distinction. He said the moratorium was arbitrary and capricious. He said:

[A] blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium on

deepwater oil and gas drilling is not the way to go.

He said:

The blanket moratorium, with no parameters, seems to assume

that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully

knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500

feet also universally present an imminent danger.

He goes on to a well-reasoned argument that has been well published and well debated.

I hope, as the Secretary said this morning, he and the President are trying to find the way forward that would involve reaching very high safety, more certification of the engineers and managers on these rigs. That is obvious since this looks like, in many instances, it might be more human error than equipment error that caused this. So I think we should focus on the humans in charge and try to make sure they are up to the task on all of these 33 rigs. That could be done well within 6 months.

There needs to be, in other words, some more urgency to find the safety level that is now being demanded by the American people, and rightly so. No one wants it more than the women who lost their husbands. They sat with me at my kitchen table just 2 weeks ago and said those words to me: Senator, no one in America could want this to be more safe than we do. But they also said: We believe the moratorium is wrong. We cannot stand by and not say this because our neighbors, the husbands of our best friends, are being laid off. People we know in our community are being irreparably harmed. They said: We told this to the President. Do you think, Senator, he will listen?

I have assured them that the President is listening, that the President is a man with a great mind and a great heart. I have assured them that Secretary Salazar could not be a more honest broker. He has been beat up on both sides. The environmentalists do not think he is tough enough. The oil and gas industry beats him up all the time. So that convinces me he is probably the right person for this job.

But this moratorium that idles these 33 rigs is dangerous, and I will tell you why. These rigs can move, and they will move. There is more oil to be found in this world. There are reserves off many coasts, and there is more oil than there are rigs able to drill. Since the world is a thirsty sponge, it just continues to need billions and billions of barrels of oil to operate.

In the United States, we use 20 million barrels a day. We used 20 million barrels yesterday. We will use 20 million barrels today. None of that is changing. So the world is needing this oil. There are fewer rigs than there is oil. They cannot and will not sit idly in the Gulf of Mexico while we try to decide what to do. They will leave, and they will not then be coming back any time soon.

I will submit for the Record--because it really got me upset this morning, and it should get everyone upset who reads it--a very moving article in the New York Times about what is happening in the Niger Delta, a delta we don't pay a lot of attention to here. Why would we? There are just a lot of poor people who live there, and we don't represent them here. But in the Niger Delta, I read this morning, they have to put up with a spill equal to the Valdez. They put up with it, the size of it, every year. The mangroves that I read about--the mangroves I can imagine in my mind because we have them in Louisiana and in Florida and in places I have been--are destroyed. The swamp is lifeless.

Madam President, I tell my Democratic colleagues: If you drive this oil drilling off our shore, you will simply drive it to places with greater environmental degradation than either you or anyone you know could probably imagine.

I ask unanimous consent for 5 more minutes.

That is what is going to happen. This is not Mary Landrieu's opinion; this is just the nature of this business. They don't have to stay in the gulf. They can break these contracts. They are doing that as I speak. There are lawsuits being filed from Houston to Mobile to New Orleans. This is a great boon for lawyers, a bad day for people, and a terrible day for our environment.

I am begging this administration to look worldwide. We are a world leader. We are up to the task of finding out what happened quickly, getting these rigs back drilling, and setting an example for the world and showing some sympathy for people who are much less powerful than we are. I would like to hear a leader stand up and say: I am concerned about Niger. I am concerned about Africa. I am concerned about Brazil and South America and what happens off the coast, even in places we are not very happy with right now such

as Venezuela or Cuba. Cuba is only 90 miles from Florida. Do you think we can control what Cuba does in offshore drilling? No, ma'am. All we can do is try to do the best we can in America, as we have done for decades and decades and generations and generations, and lead by example and show the world the technology that can work. We can make rational and reasonable decisions in a public arena such as this--very transparent, as corruption-free as possible, as rational and as educated as possible. That is what the world expects of us.

I am not going to stand here and let this Congress run with its tail between its legs and overreact to a situation, as horrible as this one is. We most certainly know; we are swimming in the oil.

I will come down several times in the next week to try to make as clear an argument as I can that there must be a better way forward than shutting down this industry so that they move to places that have less protection and less ability, while we guzzle most of the oil. What a hypocritical situation this puts us in. I don't know what to tell the people of Niger. I don't even know what to tell the people of Louisiana. I am going to think about it and come back.

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before I speak briefly about the subject I came to the floor to speak about, which is small business--I am chair of the Small Business Committee--I want to thank our colleague from Florida for his advocacy for the gulf coast, as we struggle as to how to stop this gusher in the gulf and to clean up what has been done.

We have recently seen some terrible photographs from the beaches of Florida. We have photographs equally as troubling from the marshes of Louisiana. I want to thank the Senator for his leadership, and we are all going to double our efforts to get this job done, and to do it in a balanced way.

As upsetting as this oil is, in trying to clean it up, and keep it from our shores--both the beaches and the marshes--we also have to find a balance as to how to let this industry at some point move forward with these 33 rigs or we are going to lose the entire deepwater gulf drilling, which will put thousands--tens of thousands--of people out of work, some of whom live in Florida; and some of the businesses benefit, as well as so many in Louisiana.

But I thank my colleague for his continued effort, and we will look into some of the issues he has raised and push as hard as we can from Louisiana as well.

Mr. President, I know my colleagues are on the floor to speak about job creation. That is why I am here as the chair of the Small Business Committee.

I say to the Presiding Officer, you have had a great deal of experience in your own role, before being a Senator, as a bank president and as a lender for small business. You know how important it is.

I start by sharing this graph I have in the Chamber that shows that from 1993 to 2009, 65 percent of the net new jobs created were created by small firms with 1 to 500 employees--65 percent of the jobs. Large firms created 35 percent of the jobs. So I suggest this is a very important topic for us to be discussing, and I am very pleased the leader wants to bring this small business bill to the floor next week.

We have been--many of us--clamoring to get to this debate, and I want to see this bill move forward if we can work out a few minor differences. This package has been put together with very good bipartisan cooperation, from my view as the chair of the Small Business Committee, both from our committee and then the Finance Committee has done its part as well. But there are a few items I wish to highlight because there are some agreements that must be reached and some points I wish to make briefly.

First of all, let me briefly describe the small business provisions. One is the increase in 7(a) loans from $2 million to $5 million; 504 loans from $1.5 million to $5.5 million; and microloans from $35,000 to $50,000. If I could, I would lay an amendment down to raise that to $100,000.

We have had testimony from business advocates--from conservative to moderate to liberal advocates--saying this is one of the most important things we need to do to stimulate lending to small businesses through the Small Business Administration, to give capital, to give credit to these small businesses that can create the jobs I am talking about. We must get credit into the hands of small businesses from Maine to California to Texas to Louisiana to Washington State, and these small businesses, if we can strengthen the SBA programs, can, in fact, begin to turn this recession into a job creation era and opportunity. That is in the bill. It passed our committee 17 to 1--a great bipartisan vote.

The Small Business Export Enhancement and International Trade Act, which Senator Snowe has worked so hard on--and I want to commend her for her work; and I have worked with her on this as well--this is a challenge for us. Less than 1 percent of small businesses in America are exporting. I want to say that again. Less than 1 percent of America's small businesses are exporting.

The market is overseas. The population growth is overseas. If we do not help our small businesses with technical assistance and support to be able to allow them to position to market, particularly with the ability of the Internet today--an extraordinarily exciting tool--with broadband, high-speed Internet, there are opportunities for a person, whether they are in Chicago, IL, or in New Orleans, LA. If they have a product, they can go on the Internet, show the product, and it can be shipped to China or India or any other country in the world, and the profits can come home right here and jobs can be created. That is in this bill, and it is extremely important we move to it and figure out the few problems we have with it.

There is the Small Business Contracting Improvement Act that has not been completely worked out, but I want to take a moment to speak about it. The Federal Government is one of the largest purchasers of goods and services in the world. If we are going to try to help businesses, we most certainly, in my view, should strengthen the opportunity to contract with small businesses so the Federal Government can purchase goods and services. We want to allow small businesses to do that. There is a problem we are trying to work out that Senator Thune has raised, and I look forward to working with him over the weekend to work through that.

The fourth section of the bill is the Small Business Community Partner Relief Act. This would allow SBA, upon request by a woman business center or a microloan intermediary, to waive or reduce the non-Federal share. Why is this important? We have also added $50 million to the small business development centers. Small businesses cannot necessarily create the jobs they want to create without help and support. We have a great network. We have a great backbone, a great reach through women business centers, through university-based centers, and this bill we are going to bring to the floor next week has support for them so they can then reach out and help small businesses on Main Street.

This bill is not about Wall Street. I have heard as much about Wall Street as I want to hear and so have the people in my State. We want to start hearing about Main Street at home, businesses that are struggling and need our support and our help.

We also have some additional sections for the 8(a) improvements, and I have offered a section of the bill that I think is very important to help the 11,700 businesses that, unfortunately, on the gulf coast are still paying off loans from the last disasters 5 years ago, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

As you heard Senator LeMieux from Florida and as you have heard Senator Nelson from Florida, now we have another catastrophe along the gulf. I have asked, in this bill, for some interest relief for these businesses. Some of these businesses are paying $1,000 a month--$700 in interest, $300 on principal. And that is the example that Jaimie Bergeron of Fleur de Lis Car Care in New Orleans presented to our committee. This bill would allow the owners, the Bergerons, right now-- where their sales are down; the region is threatened--to go from paying $1,100 a month down to $300 or $400 a month.

We can afford to do this now. We have to be able to give these small businesses some relief. There is some opposition to this provision. I hope people will think about how important this is for these gulf coast businesses. We have had support not only from our local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, but even the New York Times has said the people of the gulf coast deserve a break. We need a little help, and we need it now. Giving these small businesses some interest relief would be a great help.

Finally, in this bill, the White House has put forward, and I support, $30 billion for small business lending. We have the estate small business credit initiative developed by Senator Warner, Senator Levin, and others. We have $1 billion going to community development finance institutions that are not banks but lend money to neighborhood- based, grassroots organizations that then turn around and lend money to small businesses. So there are some great provisions to include in this bill.

We have a few things to work out over the weekend with my colleagues from the other side. I just want to say that no one could be working harder than our committee, both Democrats and Republicans, to try to bring a consensus to this floor.

In good faith, I come to ask my ranking member, Senator Snowe, please let's work hard over the weekend to work these final provisions out so we can provide to the American people not only a bill that works for them--and Senator Stabenow helps us grow small business--but a bill we can actually enthusiastically support in a bipartisan way. I think the American people deserve our best efforts. I am going to work double- time over the weekend, even doing some other things I need to do in my home State to get this work done, and I look forward to being here on Monday to see if we have been able to achieve that.

Yes.

Absolutely. It is my desire to have many conversations over the weekend. There are just a few points that need to be worked out. The Finance Committee has done its portion of the work, and I thank Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley. Senator Snowe and I have a few other things to work out.

The Senator from Michigan is correct. This effort on the part of the Small Business Administration is crucial to change these programs, to lift their limits, provide some support for them to be able to help reach out and support our small business growth throughout the country.

The White House has worked very hard on this $30 billion capital infusion to the banks. The Independent Bankers of America supports the $30 billion in additional capital that would be available to them, again, not for lending on Wall Street or Fancy Street but on Main Street where the Senator from Michigan and I come from, to get money into the hands of small businesses. It is imperative particularly for women-owned and minority-owned businesses that have been particularly hard hit by this recession. Some of the provisions reach right to those disadvantaged neighborhoods in our country that need the most help right now in creating jobs for people of every different walk of life.

Mr. President, as Chair of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I am pleased to introduce the Native American Small Business Assistance and Entrepreneurial Growth Act of 2010. This vital and timely legislation codifies and builds upon the Small Business Administration's, SBA, existing efforts through the Office of Native American Affairs, which is responsible for overseeing and implementing programs that are specifically tailored to meet the needs of the Native American community. By strengthening and improving these programs, the SBA will be able to reach even more Native Americans, helping them to achieve their dream of starting or growing their own small businesses and spurring vital and necessary growth within tribal communities.

According to the most recent report released by the U.S. Census bureau, the ``three year average poverty rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives was 25.9 percent higher than for any other race groups.'' Additionally, research shows that entrepreneurial development is playing a significant role in promoting healthy tribal economies, and fostering much needed economic growth in various industries. Data from the 2000 U.S. Census shows that since 1997, the number of Native American-owned businesses has risen by 84 percent to 197,300, and that their gross incomes have increased by 179 percent to $34.5 billion.

However, in the face of historically high unemployment and tight credit, particularly for Native Americans, starting a business has never been more difficult. During the 111th Congress, the Committee has heard from industry experts, organizational leaders and entrepreneurs working in or on behalf of Native American communities. From them, we know that, despite the growth we are seeing in Native American-owned businesses, more resources are needed to provide additional technical assistance and business development opportunities so as to ensure the economic sustainability and growth within tribal communities. According to the Aspen Institute, ``training and technical assistance are arguably the most important components of microenterprise development services in the United States, particularly when those services are aimed at low-income clients.'' Additionally, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development, this is particularly true for Native American entrepreneurs operating in environments that have not traditionally been geared towards private enterprise. For these reasons, it is critical that we do more to provide necessary resources for Native American entrepreneurial development programs that are working to address critical sustainability issues in tribal communities.

That is why today I am introducing the Native American Small Business Assistance and Entrepreneurial Growth Act of 2010. Since its establishment, SBA's Office of Native American Affairs worked to promote and support Native American entrepreneurs and to encourage important entrepreneurial activity in Native American communities. This legislation will further enhance and improve the existing programs within the Office of Native American Affairs, as well as create a new program that provides financial assistance to eligible entities to create Native American business centers which will conduct projects to provide culturally tailored business development training and related services to Native Americans and Native American small business concerns.

In introducing this important piece of legislation today, I would note that many of the provisions in this bill were included in S. 1229, the Entrepreneurial Development Act of 2009, which I introduced earlier this Congress and which passed out of Committee with unanimous and bi- partisan support in June of 2009. It is also the basis for many of the SBA related provisions included in the Native American Employment Act of 2010 that Senator Dorgan, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs introduced earlier this month. Given the importance of this legislation to hundreds of thousands of Native American-owned businesses, and the potential we have before us to strengthen one of America's greatest emerging markets, I have decided to re-introduce these provisions as a stand-alone bill. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate to bring this legislation to the President's desk in the coming months.

In closing, I would like to thank Chairman Dorgan for his continued leadership on behalf of existing and future Native American small business owners, and especially for his cosponsorship of this important legislation. Chairman Dorgan has been a tireless advocate for Native American communities across the country and in his home state of North Dakota, and I am pleased to have his support on this legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, as Chair of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I am pleased to introduce the Native American Small Business Assistance and Entrepreneurial Growth Act of 2010. This vital and timely legislation codifies and builds upon the Small Business Administration's, SBA, existing efforts through the Office of Native American Affairs, which is responsible for overseeing and implementing programs that are specifically tailored to meet the needs of the Native American community. By strengthening and improving these programs, the SBA will be able to reach even more Native Americans, helping them to achieve their dream of starting or growing their own small businesses and spurring vital and necessary growth within tribal communities.

According to the most recent report released by the U.S. Census bureau, the ``three year average poverty rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives was 25.9 percent higher than for any other race groups.'' Additionally, research shows that entrepreneurial development is playing a significant role in promoting healthy tribal economies, and fostering much needed economic growth in various industries. Data from the 2000 U.S. Census shows that since 1997, the number of Native American-owned businesses has risen by 84 percent to 197,300, and that their gross incomes have increased by 179 percent to $34.5 billion.

However, in the face of historically high unemployment and tight credit, particularly for Native Americans, starting a business has never been more difficult. During the 111th Congress, the Committee has heard from industry experts, organizational leaders and entrepreneurs working in or on behalf of Native American communities. From them, we know that, despite the growth we are seeing in Native American-owned businesses, more resources are needed to provide additional technical assistance and business development opportunities so as to ensure the economic sustainability and growth within tribal communities. According to the Aspen Institute, ``training and technical assistance are arguably the most important components of microenterprise development services in the United States, particularly when those services are aimed at low-income clients.'' Additionally, according to the Corporation for Enterprise Development, this is particularly true for Native American entrepreneurs operating in environments that have not traditionally been geared towards private enterprise. For these reasons, it is critical that we do more to provide necessary resources for Native American entrepreneurial development programs that are working to address critical sustainability issues in tribal communities.

That is why today I am introducing the Native American Small Business Assistance and Entrepreneurial Growth Act of 2010. Since its establishment, SBA's Office of Native American Affairs worked to promote and support Native American entrepreneurs and to encourage important entrepreneurial activity in Native American communities. This legislation will further enhance and improve the existing programs within the Office of Native American Affairs, as well as create a new program that provides financial assistance to eligible entities to create Native American business centers which will conduct projects to provide culturally tailored business development training and related services to Native Americans and Native American small business concerns.

In introducing this important piece of legislation today, I would note that many of the provisions in this bill were included in S. 1229, the Entrepreneurial Development Act of 2009, which I introduced earlier this Congress and which passed out of Committee with unanimous and bi- partisan support in June of 2009. It is also the basis for many of the SBA related provisions included in the Native American Employment Act of 2010 that Senator Dorgan, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs introduced earlier this month. Given the importance of this legislation to hundreds of thousands of Native American-owned businesses, and the potential we have before us to strengthen one of America's greatest emerging markets, I have decided to re-introduce these provisions as a stand-alone bill. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate to bring this legislation to the President's desk in the coming months.

In closing, I would like to thank Chairman Dorgan for his continued leadership on behalf of existing and future Native American small business owners, and especially for his cosponsorship of this important legislation. Chairman Dorgan has been a tireless advocate for Native American communities across the country and in his home state of North Dakota, and I am pleased to have his support on this legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, it is with heartfelt sympathy that I stand before you today to offer my deepest condolences to the family members and friends who lost their loved ones in the flash floods that swept through the Albert Pike Recreation Area in the Ouachita National Forest Campgrounds in the early morning hours of June 11, 2010. Approximately 8 inches of rain fell in 1 hour overnight, providing very little warning to campers of the danger. The warnings went unheard early Friday morning; the campground has no sirens, no park ranger on site, poor radio reception, and spotty cell phone service.

The Caddo and Little Missouri rivers rose by 20 feet overnight, engulfing the hikers and campers who were spending the night in tents along the rivers in the isolated Ouachita Mountains. The 54-unit campground was quickly inundated with water, which was rising as quickly as 8 feet per hour. The water was so violent it overturned RVs and peeled asphalt off the roads.

Twenty people, in some instances several members from the same family including young children, lost their lives in this tragedy. Among those lost were eight Louisianans, and my heart goes out to the Smith family, who lost Anthony, Joey, and Katelynn; to the Basinger family, who lost Shane and Kinsley in Gloster; and the Roeder family in Luling who, lost Kay, Debbie, and Bruce.

The 20 people lost to this tragedy will be greatly missed by their families, friends, and communities. I ask that you remember the victims of the flash floods in your thoughts and prayers.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes as in morning business.

I rise today for the purposes of giving some context and commenting in response to the President's speech last night as well as to some of my colleagues who have spoken on the need for a comprehensive energy policy as we move forward. But I would like to begin by just reminding us all that today is the 57th day of what may prove to be one of the most damaging environmental accidents in our Nation's history.

Fifty-seven days ago, the tragic explosion of the Deepwater Horizon took the lives of 11 men and unleashed an uncontrolled and uncontrollable, to date, torrent of oil and gas into the

Gulf of Mexico. It threatens our environment, and it threatens our economy and the wetlands that underpin a way of life, a precious way of life in the gulf region.

I have had the--I guess unfortunate opportunity to spend some time with the widows. And I say ``unfortunate'' because I wish I could have met them under different circumstances. But to hear their remembrances of their husbands, to hear the way they expressed to me the heartfelt commitment their spouses had to this industry and to their work and their call for this work to be more safe, for companies to be held accountable, but also their call--which I think serves as real testimony on their behalf to the American people--their call for this deepwater industry to continue, was very moving to me and to all people who I think have had the opportunity to meet these young and very impressive women. I was proud to introduce the Senate resolution honoring these men and their families. I wish to thank my colleagues for agreeing to this resolution unanimously.

But today I wanted to speak on three important issues relative to this general situation: one, the need for better safety regulations and improvements at MMS; the other, the impacts of this moratoria; and the call for accelerated revenue sharing and an accelerated claims process. First, let me begin with the need for better safety regulations.

There are more than 300,000 men and women who work in the oil and gas industry in Louisiana alone. There are a significant number of them who work offshore and directly support both the offshore and onshore industry. The offshore crewmen know this work can be dangerous. They go through a variety of safety drills and regulations routinely. And we owe it to them to make sure these activities are safer in the future. For this reason, I have fully supported a thorough review of offshore drilling safety standards and have applauded the Department, and particularly Secretary Ken Salazar, for his willingness to clean house at the Minerals Management Service.

This tragedy brought to light an unhealthy relationship that has existed, unfortunately for many years, between the oil industry and the Federal regulators who are called to regulate them, to make sure this industry is safe. That must be changed. The regulators did not have the resources to push back. They did not have the expertise.

We in Congress bear some responsibility for that. And that did not start under President Obama's administration, but it should end under President Obama's administration. This Congress systematically undermanned and underfunded this important agency by not giving it the appropriate attention it needs, and it is our responsibility to fix it.

I look forward to meeting with the man whom the President has appointed or nominated to head MMS. I will be making my own independent decision of whether he is the right person for this position. Until I meet him and talk with him and understand a little bit more about him, I will reserve my judgment.

We need a Minerals Management Service that is to be a proud, competent, and respected industry watchdog. We need the watchdog back. We need the cop back on the beat if we are to ensure that an accident of this magnitude never happens again off our shores. As I have said, Minerals Management--many of these employees are my constituents. One of their main offices is in Metairie, LA. I have been there. I have met many of them, and they are some very good people. But they need to be well managed. They need to be well led. They need to be given the resources they need to do the job they can do if that happens.

The Coast Guard also has a role to play. We should strengthen the Coast Guard's role and make sure that between Interior and the Coast Guard, they are getting the job done for the American people.

Nobody in the country wants this job done better, nobody wants this industry more safe than the people from Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama and Texas who man these rigs, although, as you know, when you were with me, Mr. President, some of our people said to you in the meeting just last week: We were grateful for the men from Illinois who came down to work on these rigs. So we want people to know we have people from all over the country, from Illinois and Maine who come and do shifts 2 weeks offshore, make a good living for their family, support their families for years. We want it to be safe for everyone.

So I applaud the President and Secretary Salazar for getting MMS back on the right track. That work needs to be done. As I said, the cop needs to be put back on the beat.

Let me speak for a few minutes, though, about this ill-conceived and arbitrary 6-month moratorium. The effort the President is making to ensure this terrible tragedy never happens again is commendable. It is beyond aggravating. It is disgusting. It angers us so much to see the terrible tragedy unfolding on our televisions and to open newspapers across the land and see the most horrific pictures of wildlife being affected, of dolphins and pelicans and birds, precious places to us that we not only work but vacation with our families for many years.

It is very hard to look at those pictures. Americans are suffering through this as we watch this horror movie unfold. But what the President has done could cause even more economic damage than the spill itself, by putting a 6-month moratorium on all rigs drilling below 500 feet.

I know we have to make sure these 33 floating rigs that drill in deep water and the other standard platforms that drill between 500 and 1,000 feet are safe. But I wish to say unequivocally and with the support of the vast majority of the people of my State and throughout the gulf, 6 months is too long. The deepwater industry cannot survive in the gulf with a 6-month pause. This work has to be done more quickly. The commission was announced last month. It was just seated a few days ago. The work is just beginning. There doesn't seem to be a sense of urgency. We need a greater sense of urgency to get this work done.

I was pleased to hear the President say he has urged them to get their work done before the 6-month timeframe. That was a slight step in the right direction. But this work has to be done in a much shorter period than 6 months. These rigs will not stay in the gulf for 6 months idling at a cost of $500,000 a day. They can't be fiduciarily responsible to their investors and do that. They have to move to where they can drill. So they will. We have already received signals they will simply pick up and move off the coast of Africa or Brazil or Cuba or other places--Venezuela--to drill. They can't sit idly in the gulf. We have to figure out a way to make sure they are safe, that this never happens again, and make sure they don't leave. That is the challenge before this administration in the next couple of days and weeks, starting with a meeting I will have with Secretary Salazar this afternoon with a broad coalition of leaders, both from the private sector and the public sector, who are committed to keeping the economy of the gulf coast strong. We have to find a way forward that is somewhere between doing nothing and having all of these rigs leave and not come back for several years. That is one of the points on the moratorium.

Second, I wish to ask the President for his personal support and the support of this body to accelerate revenue sharing, or to accelerate revenue sharing to accelerate a large stream of revenue that is reliable for the Gulf Coast States to be able to rebuild our barrier islands, to rebuild our coast, to sustain this economy and this ecology and this environment over the long run so we can produce the oil and gas this country desperately needs.

Even though this Horizon accident happened 57 days ago, 57 days ago this country was using 20 billion barrels of oil a day. Today, 57 days later, 11 lives lost, the rig at the bottom of the ocean, we are still using 20 billion barrels a day. The President did not say to people last night to park their cars and walk to work. He didn't say that. I didn't hear him say that.

We have to understand we have to continue to drill for oil and gas. But when we drill for oil and gas, the taxes that are paid to the Federal Government and have been paid over the years to the tune of $165 billion to the Federal Government from severances and royalties, that some of that money

come back to the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and, yes, even Florida, in my view, even if they decide not to drill. They are at risk. They are at the front line. We are not the only coastal States, but we are the frontline coastal States. Those revenues need to come back to us.

We passed a bill some years ago, a bill I worked on for 15 years, called the Landrieu-Domenici Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act. That bill is in effect. But because of concerns about the deficit, because of a lack of understanding of the urgency by this Congress and past Congresses, that money doesn't come to us until 2017. We can see that is too late. We can see it with our own eyes. We can feel it with our own heart. We can see it is too late now. We needed that money 20 years ago. We needed it 5 years ago. We need it today.

For any energy bill to pass, with all due respect to my good friend, Byron Dorgan; with all due respect to Senators who have been leading this energy effort, there will be no energy bill. The gulf coast Senators will not allow it. There will be no energy bill of any magnitude without recognizing the vital need for these Gulf Coast States to share appropriately, as interior States share the revenues for drilling. Interior States such as New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah keep 50 percent of the taxes. So the State of Wyoming last year got $1 billion. We could clean up a lot of pelicans with $1 billion. Louisiana got virtually nothing.

Our people are on the front line with oil washing up to their knees, and this Congress basically keeps 100 percent of the money. Those days are over. We are going to have some kind of accelerated revenue sharing in any energy bill. Gulf coast Senators will not allow a bill to pass this floor without something we believe is fair to our people.

The third issue I wish to speak to the President about and to the Congress--and the President mentioned it last night, and I am grateful--is an accelerated claims process. These claims are going to be different than any kind of claim process that has been paid, maybe similar to what happened after Katrina and Rita, as Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama struggled with how to make people whole. This is going to be a complicated and difficult situation. We have workers who can't work, who were used to making $500 to $1,000 a week, pretty fairly decent wages, not great but decent. They have not been able to work for a long time.

I ask unanimous consent for 5 additional minutes.

Mr. President, that is a modest wage and a decent wage. But it gets a lot more complicated than that. There are boat captains who were getting their business back after Katrina and Rita, recreational boat captains, fishing captains. Unlike Florida where people will come to the beach and then they will see a boat charter and they will wander onto the wharf and charter the boat, that does not happen in Louisiana because we don't have many beaches. People call from Mexico and Canada and all over the country months in advance and charter a specific boat with a specific captain because we have some of the best fishing in the world. They come with their sons and daughters and their grandsons and granddaughters. They come down with major corporate groups and do this chartering. These companies make millions of dollars a year. They can't work either.

This claims process is going to be difficult. We have restaurants in New Orleans that are 70 miles from the gulf. They have had to either shut their doors or turn down their number of hours of operating or take things off their menus. I don't know how we will calculate the economic damage to them. This is going to be complicated.

We have hotels. We have retirees who own three or four condos. A woman came up to me and said: Mary, my mother is not a business person. She is a retiree. She owns a couple of condos in Florida. That is her retirement income. She rents out these condos. She has had all cancellations this summer. What am I going to do for her?

That is a good question. She will file a claim.

From retirees with condos they rent out to supplement their incomes to fishing boat captains to hotels to restaurants and to the workers themselves, I am glad the President is taking the bull by the horns with this claims process. I hope he is having a frank discussion with Tony Hayward at his office today about that to make sure we don't have one bankruptcy, that we don't have one business, a small business or a medium-size business or a large business that goes bankrupt because of BP's gross negligence in the Gulf of Mexico. They have put the industry at risk. They have put the gulf coast at risk. That claims process needs to work. We have a great job to do ahead of us.

Those are the three points I wished to make. One, we most certainly need to move forward on a balanced energy bill. There will be no energy bill; gulf coast Senators will block anything that does not have immediate help for Gulf Coast States. Let my colleagues be on notice. We can debate the rest of the bill, how we move forward, whether we do nuclear or a portion of drilling or wind or solar. These Gulf Coast States are on the front lines, and we are going to get justice for them in the near future. We are going to accelerate and make the claims process more robust, and we are going to continue to put pressure on the White House and Secretary Salazar, respectfully, but appropriately, to say: Let's get our safety work done in the gulf. We cannot lose this industry. We cannot lose these jobs. Our economy depends on it.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, Brian Jackson and Elizabeth Erny Foote are outstanding candidates for judgeships in Louisiana's Middle and Western Districts. I was honored to recommend Brian Jackson and Beth Foote to the President last year.

These two well-qualified, noncontroversial nominees are sorely needed in the districts they have been nominated to serve, where courts are facing unacceptable backlogs and sitting judges are overwhelmed with unmanageable caseloads. Ms. Foote and Mr. Jackson have been eager for this body to let them get to work serving justice to the people of Louisiana since they were reported by the Judiciary Committee on March 18. I am relieved to see that their long journey toward confirmation is drawing to a close.

Brian Jackson is an exemplary public servant with a distinguished record as an attorney and prosecutor. He has extensive Federal experience, having worked for the Department of Justice for 16 years. From 1992 to 2002, he served as first assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana. As the first assistant U.S. attorney, he managed or litigated a variety of civil and criminal cases. Because of his leadership, he was selected in 2001 to be the interim U.S. attorney for the Middle District pending the confirmation of President Bush's nominee.

Prior to becoming an assistant U.S. attorney, he served as an associate deputy attorney general in Washington, DC. In this role, he was as a principal adviser to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General on civil rights and criminal justice policies. In 1992 he was honored as the recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Equal Employment Opportunity for his leadership in this area.

Since 2002, he has distinguished himself in private practice in the firm Liskow and Lewis, where he is a shareholder. He is currently chair of the firm's government investigations and white collar crime groups and he is on Liskow and Lewis' board of directors and is the immediate past chair of the firm's diversity committee.

In addition to this distinguished career in private practice, Brian has also been extremely active in public service. He has graciously served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including Catholic Charities of New Orleans, The Pro Bono Project, Teach for America for the South Louisiana Region, and The Metropolitan Crime Commission, for which he served as vice chair. Additionally, he has given back to the legal community by serving on the board of directors for the New Orleans Chapter of the Federal Bar Association.

Finally, Brian's impressive academic credentials have also prepared him to serve Louisiana's Middle District. He received his bachelor of science, Xavier University in 1982. He received his J.D. from the Southern University School of Law in 1985 where he served as editor-in- chief of the Southern University Law Review and his master's of law with concentration in international and comparative law from Georgetown University Law Center in 2000.

With these credentials, firm roots Louisiana's Middle District, and a long and impressive career in the U.S. Department of Justice, Brian Jackson is truly ready to hit the ground running as district court judge.

Elizabeth Erny Foote is an experienced attorney with 30 years of experience in Federal litigation. She is a partner in the Smith Foote Law firm in Alexandria, LA, where she primarily practices civil litigation. She has had extensive experience in Federal court throughout her career, having litigated in all three Federal Court Districts of Louisiana, in addition to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal.

In addition to this outstanding private practice, Beth has proven her dedication to the legal profession through her service to the Louisiana State Bar Association.

In addition to this outstanding private practice, Beth has proven her dedication to the legal profession through her service to the Louisiana State Bar Association, with which she has been actively involved since 1985

and is currently the immediate past president. In 1994, she became the first woman to serve as an officer in the Louisiana State Bar association when she was elected treasurer. The same year she received the President's Award for outstanding service.

Beth is truly a respected civic leader throughout Louisiana. In addition to her contributions to the legal field, she has demonstrated her commitment to justice and equality through a number of nonprofits and government initiatives. Her prestigious awards and honors include: the 2004 Alexandria Human Relations Commission Award for her efforts in promoting better understanding and quality of life in her community, the 2004 Louisiana Heroine Award presented by the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Associations, the 2000 Central Louisiana Woman of the Century Award, and the 1996 Central Louisiana Women Business Owners' ``Business Owner Woman of Excellence'' Award.

Finally, Beth's impressive academic credentials have prepared her to serve Louisiana's Western District. She received a bachelor of arts from Louisiana State University in 1974, a master's of arts from Duke University in 1975, and a J.D. from Louisiana State University Law School in 1978. She has also been an adjunct professor at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at LSU, teaching courses in appellate advocacy.

I believe Beth's principled commitment to the field of law, her impressive 30-year career as an attorney, her extensive Federal litigation experience, and her esteemed statewide reputation make her an excellent nominee for judge for Louisiana's Western District.

The time to confirm these two noncontroversial nominees is far overdue. I urge my colleagues to confirm these nominees without further delay so that they may begin the important work the people of Louisiana need them to do.

Mr. President, today I ask my colleagues to join me in recognizing the 125th anniversary of Olive Grove Baptist Church in Choudrant, LA.

In 1885, a small group of determined men and women founded what would become Olive Grove Baptist Church under the guidance of Rev. Andrew Moaten. Worshipping alongside Reverend Moaten were Deacon Henry Waters, Taylor and Martha Waters, Sister Mattie Hamilton, Deacon Mike Taylor, and Deacon State Wright.

These early members held services in a brush arbor for about 1 year before the first small structure, originally lit by kerosene lamps, was built. As the needs of its parishioners grew, so did Olive Grove Baptist Church. A new church was completed in 1926 under the guidance of Rev. H.J. Jordan, and in 1944 members began to raise money for yet another church. A storm destroyed the church in 1986, and current members now worship in the fifth Olive Grove Church to stand in Choudrant.

The church is currently led by the Rev. Derric Chatman, a dynamic young pastor. Current members, children of deceased members, individuals with community ties, and the general public continue to support the church with generous financial backing, allowing the church to remain active in its various ministries and demonstrating the important role that Olive Grove Baptist plays in the local community.

I ask that my colleagues join me in congratulating Olive Grove Baptist Church on their 125th anniversary and in wishing them the best for years to come.

Madam President, as we near the close of the 2010 National Small Business Week, I am pleased to join Senator Olympia Snowe in introducing the Small Business Tax Equalization and Compliance Act of 2010, which extends a tax credit to salon owners for FICA taxes paid on employees' tipped income.

Currently, salon owners are required to pay the employer's share of the FICA taxes on tips paid to employees even though owners do not control the amount of tips paid and do not get a share of the tips received. The Small Business Tax Equalization and Compliance Act of 2010 would create a tax credit for employers to offset the matching FICA paid on employees' tips just like restaurants received. In addition, it includes education and reporting requirements which may reveal a valuable new source of tax revenues for the Federal Government.

The salon industry is a vital and growing sector of America's economy. Not only will extending the tip tax credit to salon owners allow them to reinvest in their businesses and employees, but it will also grant new economic and employment opportunities in local communities. I urge my colleagues to support this bill which puts the professional beauty industry back on equal footing with the restaurant industry.

Mr. President, along with my distinguished colleague Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, I rise today to introduce the Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010. As the Chair of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I have held a number of hearings and roundtables on the issues affecting small businesses that contract with the Federal Government. The Committee has repeatedly heard from small businesses throughout the country that more needs to be done to level the playing field and help our small businesses win Federal contracts. The legislation that I am introducing today seeks to improve access to Federal contracts for small businesses, particularly for socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses. It also represents the third in a series of steps that the Committee is taking to address the disparities and inequalities that currently exist in the Federal procurement process.

As I have explained in previous statements before this chamber, as the largest purchaser in the world, the Federal Government is uniquely positioned to offer new and reliable business opportunities for our small firms. Government contracts are one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways the government can help to immediately increase sales for America's entrepreneurs, leading to the creation of new jobs and helping to move our economy forward. When large businesses get government contracts, they are able to absorb that new work into their existing workforce. When small businesses get government work they must ``staff up'' to meet the increased demand. By increasing contracts to small businesses by just 1 percent, we can create more than 100,000 new jobs. Today, we need those jobs more than ever.

But the reality is that small businesses need all the help they can get when it comes to accessing Federal contracts. Small businesses face significant challenges in competing for these opportunities, including a maze of complicated regulations, contract bundling issues, size standards with loopholes for big businesses, and a lack of protections for sub-contractors. Despite the fact that Federal agencies have a statutory goal to spend 23 percent of their contract dollars on contracts to small firms, in recent years the government has often fallen short.

For example, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, in fiscal year 2007 the Federal Government missed its 23 percent contracting goal by .992 percent. That .992 percent doesn't sound like much, but in reality it represents more than $3.74 billion and 93,500 jobs lost for small businesses. In fiscal year 2008, the Federal Procurement Data System reported that the government missed its goal by 1.51 percent, meaning more than $6.51 billion and 162,700 jobs lost for our small businesses. At a time when more than 15 million Americans are still out of work, merely meeting that 23 percent goal could mean food on the table for a family struggling to make ends meet.

Clearly we need to do better when it comes to helping our small businesses access Federal contracting opportunities. Even under the best of circumstances our small businesses face significant challenges when seeking Federal contracting opportunities. But these challenges are further compounded for small businesses that face additional obstacles, particularly those that are socially and economically disadvantaged.

The Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010 attempts to help socially and economically disadvantaged firms in three ways. First, it makes long overdue and much needed adjustments to the average annual income and net worth thresholds currently in place. Since the establishment of the 8(a) program over 30 years ago, these thresholds have not been significantly updated to account for inflation, placing unrealistic limits on the number of small businesses that are eligible to participate in the program.

Additionally, this legislation requires the SBA to establish maximum net worth thresholds for socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses working in the manufacturing, construction, professional services, and general services industries. Small businesses working in these industries simply face different business conditions as well as higher business costs, which prevent them from participating in the 8(a) program. Making this simple fix will open the program up to a wide array of qualified small businesses.

Secondly, this legislation builds upon the previously mentioned adjustments to the net worth and income thresholds, by extending the amount of time under which a business can participate in the program. For all of the success that many small businesses experience while participating in the program, upon graduation as many as 70 percent see their businesses fail within several years. By establishing a transition period, businesses that have graduated from the program can continue receiving developmental assistance for up to 3 years after graduation, providing them with much needed stability as they seek to transition their business operations.

The third way this legislation attempts to improve contracting opportunities for small businesses is through the creation of a Surety Bond Pilot Program. Under the program, the SBA can guarantee 90 percent of surety bonds, protecting small businesses against any loss resulting from a breach of the terms on a bond. To supplement the guarantee and help put these small businesses in a stronger position to succeed upon graduation from the 8(a) program, the legislation also requires the SBA to provide educational training and technical assistance on a wide range of topics. Finally, the legislation establishes a revolving fund to support the program, and also creates an advisory board to oversee and evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the program.

It is well past time to provide greater opportunities for the thousands of

small business owners who wish to do business with the Federal Government. The Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010 represents another significant step towards opening those doors of opportunity, especially for those small businesses that need a little more help. I thank Senator Cardin for his leadership on this issue, and I hope that all of my colleagues will join us in supporting this important legislation as we work to bring it to the President's desk in the coming months.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, along with my distinguished colleague Senator Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, I rise today to introduce the Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010. As the Chair of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I have held a number of hearings and roundtables on the issues affecting small businesses that contract with the Federal Government. The Committee has repeatedly heard from small businesses throughout the country that more needs to be done to level the playing field and help our small businesses win Federal contracts. The legislation that I am introducing today seeks to improve access to Federal contracts for small businesses, particularly for socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses. It also represents the third in a series of steps that the Committee is taking to address the disparities and inequalities that currently exist in the Federal procurement process.

As I have explained in previous statements before this chamber, as the largest purchaser in the world, the Federal Government is uniquely positioned to offer new and reliable business opportunities for our small firms. Government contracts are one of the easiest and most inexpensive ways the government can help to immediately increase sales for America's entrepreneurs, leading to the creation of new jobs and helping to move our economy forward. When large businesses get government contracts, they are able to absorb that new work into their existing workforce. When small businesses get government work they must ``staff up'' to meet the increased demand. By increasing contracts to small businesses by just 1 percent, we can create more than 100,000 new jobs. Today, we need those jobs more than ever.

But the reality is that small businesses need all the help they can get when it comes to accessing Federal contracts. Small businesses face significant challenges in competing for these opportunities, including a maze of complicated regulations, contract bundling issues, size standards with loopholes for big businesses, and a lack of protections for sub-contractors. Despite the fact that Federal agencies have a statutory goal to spend 23 percent of their contract dollars on contracts to small firms, in recent years the government has often fallen short.

For example, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, in fiscal year 2007 the Federal Government missed its 23 percent contracting goal by .992 percent. That .992 percent doesn't sound like much, but in reality it represents more than $3.74 billion and 93,500 jobs lost for small businesses. In fiscal year 2008, the Federal Procurement Data System reported that the government missed its goal by 1.51 percent, meaning more than $6.51 billion and 162,700 jobs lost for our small businesses. At a time when more than 15 million Americans are still out of work, merely meeting that 23 percent goal could mean food on the table for a family struggling to make ends meet.

Clearly we need to do better when it comes to helping our small businesses access Federal contracting opportunities. Even under the best of circumstances our small businesses face significant challenges when seeking Federal contracting opportunities. But these challenges are further compounded for small businesses that face additional obstacles, particularly those that are socially and economically disadvantaged.

The Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010 attempts to help socially and economically disadvantaged firms in three ways. First, it makes long overdue and much needed adjustments to the average annual income and net worth thresholds currently in place. Since the establishment of the 8(a) program over 30 years ago, these thresholds have not been significantly updated to account for inflation, placing unrealistic limits on the number of small businesses that are eligible to participate in the program.

Additionally, this legislation requires the SBA to establish maximum net worth thresholds for socially and economically disadvantaged small businesses working in the manufacturing, construction, professional services, and general services industries. Small businesses working in these industries simply face different business conditions as well as higher business costs, which prevent them from participating in the 8(a) program. Making this simple fix will open the program up to a wide array of qualified small businesses.

Secondly, this legislation builds upon the previously mentioned adjustments to the net worth and income thresholds, by extending the amount of time under which a business can participate in the program. For all of the success that many small businesses experience while participating in the program, upon graduation as many as 70 percent see their businesses fail within several years. By establishing a transition period, businesses that have graduated from the program can continue receiving developmental assistance for up to 3 years after graduation, providing them with much needed stability as they seek to transition their business operations.

The third way this legislation attempts to improve contracting opportunities for small businesses is through the creation of a Surety Bond Pilot Program. Under the program, the SBA can guarantee 90 percent of surety bonds, protecting small businesses against any loss resulting from a breach of the terms on a bond. To supplement the guarantee and help put these small businesses in a stronger position to succeed upon graduation from the 8(a) program, the legislation also requires the SBA to provide educational training and technical assistance on a wide range of topics. Finally, the legislation establishes a revolving fund to support the program, and also creates an advisory board to oversee and evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the program.

It is well past time to provide greater opportunities for the thousands of

small business owners who wish to do business with the Federal Government. The Section 8(a) Improvements Act of 2010 represents another significant step towards opening those doors of opportunity, especially for those small businesses that need a little more help. I thank Senator Cardin for his leadership on this issue, and I hope that all of my colleagues will join us in supporting this important legislation as we work to bring it to the President's desk in the coming months.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.