Floor Statements

Mr. President, it is only 1:50 p.m. in New Orleans, but the bands have been marching since early this morning, and the singing is joyful. People have been so excited not only in New Orleans but in all of Louisiana because tonight the Saints will be marching again into that grand, wonderful building we call the Superdome.

The Superdome has always been a special symbol to New Orleans, but tonight that symbol takes on a new meaning. It has been a symbol of pride in the past, and tonight it is a symbol of hope--a symbol of hope for the great rebuilding of our wonderful city, region, and State.

Just a year ago, the Superdome was a symbol of sadness, loss, confusion, and despair as New Orleans, the region, and our State faced the worst natural disaster in the history of this country. It wasn't just Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that caused devastation, it was also the levees that collapsed and put a great city and region under some 20 to 25 feet of water. It was in that overwhelming flood that people fled to the Dome looking for safety and security. All of America knows this sad story.

But I am here to talk about a story of recovery, a story of leadership. I want to thank the people who made the Dome's reopening possible--to thank the men and women who work at the Dome: the welders, the janitors, the cleanup crews, the construction crews, the managers, the architects, and the engineers.

They spent the whole year rebuilding this Dome on a schedule that no one thought was possible, at a cost that came under budget. A partnership formed between the NFL, the State of Louisiana, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get this building back into shape and reopen tonight with 68,000 fans coming to watch the Saints play the Atlanta Falcons.

I want to remind the country that these employees showed up to work each day to restore the Dome, many of them traveling hours to get there in the morning and hours back in the evening because there were no nearby houses for them to sleep. Many of them lost their homes, their children lost their schools, and their churches were destroyed.

The successful rebuilding of the Dome is because of the people who showed up to work. Their journeys in the morning and their journeys home show a commitment to rebuilding a great city. Despite the criticism that the city, the State and the region have received, tonight is a symbol of all that is great about the spirit of the people who refuse to let this city die.

Desiree Jones, who lives in Violet, La., is the housekeeping manager for the Superdome. She started working at the Dome 25 years ago as a janitor. Every day for the past two weeks, she has been working to get the Dome ready for tonight. She knows the Dome's reopening is a signal of rebirth for our city.

I come to the floor to thank the thousands of men and women who worked on the Superdome. The were

led by a wonderful leader, a young man who has really shown his stripes and all of New Orleans is singing his praises: Doug Thornton, the general manager of the Dome. He stayed in the Superdome with his wife and children doing everything he could to help the evacuees. His heroic efforts during those harrowing days a year ago have been well reported. But what might not be known is that Doug and his wife also lost their home. He didn't see his wife for weeks because he spent his time rebuilding the Dome while Denise spent time rebuilding their house in Lakeview. That is what people all over New Orleans and South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast are doing--going to work to rebuild the refineries, the pipelines, the industries, while their spouses are at home rebuilding what is left of their houses.

Doug Thornton, general manager of the Superdome, is no exception. He deserves a tremendous amount of credit.

Tim Coulon, the chairman of the Louisiana Stadium Exhibition District, is a former Jefferson Parish president and a man I know well. Tim has always been a very quiet but competent and effective leader. His leadership doesn't come from loud speeches and pushing but from quiet determination. Tim, his staff, and other board members worked very closely with Governor Blanco, who signed executive order after executive order, to cut through the redtape and expedite the Superdome's rebuilding.

That partnership between our Governor, the stadium commissioners, and Doug Thornton was the leadership team that put this Superdome back together.

I also have to say for the record that Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner of the NFL, saw what happened at the Superdome and decided that the NFL was a service organization, and its first job was to service teams and the cities. He understands something about the emotional connection between the teams and the cities that host them. The teams become a part of the spirit of every city, and he would not allow the Saints' spirit to die.

He said the Saints will march again. He said the Dome will be rebuilt, and let's get to it. New Orleans will forever be grateful to Paul Tagliabue and his staff at the NFL for their belief in our city and for not cutting and running, not leaving when times got tough for us. They stood their ground, and we are very grateful.

I also want to go on the record to say that the Dome has been a symbol of our city for 31 years. Its origin goes back to Governor John McKeithen. He was not from New Orleans. He was actually a country boy from Columbia, LA. But as our Governor, he had a vision of what a great Dome could mean to a great American city, a great southern city. He, along with the mayor at that time, my father, Moon Landrieu, along with Dave Dixon, a local businessman, decided the Dome would mean renewal for the city. The three of them overcame all sorts of political hurdles and were able to build this great Dome.

We have hosted more Super Bowls than any building in America. It sits on 52 acres of land in the central business district. The Superdome has a seating capacity of over 70,000, depending on the event.

When Dave Dixon had a vision for this Dome, he told our Governor at the time: You know, Governor, we will have a Pope here one day and a President here one day.

Nobody believed him when he said that. But sure enough, President Reagan honored all of us when the Republican National Convention came to New Orleans 18 years ago.

It was a proud time for New Orleans and Louisiana when 19 years ago, Pope John Paul II made the first ever Papal visit to Louisiana and held a rally in front of 80,000 children in that Dome. It was a site to behold.

We have had a proud Superdome history right there on the corner of Poydras and Loyola, right across the street from city hall. It will be there for years to come because the heroic efforts of the employees at the Dome and our local contractors who put their shoulders to the wheel and their hearts into their work and decided that this would be a symbol of our rebirth.

I am proud as the Senator from the great State of Louisiana to come and honor them, to thank them, and to say that this is the beginning of our recovery. This week, we close a chapter on Hurricane Rita, which, Mr. President, hit your own State of Texas, and which did so much damage to both Louisiana and Texas. I visited Louisiana this past weekend with some of Louisiana's delegation and local leaders. It is clear that recovery has begun, but there is still a long way to go.

As we close the Rita and Katrina chapters of the last year, let the Saints go marching in tonight, and let them lead us to a new chapter of hope and recovery for New Orleans, for Louisiana, for the whole gulf coast, and for all of America.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes as if in morning business.

Thank you, Madam President.

Energy Independence

Madam President, I come to the floor to speak about an equally important issue to many of our States and follow up on the earlier comment by my colleague from Idaho on energy independence for the Nation, and the importance of that at this particular time to the Gulf of Mexico, America's only energy coast and an area that I need not have to explain again is in one of the most challenging situations of its entire history.

I want to associate myself with the remarks of the Senators from Nebraska and North Dakota regarding the drought.

We have had similar droughts, amazingly, in our State, even with the hurricanes. But as Senators who represent farm State communities, agriculture is very important to the State of Louisiana. We have been in a situation that they have been in. I know people think of us as a State with a lot of rain, and obviously a target for hurricanes, but we have also been stricken by serious drought.

The point of my comment about what was said is this: Sometimes things happen out of the ordinary, extraordinary situations, as they have just described, which deserve an unprecedented and extraordinary response.

I know we in Washington deal with that very well because we like everything that is sort of in the box, but we also don't like everything to kind of be one way. The fact is, when serious, extraordinary circumstances happen, we need to make a quick and appropriate response. It is most certainly appropriate for these Senators to come to the Senate and ask for a quick and immediate response to part of our Nation. This drought is not just, of course, in Nebraska and North Dakota. The pictures have shown pockets of severe and unprecedented drought, and whether it is because of global warming or whether it is just because of the severe weather patterns caused by something else, we can debate that until the cows come home. The fact is we have farming communities, rural communities, suffering right now. They need our best effort. I support seeing what we can do to help.

Natural Gas in the Gulf of Mexico

I will speak this morning for a few moments about an issue which is almost equal to the concern of farmers in America; that is, the price of natural gas. Farmers, like many industry groups, use natural gas. In their case, fertilizers are produced using a lot of natural gas, and fertilizers go into the farmers' fields.

Natural gas is also used as a raw material to create virtually 50 percent of the products created in American gas. And we have a great shortage. It is driving the price high, historically high--not the highest it has ever been but historically high prices.

The only way we can get the price of gas down--and we need to; that is what the Senator from Idaho spoke about, energy independence and stabilizing prices--is to increase the supply and to make the supply sources more diverse so industries, if the price of gas is high, can use coal, or if the price of coal is high, they can use oil, or if the price of oil is high, they can use alternative fuels or ethanol.

We have been in a mad dash against time to expand our source of fuels and to increase the supply, where we can, in the most environmentally sensitive way possible. It has been a debate which has gone on for decades. It will continue to go on for decades because some States produce gas, some produce oil, some produce coal, and some do not produce any of that and have nuclear powerplants and think that is the way to go. Some of us have more wind than others, some of us have more sun than others.

This is a debate which is natural in a democracy. Just because it is difficult does not mean we have to stop trying. We have to press forward on the issue of a greater supply and greater independence for America. We are dangerously dependent on foreign sources of oil and gas.

Madam President, 72 Senators--unprecedented in this day of partisanship, in this day of not even being able to agree on the time of day or the weather conditions outside--72 Senators came together under the leadership of Senator Domenici, the chairman of our Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Presiding Officer serves on that committee and has been a wonderful voice of reason for the Senate. We passed a bill to open more supplies of gas in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Senator from Idaho showed a much larger and more colorful chart. I thought his looked terrific, and I will ask to borrow it one day, but I do not have it at this moment and this chart will suffice. It shows areas that are basically off of production. The white areas off the Atlantic coast, the coast of California, and around Florida have not been open to production for the last 35 years. There are many reasons-- some of them good and some of them not good--we can't drill in these areas.

We will continue to debate for decades to come what to do off the shores of Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. That debate will go on for the next many years. I will be on one side of that debate, and my colleagues will be on the other. I believe you can access resources appropriately. However, we are

not going to resolve that issue in the next week. We are not going to resolve that issue in the next month. I predict we will not resolve that issue for the next year. However, we have farmers in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kansas who are desperate for gas now. They cannot wait 10 years or three decades until we figure out the politics of drilling on the Atlantic and Pacific coast. They need help now.

For Congress to be able to help them and not help them is a crime. For Congress to be able to help them and not help them is a crime, it is a shame. It should not stand.

We have the political support and the votes now--among Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate, today--to open more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. We have not been able to open sections in the gulf because of disagreements between Florida and Alabama for decades. Because of the good work of the Senators from Alabama, Mr. Shelby and Mr. Sessions, and the good Senators from Florida, Mr. Martinez and Mr. Nelson--they worked for months in the most difficult of political situations to come up with a way to open more oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a place that everyone agrees has tremendous reserves, that everyone agrees is where we should drill. There are no fights among Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Now Alabama and Florida have come to agreements. Their Governors have agreed. Their general political establishments have agreed--not unanimously but the vast majority.

We are here, a week until we leave, and we are going to do nothing-- that is what some people say--because it is not good enough. I don't know what school of politics or leadership they came from. All I know, as a leader, you take things a step at a time. You cannot change the world in 1 day. You have to change it a little bit at a time. It takes time to educate people and to talk to them about the benefits. I have taken as many Senators as will go with me out on the rigs. I took the Secretary of the Interior out there to show him. It takes a while to take a lot of people out there. They are busy. They have other things on their minds. We are doing the best we can to try to educate people all over the country about the benefits.

We started drilling offshore in the 1940s. The first well was a little town in southwest Louisiana called Creole. It was just basically washed away in the hurricane. The brave little town, Creole, LA, put the first well offshore about four decades ago. The industry has blossomed since then.

The purple spots on this chart represent pipelines of natural gas. But the purple spots represent more than pipelines; they represent jobs, economic hope, and economic strength of the greatest Nation on Earth. Without these pipelines, without this gas, we cannot produce hardly anything in the United States of America--from plastics, to manufacturing, to steel, to electricity. We keep the lights on in North America. We are proud of it. We want to do more of it. We can do more of it.

We have a bill and the political leadership to open the gulf, but some people around the Capitol do not want to do that until we figure out the politics of drilling off the coast of California--I suggest that is going to take a little more than a few weeks--or until we figure out the politics of drilling off the Atlantic coast. I suggest that is going to take a little bit more work. I am willing to do the work. I have done a lot of the work for the last 10 years. I am continuing to do the work. It is not going to happen in the next month.

Meanwhile, our manufacturing cannot stay competitive with China. With cheap oil and cheap gas coming in from other parts of the world, they are laying off workers, unable to make long-term capital decisions because this Congress can't figure out, this leadership can't figure out how to get a bill passed that opens gas and oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It would not be opened without a bill. It can't open without a bill.

Maybe in the ``plan''--lots of things are in a plan. I have plans for my house, to decorate. That is not to say it is going to get done because there is someone else in my house--my husband--who has ideas of his own about how this works. Just because you have something in a ``plan'' doesn't mean it is going to happen. Just because MMS has these things in their plan does not mean it will happen, but it could happen with a bill that we could pass. If our bill is law, obviously it will make it happen.

I will show the picture of the gulf here. This is what the Gulf of Mexico looks like. These are active wells. The bigger picture was white spaces with no one else drilling. These are all the drills, the yellow are the leases, and these are the active wells. We are producing 30 percent of the Nation's needs from here. We are proud to do it. We will keep doing it.

There is still a lot of white space we could open. That is what we are trying to do--open a little off the Alabama shore, give Florida the buffer they have asked for. Some people do not agree with that, but we had to come to terms with the situation in Florida. Their State is divided on this issue. Some people in Florida want to drill, some people don't want to drill. This was a compromise, as is everything here, and we figured out a way to give Florida a buffer, open up some more oil and gas drilling.

The next chart shows the area we came up with after a lot of work. This lease sale that we could open opens up 9 million new acres of oil and gas. This will not solve my colleagues' problem, Senators Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson, it will not solve their drought problem, but it will give relief to farmers everywhere when the gas prices come down and the oil and gas starts coming on line.

To put the 9 million acres in perspective--and the Presiding Officer will know this better than anyone--we have fought for 40 years over whether to open ANWR, and ANWR is 6,000 acres. And our debate for 40 years has been about whether to open 2,000 acres.

Our bill--and we have 72 Senators, Democrats and Republicans, led by Senator Domenici--will open 9 million acres. But some people around the Capitol don't think that is a significant step. They do not think that 9 million acres makes a difference. They just think this is nothing and we should keep working until we can get everything opened, and they are sure that will happen next year.

I will share the national membership list of the Consumer Alliance for Energy Security. There are probably 100 or more organizations, led by corporations, nonprofit organizations, agriculture, chemical, consumers, manufacturers--the list goes on. It is a very broad-based list. It is not just an industry list; it is retailers, et cetera--the national Chambers of Commerce, the Forestry Association, environmental organizations that understand this country is at great risk unless we open access, that understand we need to do it a step at a time. We are making progress, but we have to take this a step at a time. We want to take this step now.

I ask unanimous consent to have this list printed in the Record to indicate that this group is on the record wanting greater access on the issues I am speaking about.

But I want to go back to this 9 million acres. This will not open without our bill. It may be in the plan, but it is under moratoria. This section is under moratoria. It cannot be lifted with a magic wand. The only way it can be lifted is if we pass a bill to lift it. If we do not pass a bill, it will stay closed, and the oil and gas companies that have pipelines in the gulf, that have the infrastructure in the gulf, that have the expertise in the gulf will not be allowed to drill there. Meanwhile, prices go high, we lose manufacturing, everybody loses jobs in their States, and we wring our hands here saying we cannot do anything.

Well, we can do something. Chevron did something pretty big last week or 2 weeks ago. Chevron and some of its partners discovered a major oil and gas find, as shown here on the map. Look how small this is. It is just one of these little dots, just one of them. It is so tiny on the map, but it is so huge. This one discovery of Chevron called the Jack Rig--the Jack find--and several right here in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico will double the reserves of the country's oil.

It is a significant find. It is as significant as finds in Saudi Arabia. It is surprising, in some sense, to some people who thought we drilled everything we could in America. But the fact is, Americans are a pretty smart group of people. And our partners around the world, with whom we make partnerships, can usually figure things out pretty well. With the right incentives and the right ingenuity and with necessity, we can find oil and gas in places we never thought we could.

This well is 28,000 feet deep. They found oil and gas here that is going to be a great help in the event we continue to have problems in the Mideast, if we continue to have problems in Venezuela. It does not look very promising there to me right now.

This is one small, little dot. It is probably not more than--I am not sure--maybe a couple hundred acres. So when people say to me: Senator, your bill or Senator Domenici's bill that opens 9 million acres does not do anything--and I look at what the Jack Rig did, which is right here--I have to tell them I don't buy their argument, and I don't think the American people do.

Opening more area in the Gulf of Mexico where the infrastructure is, where we have proven reserves--and because the information is proprietary--and you can understand why it is proprietary because this is a competitive business. All we can find out, according to the geologists who made this discovery, is that they think they have tapped into a ``fairway''--which is the way it was quoted in the newspaper--a ``fairway'' of oil and gas, ready reserves within our grasp in the area that is used for drilling, with people who know how to work on the rigs, in a political environment that is safe.

And we cannot, and will not, before we leave next week, take this step because we have to wait to open drilling all over America off the coast? I do not think that is a wise decision. I think we should take the steps now that we can take, establish revenue sharing, which is part of the bill for Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama and allow these States to be full and equal partners in sharing the benefits of these resources because we most certainly share the burdens of pipelines, that while we are proud of them, they most certainly have an erosion factor.

Our wetlands are being lost at an alarming rate--I have spoken about that many times--not just because of the impacts of oil and gas, which are somewhat contributory to this situation, but mostly because this mighty Mississippi River, which also serves the Nation's economy in a very significant way, has been leveed over the centuries, and it cannot overflow like it used to. So the land cannot replenish itself. And so it continues to subside. And with global warming, it is now exacerbated. But that is not the subject of this talk.

We will put our money to great use in Louisiana. Every environmentalist should be very happy to know that our money is going to be used to protect and preserve this great wetlands, which is an enormous treasure for the Nation, and one that gives so many benefits, and, most importantly, with the recent hurricane, it helps protect great cities, and not just Louisiana communities, but it also protects Mississippi. We are happy to protect our neighbors when we can.

This wetlands protects the gulf coast, and we need to get it restored for the benefit of both the States of Mississippi and Louisiana. And it creates some buffers, obviously, to Alabama, should the storm come this way. It will hit us first before hitting Mississippi or Alabama, and our wetlands reduce that surge. Having said that, we need to press on with a pro-production bill in the Gulf of Mexico, laying the foundation, as Senator Domenici has suggested, for revenue sharing.

Now, I would like to read into the Record statements that have been made by Republican Senators, not Democratic Senators, although I do have some of those I could read into the Record. But for the purposes of this debate, they are statements by Republican Senators who strongly support the Senate version, and why they support the Senate version, because I want to communicate that some people on the other side or some people in the Capitol and other people are saying it is just the Democrats who are stopping this broader drilling bill, and if Democrats would just get their act together, we could get it done.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are some Democrats opposed to the broad drilling bill, but there are many Republicans here opposed to the broad drilling bill.

Let me read one of the statements. And I am sure Senator Graham from South Carolina would not mind me restating his own speech on the floor of the Senate. He said, on August, 2--this is Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina:

I do support passage of S. 3711, but I do not support the

bill passed by the House of Representatives earlier this

year. The careful compromise that is the Senate bill cannot

be found in the version passed by the House. I will not

support any legislation that opens South Carolina's coast to

drilling for oil. . . . I . . . encourage my colleagues in

the House that if they are truly serious [they will live to

the framework of the Senate bill].

Now, he said ``for oil.'' He may be willing to open it for gas. I will grant you that. And the House bill allows a choice between oil and gas. But, like I said, that debate is complicated. It is multistate. It will take much longer than the week we have, much longer probably than even next year. And the need is immediate and the need is great.

I know my colleagues have come to the floor, and I asked for 20 minutes, so I am going to wrap up my remarks in about 1 minute to give others an opportunity to speak.

Let me quote from Senator Martinez, a Republican Senator from Florida:

I will take a moment to thank [the House] for their

diligence and vigilance. [I will thank the House Members for

their good work. But at this time] I cannot support the House

version. I have had clear assurances from our leaders [here

in the Senate] that we are committed to working from the

framework of the Senate bill. That has been important to me,

and while I respect the hard work of our House colleagues [on

this subject]--

And we have some great leaders in the House, both Republicans and Democrats--those are my words. He goes on to say:

and their autonomy as a body of Congress--

He says he respects that, but we must prevail in the Senate version.

Senator Warner said:

Many of my colleagues have expressed concerns about the

Gulf of Mexico bill, and they stem from what is in the House

bill. They said they do not want to lift the moratorium as

the House bill would do.

So even Senator Warner, who supports drilling off the coast of Virginia and has made his position clear, understands there is still work to be done in order for that to happen.

Mr. President, in conclusion, let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Let's not tell our agricultural community, our manufacturing community, our utilities, our petrochemical industry to wait when we have a bill that will open 9 million acres of gas and oil, provide great companies such as Chevron and others the opportunity--both big oil and independents that create a lot of jobs--to explore more here safely off our coast.

It increases our economic strength. It produces jobs immediately. It lowers energy prices for all consumers. And it does make our Nation more secure.

I am going to close with this: I do not know how my colleagues feel about being beholden to the politics of the Mideast right now. I do not know how my colleagues feel about being beholden to the politics going on in Venezuela. I do not feel comfortable with it. I do feel comfortable about the politics of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. They are Americans. And we have our deal together. We want to drill for all Americans, for the security of our Nation.

Please, allow us to give this country more oil and gas. Please allow us to lower prices. And let's take it a step at a time. I promise my colleagues--the Senator from Pennsylvania knows very well the people in Pennsylvania need relief. I say to the Senator, they cannot wait another year or two. They need it now. He knows that well. He has been a strong advocate for his people in Pennsylvania. But we have to open this up now. And we will come back and work offshore Alaska, offshore maybe some of these other States, when their Governors and when their legislators and when their political leadership can get their neighborhoods together.

But the neighborhood of the gulf is together. Our Governors are together. Our Senators are together. And our people are together. We want to do this for America. Please let's do it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, next week the United States will welcome President Nursultan Nazarbayev, the leader of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Fifteen years ago 15 independent states were formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The international community has followed the aftermath of these events in that part of the world with great interest.

Kazakhstan has demonstrated important economic gains during this period. The reforms which have been carried out thus far have allowed it to become one of the world's rapidly developing economies with an annual growth of 9-10 percent. Additionally, it has become the place for common ground among its various ethnic and spiritual groups.

As ethnic and religious conflicts divide regions around the world, Kazakhstan is working to preserve broad interfaith tolerance by creating the Congress of World and Traditional Religions. This program unites a predominantly Muslim country with more than 40 other faiths and fosters a dialog which assists in overcoming religious differences.

One cannot overlook Kazakhstan's contribution to nonproliferation and promotion of global security. Kazakhstan had the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal, and renounced this lethal heritage without any pressure or coercion.

Independent Kazakhstan is a young nation, yet it has shown tremendous progress and occupies a worthy place in the international community. President Nursultan Nazarbayev has made significant contributions to the establishment of strong and friendly relations with the United States.

After the tragic events on September 11, 2001, Kazakhstan extended its generosity to the people of the United States and after Hurricane Katrina it offered its generous support to the people of Louisiana.

Today our countries enjoy a solid foundation for the continued flourishing of a partnership along the entire spectrum of bilateral relations. Kazakhstan is a dependable partner of the United States in the global war on terrorism. I am confident the upcoming visit of President Nazarbayev to the United States will deepen and strengthen the strategic partnership between our two countries.

Mr. President, I didn't hear the request.

I have no objection.

Mr. President, I came to the floor to speak briefly about one of our outstanding superintendents in Louisiana and to pay tribute to an accomplishment that has been made on education. But in light of the rantings that went on for the last 30 minutes in the Chamber from my two colleagues on the other side, I would like to state for the Record that America is not tired of fighting terrorism. America is tired of the wrong-headed and bone-headed leadership of the Republican Party that has sent $6.5 billion a month to Iraq, when the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. America is tired of leadership which led this country to attack Saddam Hussein when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden, and which captured a man who did not attack the country and left loose a man who did.

Americans are tired of bone-headed Republican leadership that alienates our allies when we need them the most. And Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that, despite documented mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake--and even their own party admitting mistakes--never admits that they do anything wrong. That is the kind of leadership Americans are tired of.

I didn't come to the Senate to have partisan rantings on the floor, but I most certainly am not going to sit here as a Democrat and let the Republican leadership come to the floor and talk about how Democrats are not making us safe. They are the ones who are in charge, and Osama bin Laden is still loose.

Mr. President, now I will speak about what I came to the floor to speak about. We have had a very difficult time in Louisiana and Mississippi and the gulf coast this year, in part because our resources are short because our country is involved in so many other things, and I can appreciate and understand the dilemmas. But we still have a great effort underway to rebuild Louisiana, Mississippi, and the gulf coast. So we have been moving steadily ahead in fits and starts because, of course, this was an unprecedented disaster. And while it really wasn't a natural disaster for Louisiana, it was a manmade disaster because our city went under water and the region, counties in Mississippi and parishes in Louisiana--for instance, one of our parishes, not New Orleans which we have heard a lot about, but St. Bernard Parish which sits right outside of New Orleans, 75,000 people live there, and every home was destroyed and every church was ruined

and every business was destroyed. They were ruined not just because of the storms and the hurricanes which come and there is nothing much we can do to stop them, but because the levees broke which the Federal Government is supposed to maintain, and because of spending money in other places and not protecting people in their homes.

So as my colleagues know, we had water 15 feet high that stood for up to 6 to 8 and sometimes 10 weeks in some places. Our communities have been struggling with how we might better approach the recovery should something--and I see my colleague from Seattle, WA--should a tsunami hit Seattle, which is a major, very important American city, or should a category 5 storm hit Long Island like it did in 1938 when only a few hundred thousand people lived there but now millions of people do. We need to do a better job of responding. So Congress has been involved in that for this last year, and I predict will be involved in it for many years to come until we get it right.

But one of the things that we did get right is that the northern parishes of Louisiana came to the aid of those from the southern parishes, and one of those parishes that I am here to speak briefly about is Madison Parish. It is a small parish up in the northeastern part of our State, and it is a poor parish. It has great natural resources and very vibrant and vital agricultural land, but it is quite poor, generally. It is a district with only 3,000 students in school. But as the people fled from south Louisiana and south Mississippi and southeastern Texas to flee from the rising water of the storms, many of them found their way to Madison Parish.

Madison Parish superintendent Michael Johnson led this effort to absorb several hundred students into a very small school system that was already overburdened. The storm didn't, of course, hit Madison Parish directly but, of course, indirectly they were impacted by some high winds that made it up to north Louisiana, and were mostly impacted by students and families who ran there for shelter. There were many shelters put up. Superintendent Johnson, as many superintendents in north Louisiana, reached out their hands and, without a lot of help, without any textbooks, without a lot of information about how this was supposed to happen, took the children in. Not only did children find a safe place in Madison Parish school systems to attend school because their schools in south Louisiana were ruined, but with all of this, Madison Parish was one of the parishes that improved their test scores substantially on the last LEAP test given in Louisiana. Not only did their scores improve, but students and educators in Madison Parish at the same time were welcoming evacuated children with open arms.

Madison Parish is not the only parish that saw a substantial rise in test scores this year. Beauregard Parish has also done well. We are very proud of all of our school systems that did better in a very difficult year, but most certainly we are proud of those small, poor, rural school systems that, with good leadership, are making substantial progress.

We don't talk enough about education on the floor of the Senate, in my view, and we don't often at all talk about the small areas of our country that are making extraordinary progress in less populated areas. We talk a lot about New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, but we don't always get to hear about small places that are not even recognizable sometimes to many people on the map. But since I visited Madison Parish recently and had a great tour of north Louisiana, I thought I would take a minute to come and praise publicly this particular superintendent and to call attention to many of our superintendents who, despite the fact that we keep cutting their Federal funding, are managing to meet these high standards and to lift their children up and to make their school system and others better for the future of our States and our region.

Superintendent Johnson has been the impetuous for Madison Parish's recent success. Interestingly, Superintendent Johnson was working as superintendent of schools for New York City's District 29 when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Superintendent Johnson took over in August before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit and proceeded with the same positive energy he embodied in New York. The Madison Parish School District now has improved their LEAP test scores by reducing the percentage of students scoring Unsatisfactory and increased the percentage of students scoring Basic and above. They have also reduced suspensions at the elementary and middle school levels.

Not only have their scores improved, but the students and educators of Madison Parish have welcomed the evacuated children with open arms. Under Superintendent Johnson's leadership, they used their resources to provide the children lunch, buy clothes, books and other necessary items. They provided increased after school programs so these students would spend less time in shelters and have some sense of normalcy. The students and staff helped the displaced children and teachers begin to replace their personal possessions and helped them work through their feelings in the crisis. This was something that Superintendent Johnson understood very well from his experiences in New York and added to his success in caring for the children taken in after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by Madison Parish.

As students come back into southern Louisiana and begin the new school year, I would like to recognize how beautifully our students were welcomed into schools systems like Madison Parish. Superintendent Johnson and his community are an example of the best in our society-- the generosity and compassion that is found in the hearts of our people. I also want all of us to look to the Madison Parish School System and to Superintendent Michael Johnson as an example of how a low performing school can, not only turn their scores around, but offer help to those students who are less fortunate.

Thank you to all students, teachers, principals and superintendents who have taken that extra step and worked harder, improved their test scores and opened their arms and hearts to those who were affected by the storms. We should all live by this example. In closing, I would like to express my gratitude to the Madison Parish schools system and to Superintendent Michael Johnson for taking education seriously and improving their test scores while providing a safe, healthy learning environment for all children.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, how much time do the Democrats have remaining?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 4 minutes of that time, if I could.

Mr. President, I would like to take a few minutes to add to Senator Murray's heartfelt and beautiful tribute to Governor Ann

Richards. Many of us woke up this morning to read the newspaper and were stunned by the news that Governor Richards had passed away.

Many of us, of course, knew of her illness and that she struggled with it and fought it bravely, but I am not sure how many understood how close she was to death's door.

As a neighbor of hers who grew up right over the border from Texas, and as a young woman in the legislature, Ann Richards was at the top of the list of women I looked to early in my career. I did not have too many women to look to because there were just not that many women in public office in this country in 1976, the year when Governor Richards started her political career as Travis County Commissioner. There were 604 women in state legislatures nationwide. Not only was she an outstanding leader but she was an extraordinary administrator. I remember her days as State treasurer of Texas and followed many of her guidelines to leadership in trying to manage the budget of Texas. I followed that lead in trying to manage the budget of Louisiana. She showed that women could not only hold county commissioner seats, but high-level executive offices, managing finances and money. She become Governor of one of the largest States in America and served with extraordinary ability.

But more than just her service to the public at large, which was tremendous to the State of Texas and the country, Ann Richards encouraged women to think of things that had never been thought of before that women could to serve in corporate board rooms and as Governors and, hopefully, one day as President of the United States. And today, thanks to women like her, 1,686 women serve in state legislatures across the country. Without women such as Ann Richards, those dreams would never materialize or would be decades away.

There was a quote in the paper that I chuckled at because Governor Richards said once she didn't want to be remembered for keeping a clean house. She thought that women should be remembered for things greater than just how well they could vacuum how well they could cook or how well they could do things associated with the home.

While I do not in any way diminish the contribution that we make as wives and as mothers or diminish any of the things that we do inside of our homes that keep our families happy and keep our society going, I want to say emphatically that I agree with her. I hope women who are born and grow up today really think about what they want their tombstone to say.

Ann was always that kind of woman. She was born not only to be all a woman could be, but all a person could be, all a leader could be. Very few women in the generations that I am familiar with have accomplished that as well as she did. It is with great sadness that we recognize her passing, and I am sure there will be a more formal recognition in the Senate Chamber among men and women remembering the contributions this extraordinary American made to our country, to the world, to women and girls everywhere.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be dispensed with.

Mr. President, this truly is going to be quite a vote in just a few minutes as the Senate has decided to have a vote at 5 o'clock on the Gulf of Mexico Energy Independence Act.

Mr. President, you have been particularly helpful in putting this bill together, along with other gulf coast Senators.

I wanted to come to the floor to thank so many people who have helped to make this bill possible. It was many months in the working, many, many negotiations and meetings that went on to produce a bill that is not only going to be of extraordinary help to the great State of Louisiana and to all the Gulf Coast States as we try to restore our coastline, restore our marshlands, stop the erosion, and build the levees and the floodgates that are so imperative and critical to the protection of our people, our communities, large and small, but it is also a bill that is so important for this Nation as we seek to increase the supply of oil and gas produced in this country so we don't have to rely on oil and gas coming in from unfriendly and unstable places.

It took a tremendous amount of work for this bill to be put together. I begin by thanking particularly Senator Domenici who, as the chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for many years, has served as ranking member for some of those years, has led on the issue of energy in almost every aspect, trying to help us increase supply, diversify supply, and come together on conservation measures that are important for the Nation.

I also thank Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader. Without his support, we would not have been able to get the Democratic votes necessary to join in a bipartisan spirit to provide revenuesharing for the Gulf Coast States, to establish for the first time a real conservation royalty for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and in a great way contribute to the reduction

of the deficit by encouraging production where we can get new production, therefore generating more revenues for the Nation. Senator Harry Reid is from Nevada, a State that has produced great natural resources for the country. He understands the balance in this policy.

I thank Senator Bill Frist and Senator Mitch McConnell. Senator Domenici is in the Senate now. He is scheduled to speak, so I will wrap up. I thank Senator Bill Frist and Senator Mitch McConnell for helping to pull the Senate together to keep us working on this good, balanced compromise.

I thank the Senators from the gulf coast, of course, including the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Louisiana, as well as Senator Lott, Senator Shelby, Senator Sessions, Senator Cochran, Senator Hutchison, and Senator Cornyn. None of this would have been possible without the gulf coast Senators coming together and agreeing how to share the money, how to proceed. I thank the Senators from Florida, Senator Martinez and Senator Nelson, as well.

There is a list of staffers I will have printed in the Record, starting with my own staff, Janet Woodka, legislative director; Jason Matthews; Tom Michels; Elizabeth Craddock; and Ron Faucheaux; a list of staffers representing all the Senators who were instrumental in the passing of this bill. I thank them very much, particularly Frank Macciorola with Senator Domenici and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee who led this effort with Bruce Evans. It would not have been possible without the help of Libby Jarvis from Senator Frist's office.

The staff have put in the long hours and I thank them for all of their hard work. That staff includes: Chris Miller, Senator Reid; Frank Macciorola, Senator Domenici, Senate Energy Committee; Bruce Evans, Senator Domenici, Senate Energy Committee; Libby Jarvis, Senator Frist; Kyle Simmons and Malloy McDaniel, Senator McConnell; Jim Sartucii and Annie Estrada, Senator Lott; Garrett Graves, Senator Vitter; Ryan Welch, Senator Shelby; Marie Thomas, Senator Cochran; Jamie Moore, Senator Hutchison; Spencer Chambers, Senator Cornyn; Dan Shapiro and Bridget Walsh, Senator Bill Nelson; Brydon Ross, Senator Martinez; Stephen Boyd, Senator Sessions.

I also thank all of my staff--they have all worked hard over the years-- and in particular, my energy team: Tom Michels, Elizabeth Craddock, Janet Woodka, Jason Matthews, and Ron Faucheaux.

Any my former staff-who have laid the groundwork and built this issue up over the past 10 years to get us to where we are today--most notably Jason Schendle, who has been a tremendous resource and advocate, Kathleen Strottman, Dionne Thomas, and Neil Naraine.

Finally, I thank Senator J. Bennett Johnston, whose seat I now occupy and my great friend, Senator John Breaux.

I see Senator Domenici in the Senate. I thank him for his extraordinary leadership in helping the Nation break through on new drilling for the first time in many decades.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, before the Senator from Florida leaves the floor--and he may be staying through the debate--he has been extremely essential and instrumental and vital to the compromise that has come forward. I want to thank him for his leadership. As he alluded to, the five States in the gulf coast came together--the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the State of the presiding officer, Texas, and he did an outstanding job as part of the coalition as well--with an arrangement that would have many mutual beneficial parts. One, it is going to provide oil and gas, and particularly natural gas. That is in such short supply. The Senator from Florida knows and all of our colleagues from Florida understand that natural gas is a raw material that is used to literally produce almost every product in America that you can think of, from rubber tires, to the automobiles themselves, to the products of ethanol, to fertilizers, chemicals--you name it, natural gas is used as a raw material.

The prices are too high. They have to come down. The industry is doing a

very good job of conserving, but we must open domestic supply, as well as--unfortunately, because the demand is so high--import liquefied natural gas, now that the technology has presented itself. But before we establish another network of dependency, let's at least do our part and produce the natural gas we have here. So on this bill, the Gulf Coast States have come together to open up 8 million new acres, four times more than the original bill--in the compromise we provided, four times more than the original bill to open natural gas for the country.

The other beneficial aspect of this bill is establishing a strong and reliable, trustworthy partnership between the Federal Government and the Gulf Coast States--the four producing States, of which Texas is one--and to say the infrastructure that we provide, basically allowing the Federal Government to access the land it owns--and there is no question that this land off the coast of the United States is owned by everybody, not just the States along the coast. But, frankly, as you know, without our highways and helicopter pads, and our sheds, and our boat launches, and our shipping facilities, and fabrication facilities, the Federal Government could not even access the minerals. So, basically, by providing the servitude and the services and the platform, if you will, to host this great industry, we are saying let us share in all future revenues--as you know, 37.5 percent. That is the second most important thing in my mind that has been established.

For Louisiana's purposes, and according to the way the bill is currently structured for all of the Gulf Coast States, we will use that money to restore a great coastline, to secure and buffer America's only energy coast. We don't have to roll the reels back or rewind the tape of Katrina and Rita. We know what megastorms can mean for the gulf coast. We have all lived through them. We have watched our families struggle. We have watched our constituents struggle, having lost homes, churches, and schools, having seen the great infrastructure, the huge pipelines and facilities, drilling ships, and oil rigs and platforms bent by the great winds and waves. We know how important it is to take a little bit of that money we are paying in taxes and reinvest back into the gulf coast to strengthen the infrastructure, not just for the people who live there in the big towns such as New Orleans and Creole, LA, and midsize towns such as Beaumont and Galveston, and Gulfport, and Pass Christian, but for the whole Nation, because the Nation needs the gulf coast to be strong and secure in these storms.

So using this money to restore the great wetlands, which our scientists know we can do--but, frankly, we have not had the money to do it. People say, Senator, get a plan. I could almost fill up this Chamber with plans our people have had--or I can say dreams our people have had.

We have dreamed all we can dream. We have thought all we can think about this. We need money to turn the dirt and restore the wetlands. The technology is there to do it.

That is another great reason that we can have industry and the environmental community support this bill shoulder to shoulder, because the uses of the revenue sharing are going to be of such benefits to our communities.

Besides the drilling and the additional revenues for the gulf coast and the additional gas for the Nation, we also have the benefit of directing these revenues to a great purpose, which is the restoration of these wetlands.

Just a little more on that subject that might bring this home to those who are listening. When Katrina and Rita hit--and we are just about a month away from the anniversary, August 29 for Katrina and about 7 weeks away from the anniversary of Rita--we lost an area the size of the District of Columbia to open water, 100 square miles. The District isn't 100 square miles today, as you know, Mr. President, because a portion was given back to Virginia, but about 70 square miles is the District of Columbia now. We lost in a matter of a few days that amount of expanse. It went from marsh to open water because of the catastrophic loss of this great wetland. At that rate, all of our communities along the gulf coast will eventually be threatened.

I laugh at my colleagues from Arkansas because the reason they are very supportive of this bill is because they told me privately: Senator, we don't want to be a coastal State; we like Arkansas the way it is.

I know that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but, Mr. President, you have been down to east Texas, to Padre Island, to Galveston and coastal communities in Texas. You understand the wetland losses that are occurring. Ours in Louisiana are exacerbated because we are the mouth of the Mississippi River. We are truly a delta, not just a coastal wetland, which you find all over our coast from the east to the west. But the delta, the mouth of the river system, is strong, yet fragile, and these wetlands are leaving us in extraordinary numbers. This money, this sharing of revenues we are going to get from this bill, will go a long way to build on the science and technology that is there to restore these wetlands. We know we can do it.

Mr. President, 37.5 percent will go to the gulf coast producing States for these purposes; 12.5 percent will establish a great stream of revenue for the Land and Water Conservation Fund that benefits the whole Nation.

I see the Democratic whip on the floor. I will wrap up my remarks in just a moment. I think I am scheduled later to speak.

I am very grateful to particularly Senator Salazar and others who stepped up--Senator Alexander--and said: Senator Landrieu, why don't we try, with Senator Domenici's leadership, to see if we can restore the real purpose of the Land and Water Conservation Fund when it was created in 1965.

I wish I could take credit for creating it. I didn't, but I have been determined since I got here to help fund it so we can live up to a promise we made to America's Governors a long time ago: If you want to build parks, we will help you. If you want to build recreational opportunities for your community, we will help you. The Federal Government said that and then backtracked year after year until today we are spending less than $40 million a year nationally. I would say that is a disgrace, $40 million nationally. The program is authorized at $450 million. At $450 million, it is still not enough, but at least it gives a few million dollars to each State to match private donations, to match faith-based donations, to match literally the pennies children collect for the planting of a tree in a park or the expansion of a bike path that means a lot to them. We can at least do our part in Congress, and this bill will do that.

Then finally, 50 percent will go to the Federal Treasury. So as those revenues come in, we can help reduce the deficit, help encourage drilling where people will accept it. Maybe they won't accept it everywhere. We have made a lot of mistakes in Louisiana, we admit it. We have learned from our mistakes. We have perfected the technology, and we believe we can minimize the environmental footprint and maximize the benefit to the Federal Treasury. There are many benefits.

I yield the time to those scheduled to speak as well. I have some time reserved later in the day. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

I thank the Senator. I know our colleague from Massachusetts is here to speak on another subject, but I would just ask a question of the distinguished Senator from Virginia.

First of all, I would like to thank him for the bill he has introduced. I know in the form of an amendment it won't be appropriate in this debate, but I thank him for that.

Would the Senator just explain briefly for maybe a minute or so the feelings of people in Virginia--your legislature has done a lot of good work--about the possibilities of opening additional drilling, perhaps at a later date, and how that might affect the neighbors of Maryland, Delaware even, and perhaps even the Carolinas? Could the Senator just comment for a minute about how those negotiations are potentially moving forward, if not for this bill, then maybe at a later time?

I thank the Senator for his comments.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

The Senator is absolutely correct.

I ask unanimous consent for 1 more minute for the chairman.

The Senator is on to a very excellent point. I was wondering if he could remind those listening, getting ready for the vote, one of the reasons the debate was restricted is so that we could move on this very important piece of legislation. But if the Senator would remind those of the good things that were done in last year's Energy bill on conservation so that we didn't need a broad debate, we did so many good things, as the Senator will recall, in the last Energy bill to conserve, promote renewables. The Senator is well aware of the many things since he led that fight.

Mr. President, I think we are going to vote around 5:30. I may need 10 minutes to speak, and others may follow suit. I wanted to follow up on what Chairman Domenici said, as a member of the Energy Committee--and, Mr. President, you serve so ably on that committee, as does the Senator from Florida--to say exactly that point.

Some people have been critical of this debate, questioning why it is so limited. The answer is because almost everything was included in last year's Energy bill, which we debated for 10 years--a lot of debate, over weeks and months, over a 10-year period. This part was the part that was left out--actually increasing the supply of gas. As the Senator from New Mexico said earlier, today is probably a propitious day to be debating this because the price went up over a dollar.

Earlier today, the manufacturing association, the agricultural interests, and the paper and pulp industry shared a press conference. The equivalent price of gas to oil, when gas went up earlier to $15--it is now today at $8, yesterday at $7. But at $15, which is what our industry folks pay, and residents pay as well--that high price of gas-- it was the equivalent of a $7-per-gallon price of gasoline at the pump. So if you are thinking, because all of us know when we fill our tank up how expensive that $2.89 or $3.10 or $3.25 is--can you imagine the shock of going to the pump and having it say $7.50 a gallon? Imagine that. That is how high the price of gas got this year in the United States of America.

So the reason our farmers are supporting this bill, the reason rural communities are supporting this bill, the reason the manufacturing industries are supporting this bill, the reason the chemical association is supporting this bill, and many environmental groups as well, is because we must find more domestic supply to reduce the price of natural gas.

We are going to also have to import, unfortunately, more liquefied natural gas. I say ``unfortunately,'' although my State benefits from those imports. I can honestly say that I really belong to the group of Senators who believe we can be energy independent, and we should. This bill is the piece that didn't get done in the last energy bill, and it must get done before we begin writing another comprehensive energy bill, which we can and will do because there is always room for improvement.

I wanted to answer the critics about why just focus on this. It wasn't done in the last bill, so it needs to get done today. Why the gulf coast? Because the gulf coast Senators came together, working with Senator Domenici, and figured out our neighborhood. We live in the neighborhood of the gulf coast. Five States share the gulf; four of us drill and one doesn't. Maybe that one will one day, but who knows? That is for the State of Florida to decide. We will defer that debate. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama came together and decided we wanted to stay in the business despite the fact that there have been difficulties to our coast. We believe in drilling and strengthening America's domestic reserves. We want to continue to serve the coast, but we can and will not any longer do it for free.

My critics say: Well, Senator, you are not thinking about all the jobs you get and about the taxes. I am thinking about the jobs created, and we are grateful. I am thinking about the taxes we get from onshore drilling. But I am also thinking about the $150 billion in royalties that have been paid by the offshore industry to the Federal Government, of which Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama got zero.

When I think about our beaches, our coasts, our marshes, our great fishing places, and our beautiful marshland, it is compelling that we would enter into a smarter partnership for the future than the one we failed, for many reasons, to enter into in the past. So I am proud to have argued and helped with our gulf coast Senators to negotiate a good deal, a square deal for the gulf coast, and a good deal for the Federal Government.

I also repeat that the country needs the gas now. The gulf coast needs the revenues now, the country needs the jobs now, and the companies in the industry need the competitive edge now. Today, again, at that press conference earlier, it was shocking to see how many manufacturing jobs have been lost. When the price of natural gas for our manufacturing sector exceeds the price of labor, we have a serious problem. That problem is getting addressed at 5:30 today when the Senate votes to open, for the first time, almost 8.3 million new acres of rich natural gas and send a positive signal to the markets and to the industry that we are serious again about finding resources right here.

Fifth, the companies in these industries need to gain a competitive edge. The States will get a reliable partner in conservation. Mr. President, you have done more to spearhead that debate since you came to the Senate. You did it as Governor of Tennessee, as a Secretary for our country. You have been a leader in conservation. I have spoken many times about the coast and wetlands. I am not quite as passionate or articulate as you, but I share your enthusiasm for the fact that this Nation is a great nation of the outdoors. It separates America from our European neighbors. It sets us apart from places like Japan. We have great open spaces. It is the character of America, as I have heard you say many times.

If we don't work harder to preserve those open spaces, they will not be there because they just don't happen; they are dreamed about, nurtured, and created, and not by words, not by wishes, but by money that buys and sets aside land. I know we cannot do it in every place and for the Federal part, but for the States, for our 50 Governors who are looking to the Federal Government to be a good partner and want to work with nonprofit organizations to expand conservation, I say to my colleagues that this bill finds balance.

We tried to do this in 1965 when some great Senators, such as Scoop Jackson from Washington and others, created the Land and Water Conservation Fund--the first time ever that the Federal Government said: Let's create a fund to help the States. It wasn't much of one. You could barely see this little dot. It was probably $10 million for all the States. That is just pennies. But it was a beginning. We went up to $75 million and back down to $50 million, and we kept trying, through the budgets, to get a little bit of money set aside for our parks and bike paths and soccer fields where our kids play. I am not just talking about suburban areas, I am talking about urban areas, such as small city parks in New Orleans or the large Central Park in New York. We did a pretty good job over time, and we have fallen off the wagon, if you will. It is time to get back up in the saddle and fund the Land and Water Conservation. That is what this bill does.

To some undecided Democrats who are thinking: What should I do, please consider that the country needs the gas, manufacturing needs their competitive edge back, the gulf coast could certainly use the revenues, the country needs the jobs, and the States need a reliable, steady stream of revenue for the Land and Water Conservation Fund that our Governors, legislators, mayors, county commissioners, and parish officials in Louisiana can certainly count on to help. It is down to $40 million, one of the lowest levels it has been.

Under this bill, it will go up $450 million a year. Not right away, but over time it will go up to its full authorized funding. We are going to do what we can between now and the time the bill gets to the House to make these adjustments in these early years to get these numbers up. We will see. We cannot make any promises because there is a lot to be done. The idea is to pass this bill today and get something to the President's desk that he can sign.

I thank the administration for supporting the framework of the Senate bill, for Secretary Kempthorne's visit to Louisiana and Mississippi, to the gulf coast. I thank all Senators who have come down--almost all of them now have come before the anniversary of Katrina--and seen firsthand the great needs America's only energy coast has.

I want to show a final picture of the gulf coast because this is what I have shown so many times when I have come to the Senate floor. This is America's only energy coast. I am not making this up. This is a USGS satellite view of the Gulf of Mexico. You see the great boot of Louisiana, the mouth of the Mississippi River here, Mobile Bay, Galveston, and the great expanse of the Texas coast. This is America's energy coast. All of these are pipelines that are out into the gulf. There is no way to get oil and gas from this part of the gulf unless you connect it to someplace on land. Whether it is Port Fourchon, Venice, Buras, Gulfport, Pass Christian, Morgan City, Beaumont, Cameron--all of these towns and communities support this industry.

When I see people come to the Chamber and say this doesn't belong to the States, this belongs to the Federal Government, I am not even making the argument; I know this belongs to the Federal Government. What I am saying is the Federal Government could not access what it owns without a right-of-way through the States of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It is as simple as that. You can own all the valuable land you want; if you cannot access it, it is as if you don't own it. That is what we are talking about, sharing these revenues to protect this great coastline. We most certainly need every penny we can get to build these levees to protect these people so we can keep the lights on in the Chamber.

I ask unanimous consent that Senator Alexander and Senator Hagel be added as cosponsors to S. 3711.

Mr. President, I yield back the time in the event there are any other Senators wishing to speak for or against the measure.

I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask that it be equally divided between the two sides.

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

Mr. President, I have come to the floor again today to speak about the bill Senator Domenici and many of us have brought before the Chamber. The Presiding Officer has been a great leader in this effort to fashion a bill that has many fine points and good points and needed points for the country.

One, it would provide us with a new source of oil and gas that will help us increase supply in hopes of reducing and stabilizing the price of oil and gas in this country. The other fine and wonderful point of the bill is that it takes a portion of the revenues that are now going into the Federal Treasury--but future revenues--and dedicates them to a conservation royalty, because Mother Nature every now and then needs its share, too. Being from Tennessee, Mr. President, and a leader in the environmental area, you most certainly can appreciate the value of that.

Of course, the great point for Louisiana, the gulf coast--not that those two points aren't very exciting to us as well--is the chance to have a new source of revenue to actually reverse decades of loss of precious and valuable wetlands. These wetlands not only protect the 10 to 15 million people who live along the gulf coast from Texas to Alabama, but also that will restore the wetlands, which we in Louisiana call America's wetlands because it is the mouth of the greatest river system in North America. So many of these wetlands help the industries of trade, commerce, oil, gas, fisheries, and the general environment for the whole Nation.

But today I wish to speak a little bit more about the history of how we got where we are today and then talk about the value to the Nation of taking such a positive step forward, a big step, a positive step and a step absolutely in the right direction. Yesterday, Senator Domenici, the chairman of the committee, and I spent some time clarifying the record regarding President Truman. The fact is, this was not Mary Landrieu's idea, as much as I would like to take credit for it; this was Harry Truman's idea: to establish a partnership with the States when oil and gas was first discovered, knowing it would take a strong partnership to sustain this effort over time, and an interest on the part of the Federal Government, the local government, and the State government to engage in the technology necessary and the financial wherewithal necessary to pursue this frontier, basically, whether it was the frontier of the West or the frontier on the Outer Continental Shelf, to get the natural resources to make this country great.

Now, of course, President Truman, having come from the experience of the Second World War, really understood what he was talking about because although our military and the allied forces were quite spectacular in winning that war, sometimes I think we forget that it was the steel workers and the iron workers and the shipbuilders and the boat builders and the women and the families who sacrificed at home, saving their pennies to send every spare item we could for the machinery necessary to win a war. Yes, it takes bravery. Yes, it takes men and women in uniform. But it also takes a lot of steel, a lot of supplies, a lot of petroleum, and a lot of natural resources to win a war. America won that war in large measure because we had the natural resources and the military might combined to provide the strength to the allied forces to win the great war.

It was America's oil production--America's oil production--that Winston Churchill said made him transfer the British fleet from coal- powered to oil. Here is a nation literally under siege, and a great leader makes a strategic decision. He would rather depend on American oil than maybe his supplies of coal in Europe to give him the staying power to sustain that war. In the Second World War, German tanks stalled for lack of fuel, and Japan had to cut the operations of her fleet. It was America's natural resources that propelled our allies to victory.

I think perhaps sometimes in this world in which we live, where everything seems so automatic and you just turn on a switch and the lights come on, you plug in your computer and it

gets booted up, you turn your coffee on in the morning and it automatically smells beautiful in your house, it takes a lot of effort to produce the energy which is necessary to make our lives the most comfortable the world has ever known and perhaps will ever know. But in the Second World War, they understood they needed lots of things to win that war, and one of them was the natural resources of oil and gas. We didn't know too much about the environmental aspects of it back then but, frankly, all we cared about was getting our troops home, beating the Germans, winning the war, and saving the world for democracy, which we did.

Then, through the 1950s and 1960s, we got smarter, just as you should if you are growing all the time and you learn, and we understood better about the environment. Then something went wrong in the 1960s. Something happened in the 1960s. We forgot where we came from. We forgot the sacrifices that had been made. We had a very dramatic spill off the coast of California--not a pretty picture. The country was on fairly good financial footing, and we just sort of started backing up. In my mind, we have been backing up ever since.

We need to get in a forward gear with a proper mindset to move this country back in the direction of natural resource production, with all the benefits of the new technology, with all the benefits of knowing the mistakes we made--no turning our back on them--not pretending the spills didn't happen, and not pretending oil and gas isn't a dangerous business at times.

I can remember seeing on television one night--I think it might have been on the Discovery Channel, which is a wonderful channel my family enjoys watching--they were talking about how we first designed hot water heaters. Of course, we take hot water coming in our house, clean water in America and hot water, for granted. It happens so frequently, we don't think about it. But when I was watching this on television, the story was saying we didn't always have hot water in our houses and it was quite a feat to try to get hot water heaters.

In the beginning, when people had them--and I am sorry I can't remember the year--they kept blowing up, and they would just blow people's houses up and people got hurt and people died. But nobody said: Oh my gosh, we just can't have hot water. We pursued and developed the technology, and now we take for granted the most amazing thing which is in almost every house in America: you can turn on the faucet--not in New Orleans, where you can't get any water pressure today, but in most places you turn on the faucet and get clean hot or cold water, to the temperature of your choice. But it didn't happen because there weren't accidents or problems, but we learned and we perfected the technology. You can say a thousand times how that happened in America, but for some reason we got stuck on this natural resource issue and can't get off of it.

We have an opportunity this week to move past the 1960s and 1970s and to be responsible at a time when our country needs more gas and oil. Now, we are going to move beyond petroleum. We are going to develop new technologies. If Senator Domenici has his way, he would have the 15 new programs we authorized in the last Energy bill funded to actually invest in new technologies.

We are good in this Chamber about talking about things, but actually we don't put the money to them. So we sort of pretend we are doing things. But even saying that, we are making progress. I would support more investments in alternative energies and real money for real projects to move in that direction. But until we do and as we are doing that, we need to drill for oil and gas where we can.

I want to show you here in America what the pipeline systems look like today. This is the pipeline system: an extraordinary network of private sector--with government support--pipelines that bring gas from Canada, that bring gas in from the northwest part of Canada, bring a multitude of riches from the gulf, the gas connections that move up through your State, Mr. President, all the way up to the Northeast. And then you can see another in north Texas, in Dallas, Oklahoma gasfields, because, of course, Oklahoma and Texas understand gas. They have a lot of it. It is shallow in large measure, but they are producing a great amount of gas for the Nation. This is what it looks like now.

This is the area which we along the gulf coast understand is rich in natural resources, and we have almost perfected the technology to reduce the footprint, to drill far down into the floor of the ocean, deep into the coastal areas here that are abundant in resources and provide the gas necessary to keep people cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and to keep the manufacturing sector of this country competitive because we have competitors now, big competitors--China and India--and if we don't want to lose every manufacturing job in America, and we are on track in some measure to do that, we better find some gas and oil somewhere here.

But in the 1960s, as I said, we got stuck in a place that has been dangerous for this country and went from being a net exporter to win the greatest war ever fought. But in the 1960s, the situation flip- flopped and the United States became a net importer of oil, a situation which has deteriorated to the point where today we import 60 percent of our oil. It would be bad enough if we were importing that oil from friends because when you deal with friends, maybe they would give you a good price and maybe, even if it was tough for them to produce it, they would still give it to you because they are your friends. But we are importing oil from places in the world that are not friendly, that are dangerous. When the price goes up, they are happy if it goes up higher because they know we are dependent on it. I don't know if Americans feel as strongly as I do, but I know people in Louisiana do. We are happy to have a mutual dependence, I guess. We don't think we live on an island, but we don't like to feel dependent. We like to feel strong. We like to have choices. When you owe people a lot of money or you get your oil and gas from people and can't get it yourself, it puts you in a dependent position--not a good place to be most of the time. That is the place we are in right now in America. So one of the reasons this bill is so important is that it reverses 30 years of drift, 30 years of not clear thinking about what dependency really means, and we have to make the change.

I would like to see this bill be a little broader in its scope, but it has been a compromise, and that is the nature of our political system. This is not a dictatorship, it is a democracy. We on the gulf coast have worked out a system that seems to work pretty well, protecting Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama, and respecting our friends in Florida who have chosen a different path for this time, and that is just the situation we are in right now.

I think as we open this 8 million new acres here and we can see more of the benefits for the whole Nation, that perhaps, as some of us continue to speak and travel the country and speak about the benefits of being less dependent on foreign oil and gas and more independent, more self-sufficient, and developing alternatives and conserving where we can as well, maybe the situation will change. But this is the step which needs to be taken.

Some people say: Oh my goodness, there is just not enough oil and gas here. I want to tell you how much there is. It contains enough natural gas to heat and cool 6 million homes for 15 years. It holds six times the amount of liquefied natural gas imports we are importing today. It represents more oil than we import from Saudi Arabia, and it will produce more oil than found in the reserves of Wyoming and Oklahoma combined. So I know when you look at the whole country and you see just this little 8,337,000 acres, people say: Oh my goodness, that is not very much. But it is more than the reserves of Wyoming and Oklahoma combined. This is a very rich area, and Americans deserve to benefit from the natural resources that belong to them.

Believe me, people around the country, some people think: Well, they must not care about their environment.

I do not have a statistic about this, but I bet people in Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama and parts of Texas spend more time in the water than anywhere else because we are hot most of the time and we like to swim. We swim in our bayous and we swim in

our lakes and we swim in our gulf water, and we swim all year because it is warm all the time. Our temperatures are good throughout the year.

I do not have statistics on it, but I bet you we fish more per capita. We have more fish than we know what to do with. I laughed when I told my children--I took them out fishing in the West--not to be critical of the West. It is beautiful, of course. But we fished in a stream, and the rule was, after you caught three fish, you had to throw them back. My son, who is 10 years old, said: Mother, I have never been to a place where you have to throw the fish back, because where we fish, we have limits, but they are pretty good limits. You can catch 30 redfish, lots of trout, and you keep them and then you eat them that night. This would be a sad world if you had to throw back every fish you caught. It is a matter of managing your resources. We do that very well.

People look at me, and they think: Mary, you are not saying the truth. But I am. The best fishing is around the rigs. The best fishing is around the rigs. And when you are on these rigs--these big platforms--you can look down, and you can see the fish. I do not need to read this in a statistic. You can see the fish around the rigging. Why? Because it acts as an artificial reef, and it creates a food supply, and the fish naturally gather there. So we have been doing this a long time in Louisiana. We would not suggest it.

We do have beaches. We do not have the same kind of beaches as Florida, but we have a proud and beautiful wetlands. We are concerned about our environment, and we know that while there every now and then are mistakes, the technology is getting better and better and better, and we can get American gas so we do not have to talk to Iran, if we do not want to, we do not have to send our troops to Iraq unless there is good reason, and we can keep our business right here in America.

I want my colleagues to know how appreciative I am, and Senator Vitter, for the help and support for this bill and what it will mean to the gulf coast and for Louisiana to save our wetlands. But I also want to say that for the Nation, as a Senator, I know this is the right thing. And it is long overdue. We have to open up resources in this Nation and use the technology.

Now, I do not know when we got off this track. I do not know when it happened. I do not know if it was gradual. But we have to be confident in our ability to move forward and to not be afraid but to be bold and press this technology so we can have the independence and energy we know we must have.

I look forward to the day when I do not think my children will have to be dependent on either China for financing or the Mideast for oil and gas, that they can be like my parents' generation: pretty darn independent. We better get back to that independency in this country. We can make friends when we want to, but we do not have to when we do not need to or do not want to.

In addition, I say to the Presiding Officer, because you have been so good about this issue, I want to say something about a program. There is a program--we have tried to make it a trust fund. We did not succeed. But in 1965 some very bold, progressive-thinking individuals created the Land and Water Conservation Fund because they knew the American population was going to grow exponentially.

We now have almost 300 million people in this country, and many people around the world who want to come and live here, as you know. So we created the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a little program relative to the billions of dollars we spend up here--only $450 million for the State side and $450 million for the Federal side--to try to provide some--in the scheme of things, it is pennies--to provide for parks and recreation and the expansion of bike trails and walking trails and to preserve the great outdoors.

I say to the Presiding Officer, you have been a great leader on the outdoors. When you think about the beauty of the Smoky Mountains and you think about the beauty of the Rocky Mountains in the West, you think: Please, God, don't let us ruin that. Let us keep it.

Well, the way you keep it is not by wishing for it but by paying for it. And the way you pay for it is to put it in your budget. We tried that, but it did not work. So in 1965 we spent $10 million in the whole country. In 1982, we spent nothing because it got zeroed out. Then, in the 1980s, it went back up. You can see basically the high point was in the late 1970s, at $350 million. One time, 1 year, we sent $350 million out to all the States, which is not very much money per State, to help them with parks and recreation. Even though this was not much, I will tell you what this money did. It built thousands of parks and thousands of ballparks for our kids to play in and helped shore up the urban parks in New York and New Orleans and Memphis. It saved the redwoods. It helped to establish the great wilderness in the Smoky Mountains. You could go on and on with what this little money has done because it got sent to the States. They stretched those dollars, and they made it work.

In this bill, we have a plan to fund this gradually until it will go up to, hopefully, $450 million out of new revenues. So it does not contribute to the deficit. It does not take one penny against any other program. But it helps us to build the parks and recreational areas so my children and grandchildren can continue to swim in those bayous, can continue to enjoy Lake Pontchartrain, and whether they are in an urban area in a little pocket park or in the great Smoky Mountains where they could walk for days without seeing a person and only a few bears-- wherever they are, they can enjoy it.

So that is a great thing this bill does. I hope it survives the conference and the negotiations because sometimes Mother Nature does not have the advocates she needs here in Washington. This bill we have presented is not only good energy policy--because we need more production--it is good environmental policy, and it is good economic policy.

One final argument I would make for the bill is this: I know anytime you bring a bill to the floor, everybody has an important amendment. I have several other amendments. People could not believe it, but I want to have several other amendments on this bill. I know my colleagues have some great ideas. And they say: Well, why can't we debate all sorts of other things? Why do we have to debate the focus of this bill?

I have an answer for that. Because we debated, for the last 6 years, an energy bill. We debated for 6 years--day after day, month after month, for 6 years--up until a few months ago an energy bill. We had CAFE amendments. We had alternative fuels. We had reliability amendments. We had nuclear power. We had amendments about how to distribute the waste from nuclear power. Should we use electricity? We debated and debated everything about it.

So I do not want people to be left with the impression that those of us who are on the Energy Committee provided no opportunity for people to debate. We literally took 6 years to pass--10 years--10 years, excuse me, to pass the last Energy bill. So 10 years we debated. We do not have 10 years. We have until August. We have until September. We have to limit the debate. I know it is unusual, but we have to take, in my view and in Senator Domenici's view, a positive step forward. We have time again to debate CAFE. We debated it for the last 10 years, and we will debate it again.

But right now let's take this time to remember our history, to remember the great strength natural resources are for the country, to not think of this as helping the gulf coast, which most certainly needs help, but that it is the right thing for America at the right time for America, and in a way that honors the spirit of this body, which is open to debate. We do many debates, and will continue, but for this bill, let's pass it. Let's send a signal to the American people that we are changing course.

Today's debate is focused on 8.3 million acres of submerged land in the Gulf of Mexico, but it is really about something much broader and much more important. It is about our country's future.

It is hard to believe today, given the complete turnaround in circumstances, but the energy reserves of this country were once the security blanket for Western democracies.

When Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, transferred the British fleet from coal power to oil, he did so knowing that it was American oil production that he would rely upon in a crisis.

In the Second World War, as German tanks stalled for lack of fuel, and Japan had to cut the operations of her fleet, it was American natural resources that propelled the allies to victory.

U.S. energy production was a strategic asset that allowed our economy to hum in the 1950s and become the envy of our competitors during the cold war.

Yet sadly, we allowed this great strategic advantage to slip away.

Economics played its part. At the same time as U.S. energy resources became more scarce, readily accessible oil from the Middle East started to come online.

By the 1960s the situation had flip-flopped. The United States became a net oil importer--a situation that has deteriorated to the point where the United States must import 60 percent of the oil, making us the largest consumer of energy in the world.

The truly frightening thing is that this country is bracing to allow the same circumstance in natural gas. With seemingly no one guiding our strategic energy direction, this Nation is now preparing to double the amount of natural gas imported into this Nation by 2014. The country is faced with 45 planned or proposed liquified natural gas terminals. While it is obvious we need them, we must also acknowledge that we are building the infrastructure of dependence.

So one of the reasons this bill is so important, is that it reverses 30 years of drift, 30 years of policy avoidance masquerading as an energy policy. We are sending a signal to the American public and the world that we are serious about regaining the strategic initiative in energy.

We are in a hole that took a long time to dig, so we must understand it is going to take us a while to dig ourselves out.

But we are not going to allow American security to be crippled by this strategic weakness any longer. The idea that we can do this by additional exploration and drilling alone is false on its face. But it is equally false to say that the step we take today will not help.

For the first time in 20 years, America is taking approximately 6 million acres of land that is currently under moratoria out of moratoria. That is a signal that we are getting serious. Furthermore, we are opening up a resource-rich region of the coast. It contains enough natural gas to heat and cool nearly 6 million homes for 15 years. It holds six times the amount of our annual LNG imports. It represents more oil than we imported today from Saudi Arabia. It will produce more oil than found in the reserves of Wyoming and Oklahoma combined.

That is an important step, and it sends an important signal to the world.

A couple of months ago, I hosted a group of French Senators who are involved in energy issues for their nation. When I showed them a map of the coastal resources that we have put off limits in this country, their mouths dropped. They could not believe that we would place so much of our security in foreign hands, while tying the hands of American production behind its back.

We have taken an attitude that somehow drilling and tourism are incompatible no matter the distance involved. Do you know that our colleagues in France are drilling for oil on the outskirts of Paris? Now that is making energy independence a priority.

Richard Holbrooke is well known to Members of this Chamber and has engendered real respect in the foreign policy community. He stated that our failure to reduce our dependence on foreign oil is the greatest failing of this country over the last 25 years. I agree.

We can only wonder what an American foreign policy not hobbled by dependence on foreign oil would look like. I promise you this, everyone in the world would sleep a little safer.

Iran derives 50 percent its revenue, and almost all of its hard currency, from the sale of oil. We know where those revenues go. They go to Katushka rockets, they go to Hezbollah terrorists, they go to a covert nuclear weapons program.

It is fine to say that the United States does not buy oil from Iran. But oil is a global market. It does not matter if it is Americans who buy the oil from Iran or the Chinese. If demand is high, Iran will derive huge revenues.

The truly sick piece of this policy is that the American public pays twice. First, they pay at the gas pump, and then they pay taxes so that our Government can spend billions of dollars trying to undue the evil that Iran propagates around the world. It is like giving money to the neighborhood burglar so that he can buy a gun.

It is time that our country retake the high ground and the strategic initiative on energy. This is only the first step of many. Conservation, alternative energy, nuclear power must also all receive consideration and attention from Congress. But this is a step that we can take today.

It took the Congress a decade to pass an energy bill--we did it with bipartisan leadership last year. Imagine the signal we are sending by passing another important piece of energy legislation within a year of that effort.

Mr. President, I yield the time.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I appreciate the introduction to this important measure by the chairman of the Energy Committee, Senator Domenici. No one has worked harder, in my view, in this entire Chamber, and perhaps in the entire Congress, to help us reach a reasonable, balanced energy policy. The Chairman knows, and I agree with him, we can't drill our way out of this situation. But neither can we conserve our way. We have to stay on parallel tracks to drill more where we can of oil and gas, and conserve more where we can.

The last Energy bill reached a pretty good balance of that. This is another step forward in that reasonable, rational, progressive road the chairman is trying to provide. He is providing excellent leadership and I am proud to support his efforts.

This bill, as the Senator from New Mexico said, will open up significant tracts of land off of the gulf coast for drilling of oil and gas that we need as a nation. I have spoken about this bill many times in terms of its benefits to Louisiana and the gulf coast, and I will again this morning. But before I do that, I would like to speak to the national issue.

Senator Domenici is correct when he said this country needs these reserves--and we need them now. This area of the gulf, 8.3 million acres that we have been able to negotiate based on the good work of Senator Martinez and others in the Gulf Coast States, will provide more than six times the amount of natural gas that this country imports in the form of LNG each year. Let me repeat that--six times the amount of natural gas--liquefied natural gas--that this country imports every year. It has more oil than the proven reserves of Wyoming and Oklahoma combined. There is more oil here for our Nation that desperately needs it.

Our manufacturing sector is doing the best it can do to hold onto jobs in the United States. This is an issue that Senators on both sides of the aisle feel strongly about: keeping jobs in America. If we want to keep jobs in America, we need to follow the Chairman's lead and open up lease sale 181 and 181 South.

Only a year ago, the price of natural gas was $15 per million Btu. Today we are fortunate. It has gone down to $6, but 3 or 4 years ago it was $2. It is volatile and it is too high. We need to take it down and stabilize it for manufacturing and agricultural interests from which every single Senator in this body benefits.

We are competing internationally. Overseas they can produce natural gas for a fraction of what it costs us here. Our industries are struggling to hang on because the price is too high. This will help to get our price down, to stabilize it, and bring down the futures that are driving up our prices.

The same for oil: only a few years ago a barrel of oil was $35 a barrel. Today it is selling for about $75 a barrel.

We need to open up more domestic reserves--first, for the country because it is a smart and balanced energy policy. It is sound economic policy--to keep jobs right in the United States.

Second, we must open up these domestic reserves because it is sound environmental policy. Let me speak about the gulf coast for just a few moments.

I have come to this floor many times in the 10 years that I have been here to talk about the gulf coast where I was born and raised, part of the country that I think is the most beautiful and the most special. Of course, we all think the place we are born is that way. But I have also said this coast is America's only energy coast.

This is a satellite picture taken just recently. It shows the coast of Florida, the coast of Alabama, Mobile Bay, the great boot of Louisiana, the shore of Mississippi, and the great expanse of the shore of Texas. This area, since the 1940s, has been the only area in the United States that has allowed offshore oil and gas drilling. We have experimented there for 40 years. We made a lot of mistakes. But we have done a lot of things right. Now we have an industry that actually resembles the space program more than it does the old-time roughneck industry with oil greasy derricks of the old days, as seen in those black and white pictures. Today, the industry deploys technology that looks like a spaceship out in the Gulf of Mexico. We are proud of the gulf. Every widget, every gadget, every seismic device, every flange, every wellhead in large measure has been crafted, designed, and built by people along the gulf coast--and it is a trade that we are proud of. We do it without major spills. We do it simultaneously as we enhance our fisheries, and we do it proudly. We want to continue to do it.

We have laid thousands of miles of pipeline that send oil and gas not just to Louisiana but all over this country for people who live in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, places like Illinois, places in the Midwest. I want you to see where these pipelines start. They start in the Gulf of Mexico.

We drill for oil and gas proudly--and we don't use it just for ourselves, but we use it for everyone in America, to keep these lights on in this Chamber, to help cool people's homes. As we have seen many times after heat waves strike, people can die in large numbers when the utilities go off.

This is not a laughing matter. This is a very serious matter. We are proud to do it, but we cannot do it any longer without sharing in a portion--a very reasonable portion--of the revenues that are generated. We need those revenues to ensure the safety of the massive amounts of infrastructure that rest atop our rapidly eroding coast.

We generated this year from this section of the gulf about $6 billion. The projections are that it could go up to $12 billion. If we pass this bill, it will open up some other areas which will generate for the Treasury of the United States of America upwards of $15 billion a year.

The question to my colleagues is, do you think the people who help generate this revenue, the 10 million people who live along this coast, could share in a partnership with these great resources so we can provide some revenue stream to help protect ourselves and the nation's energy infrastructure from hurricanes that come our way; restore the vital wetlands that support this entire Nation; protect and support the mouth of the greatest river system in North America, the Mississippi, help drain two-thirds of the United States, the river that takes 70 percent of the grain from the Midwest?

Is it possible that we could set up a partnership that works for everyone? Or is that impossible these days in Washington?

My people at home can't even understand it. They say: Senator, who would be against revenue sharing?

We are not asking for all of it. We would like 50 percent, but we negotiated a good deal, at 37.5 percent the same percentage that onshore states used to receive from production on the federal lands in their states before it was raised to 50 percent. We are not trying to be hogs, but we are drowning down here.

If you think I am joking about drowning, I would like to show you a picture of one road. Senator Domenici has seen this. It made him shudder. This is the highway to Port Fourchon, which is the highway that links the United States of America to about 70 percent of U.S. offshore oil and gas production. This looks like a Third World nation.

I have come here and begged for money to help with this highway. We cannot, as a State of only 4.5 million people, support the entire infrastructure of the United States of America. We can't do it. We are not that rich. We are a Southern State that has serious challenges. I am not saying we are a charity case, but we can't build highways for everybody with only our money, particularly highways that basically carry the natural resources of the Nation. This is what it looks like.

This is the scientists' projected land loss of the Delta plains. This is from the USGS at the Department of the Interior. This map shows the projected land loss. From 1932 to 2050, this is the land lost and the projected land loss by 2050.

People wonder why New Orleans is flooding. This picture shows us why. The great marshland that protected us--up the great river system and the major ports which helped western expansion for the Nation--put it away from the water and protected it so it could help the Nation grow. Since then, we have not done our job using the revenues wisely and reinvesting in this great wetlands to protect it.

This is an opportunity to pass a bill that is balanced, that is smart, that is necessary, that is needed, and that will be put to great use by the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas to protect the barrier islands that protect the great energy resources of the Nation and the wonderful people who live there.

In conclusion, I will say this: I have taken Senators on planes, flying over these coastal wetlands. I look down at these ports and these bays. In the middle of hurricanes, people whose homes, schools, and churches were destroyed were sleeping on concrete in tents to keep these pipelines open for the Nation when they did not have homes for themselves.

I am not going to go home until a solution is found for the wetlands.

I see the Senator from Florida. I will yield my time. I thank him for his extraordinary leadership in finding the solution for the gulf coast. This is a gulf coast bill. It is not a Louisiana bill, nor a Florida bill--it is a gulf coast bill. We are Gulf Coast States. I am very proud to have Senator Martinez's support.

Mr. President, I intend to speak for about 15 minutes. I think that was part of our unanimous consent agreement earlier. I know there are other Senators who want to speak for and against.

I wish to begin again by thanking Senator Domenici for his strong and able leadership. I want to associate myself with the remarks of the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the senior Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Cochran, who has been a real leader in our effort to pull a coalition of Senators together who are concerned about the Nation's energy supply and our growing dependence on areas of this world that are not friendly to downright dangerous. This coalition of Senators understands how important a partnership is to maintain a long- range, mutually beneficial relationship that helps the coastal States that agree to drill and the Nation that so desperately needs new supplies.

I am going to try to answer some of the charges that were made. As the chairman, the Senator from New Mexico, said, some of them are not worth responding to because they are so weak on their face. But some do need to be responded to.

One of them that I want to set right is President Truman's position. Somebody might say: Senator Landrieu, why is it so important to know what President Truman did? We need to look forward, not backward.

But you know, as a leader and as an elected official, I find it very helpful sometimes to understand history--the things we did right and the things we did wrong--because it helps us to make wiser decisions in the future. When so many lives depend on it--300 million, in this case, in the United States, and

more in the rest of the world--I think it is important for us, as fast as we move up here, to try to get it right. So I want to get something right for the record. If somebody wants to come down here and debate me, please do, because I have many books about the Tidelands oil controversy with which I am prepared to debate. I have excerpts of the veto letter Truman sent. I read the original law. Why would I do this? Because this is very important to my State.

The truth of the matter is this: In the late 1940s, we didn't know there was oil and gas in the waters off the coast. I think the first well was found in Pennsylvania, maybe the second one in Texas, and the first offshore well was off of a pier in California. I say a pier because that is the way they first were because nobody knew how they could swim out. They made a pier to walk out to put the rig in the water. And lo and behold, they discovered oil and gas. It wasn't soon after that first well, there was a second well offshore in Creole, LA. I know about it because it is in my State, a little town that was virtually destroyed by Katrina and Rita, where a lot of brave souls, pioneers--just like the West is proud of the cowboys and the pioneers and the wagon trains that went out West, those of us along the gulf coast, the roughnecks who started this industry, those who own pirogues and skiffs and flat boats and walked in the marsh are proud of the industry which we developed.

We don't hang our head in shame about it, despite the rambling up here about big oil companies this and big oil companies that. People have made a good living. It helped this country to be the strongest economy in the world and in large measure because of the way we manage our resources. We need to do a better job of that.

President Truman offered the Gulf Coast States 37.5 percent. He said the land belongs to the Federal Government. There is no question it is Federal Government land and it is Federal resources. But as your President, I will agree to share the bounty.

Why? Because he was a smart man. He was an able leader, and wise, and knew that sharing is always better than hoarding. It is the first lesson kids learn in kindergarten. Why we can't learn it in Congress I don't know. But President Truman figured that partnership is better than in lateral taking. So he offered us 37.5 percent and he put a bill in and sent it to the Congress. You can read what happened.

But because of States rights issues and all sorts of other politics of the time, the Congress, for whatever reason, decided the States should get 100 percent. They amended his law that he sent to Congress to give 100 percent and the Federal Government to get nothing. That, of course, didn't make any sense. And President Truman was correct. He vetoed it. I would have, too, if I were the President, and so would Thad Cochran, if he were the President back then. It didn't make any sense.

But for Members to come to the floor and read only a part of the history and use it for their argument is not being forthright. That is what history books will say. That is why those of us in Louisiana understood that it was Leander Perez, who was leading the charge for a greater share, 100 percent. We were so angry because we basically ended up with nothing. We should have taken the 37.5 percent.

That is what brings us here 50 years later--not to rob the Federal Treasury, not to ask for something that is not ours but to cut a good deal, a fair deal, a square deal for the people of the gulf coast, for the coastal States, and to honor the wise offer made to us by President Truman.

Here is a picture of it. I would have no such objection to such a provision, which is similar to existing provisions under which the States receive 37.5 percent of revenues from the Federal Government, oil-producing public lands within their borders. Because in the 1920s the record will reflect, when oil was discovered on land, the Minerals Leasing Act gave 37.5 percent to States such as New Mexico, to States such as Wyoming, to States such as Colorado. No oil or gas had been discovered in water. So there was no reason for the coastal States to be included.

The Senator from New Mexico is correct because western States came into the Union under completely different rules than the eastern States. There was a lot more western land. So the Minerals Leasing Act was passed. It was set at 37.5 percent. When oil and gas began to be discovered in little places such as Creole and off the coast of California, there was interest in having the coastal States at 37. But because there was an overreach, we got nothing.

Yes, we have had jobs, we have had economic opportunity. I am not denying that. But what I am saying is a partnership is always better than going it alone. The strategy of going it alone has resulted in not one new refinery being built in this country in the last 30 years and only expansion very recently, no new nuclear powerplants being built until recently, and no new areas opened under leasing because of no partnership.

I wanted to get the Truman issue straight this afternoon.

I also want to say that this bill is good overall energy policy. I know we cannot drill our way out of the situation we are in. But we had better change course. Since 1960, we have been on a course of further dependence on oil and gas. We are building and trying to permit more liquefied natural gas terminals, which is good, but we are building an infrastructure of dependence. We need to build an infrastructure of independence so that we can make wise choices and not be beholding to the suppliers of a commodity and a resource which we need to keep the lights on and to keep this economy moving forward.

This bill comes to the floor not saying it is the solution to all of our energy problems but arguing forcefully that increasing supply is important and saying we have not done that in over 20 years. We need to open areas of new drilling.

As a story, I had a group of French Parliament members from France in my office not too long ago. I cochair the French caucus. We talked about a lot of issues. They were particularly interested in the issue of energy. I put up a map of the United States. And first they asked me about nuclear because, of course, the French are leaders of the world in that. They produce a different kind energy technology than we do, and 80 percent of their energy comes from nuclear sources. They were asking me about that. They also asked me about other aspects of the energy legislation. I showed them a map of the United States. I said this is where we allow drilling, and this is where we don't, but we think we might have reserves in many other places. When they saw the map of how restricted drilling is they were dumbfounded. They said: Senator, why? This is a great country. America has resources. I said: Because we have a backward-looking approach. We have not recognized new technology. We have not recognized that you can drill in places and minimize the footprint and expand opportunities for the economy while making sure that you are protecting the environment.

This is a step in right direction. The gulf coast is our Nation's only energy coast. Three-hundred million Americans depend on this coast to work--and work we do.

This is a picture of a graph that I like to show. I have shown it many times. The red is a natural gas pipeline company, and all the pipeline companies that exist in the Nation. You can see there is a great cluster right here along the Texas coast, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. It comes right here at Mobile Bay. This one lonely little pipeline brings gas right over here to Florida because we are not able to drill for several reasons. That is a subject for another day. But this is the gulf cost compromise. By the nature of it, we all can't get what we want. It is a compromise. These five States--four that are drilling States and one that is a nondrilling State--have come together, Senators Martinez and Nelson, all of us, to say: OK. Let's stop fighting and let us start working for the benefit of the country. Let us give Florida a reasonable buffer, new revenue sharing to these States, open some additional drilling and help the country get the domestic oil and gas it needs. Maybe it makes too much sense for people to vote for, but there is another reason that this money is so critical to Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama and Texas and, in particular, Louisiana because our topography is

different. I know people can't grasp it because you do not see pictures of it very much. We don't have beaches similar to California and Florida. We have only two. They are 7 miles long each--Holly Beach on the west and Grand Island on the east. All the rest of our coast is quite expansive. It is marshland and grassland. It is the home of the mouth of the greatest river--the Mississippi River--system in North America. That river goes all the way through our country. So this land is very fragile. Because of global warming, and because of other things, because of some of the canals that were dredged back in the early days before we understood the degradation that can be caused, this coastal land is eroding. The hurricanes that are coming are more fierce and strong. We lost in Rita and Katrina alone total land equal to 73,000 football fields. We lose the equivalent of one football field every 38 minutes, 73,000 football fields in 48 hours. That is the size of the District of Columbia gone in 2 days because of the great surges from the water and wind from Katrina and Rita.

This money is critical. And unlike our opponents who say there is no direct use of this money, the people of Louisiana are poised to pass a constitutional amendment that all of that money will go to coastal restoration and hurricane protection.

I might add we are happy to do that. It is obviously popular and quite necessary in the State of Louisiana to do that. That is what our State wants to do. I might add that the interior States of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming have no restrictions. The States that share 50 percent of their revenues have no restrictions on the way the money can be spent. They can reduce taxes with it. They can build universities with it. They can build highways with it. They could put it in a trust fund and give out a check to everybody who lives in the State. But we have targeted uses for these funds in this bill. We want them to go for general environmental purposes and to secure our coast--not just for the benefit of the 10 million people who live along the coast but the 300 million people who depend on this coast to be there decades from now, hopefully, centuries from now--a very valuable working coast for the Nation.

Energy comes from this coast, fisheries come from this coast, the Mississippi River empties into the gulf here, and 70 percent of the rain from the Midwest comes down through this river system. It is important that we don't wash it away.

I know my time is up. I will come back again to speak. Maybe there are some other Senators who would like to speak. But I wanted to get President Truman's position straight for the Record. I wanted to say that our uses are going to go for environmental purposes and I wanted to say that without this money the coast will wash away.

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

Mr. President, I had to come to the floor and speak briefly and thank the ranking member and the chairman for their extraordinary help in crafting this bill to help meet the needs of Louisiana's vanishing coast. This coastline just doesn't belong to Louisiana, it belongs to the Nation. It is America's last coastal zone, with millions of acres of wetlands that serve as hosts of the oil and gas industry and that cradle, if you will, the great Mississippi River, which is the greatest river system on the North American Continent. It provides for the extensive fisheries industry.

This is a picture of southeast Louisiana. But if you head southwest, it is also host to major river systems, the Calcasieu Ship Channel, et cetera. This coast is threatened. This is a pretty extraordinary graph that we found recently, which shows the track of every major hurricane since 1955. The blue line is the track of Hurricane Rita, a category 4 to 5 hurricane. Katrina is the yellow line that went through the eastern part of our State, and then, of course, Rita on the western part on the Texas-Louisiana line.

This gulf coast is America's only energy coast. All of the oil and gas offshore is produced right here. Most of the refineries, platforms, et cetera, are beside these great wetlands. This bill is going to make substantial investments

along this coastline to keep our river open, to keep our ports operating, to protect these wetlands, and to help create a stronger barrier.

Obviously, we need to be doing this all over the country, this Atlantic coast. There is money for that as well. Of course, I am not as familiar with those projects. I can tell you that this WRDA bill--of course, my partner and colleague, Senator Vitter, is on the authorizing committee, and he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his work.

I wanted to say that the ecosystem project of Louisiana's coastal area is funded, as well as significant navigation and hurricane protection and wetlands restoration projects. In addition, there are some innovations important to America. There are some new technologies that will allow us to protect these areas, to build stronger levees, to protect this coast with better materials that cost less--way less--and we can stretch the dollars in this bill far more than we have been able to do in the past because although this is a very large bill with a $10 billion authorization, it is not enough, as some of our colleagues have said.

Mr. President, the technology--and we will soon send to the Record an example of the technologies--will help us to make these projects stretch. I thank the ranking member for his courtesy and the chairman for all of his help.

Mr. President, today, July 18th, 2006, Ambassador Kanat Saudabayev from Kazakhstan is congratulated on his 60th birthday and recognized for all of his work around the world as a diplomat, government official, and culture and arts leader.

In his work with Washington since December 2000, Ambassador Saudabayev has helped to build a strong relationship with the United States on many levels. In 2001, Kazakhstan's positive support after terrorist attacks on September 11 helped extend the U.S. partnership on important issues such as energy policy, arms proliferation, the environment, and terrorism. In the past year, he and his country have helped to build positive economic and educational affiliations with Louisiana and also have graciously donated $50,000 to two local schools for rebuilding after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Serving in many important leadership positions before now, Ambassador Saudabayev was born in the Almaty region in 1946 and is now married to Kullikhan and is privileged to have two sons, a daughter, and three grandchildren. He has served as the head of the Prime Minister's Office in 1999 and 2000. In the 1990s he was appointed to serve as Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He worked as the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1994 for his state and signed for Kazakhstan in NATO's Partnership for Peace Agreement. In 1991, he served as Ambassador to Turkey, the last under Soviet order, and worked to create a new strong future for Kazakhstan in its international relationships.

Before his diplomatic ventures, Ambassador Saudabayev had a passion for and held many positions in Kazakhstan's focus on culture. Starting as a theatrical producer, Ambassador Saudabayev acted as chairman of the State Committee of Culture, chairman of the State Film Committee, and Deputy Culture Minister.

Besides his devoted nature in working with the United States and his homeland, the Ambassador's most impressive past will lead the United States to not only recognize him for his past contribution to the world but most likely also for his efforts to come.

We wish him Happy Birthday on this celebratory year and occasion along with many years of health and good fortune in his future.

Mr. President, the gulf coast has made good progress in rebuilding after last year's hurricanes. Our small businesses and entrepreneurs have led the way in this recovery. As all of my colleagues know small businesses are the engines of our economy driving innovation and growth.

Following Katrina and Rita, one problem for our business owners in the gulf was that their customer bases were dispersed around the country by the storms and were slow to return. Without this revenue from their customers, many businesses struggled to make ends meet and relied upon U.S. Small Business Administration, SBA, disaster loans, insurance payouts, and in some cases, State-administered bridge loan funding to keep going.

We also have businesses that export goods and services to foreign countries. The 2,000 exporters in Louisiana, in addition to the other help available, were also able to rely on their international partners to stay in business. Their international customers showed great faith and commitment to our exporters by placing new orders after the storms.

I am introducing the Small Business International Trade Enhancements Act of 2006 to give all small businesses the opportunity to expand their operations into international markets. I am pleased to have Senator Kerry, the ranking member of the Senate Small Business Committee, as well as Senators Pryor and Bayh, as cosponsors.

As I mentioned we have 2,000 exporters in Louisiana. However, there are many other businesses who are exporters, but they do not even realize it. They may have overseas Internet sales, or they focus operations on domestic sales, but have some international buyers as well. In fact, the Small Business Administration has stated that over 96 percent of all exporters of goods and services are small businesses.

Given the importance of these exporters to my State and to the rest of the gulf coast, I would like to improve their competitive edge in the international market and give them every resource they need to succeed. As they continue to recover, one of the main issues being faced by our small business is accessing capital. Our exporters are no different. They need help accessing export financing to cover export- related costs such as purchasing equipment, purchasing inventory, or financing production costs.

To help our small businesses access export financing, my legislation will create a gulf coast international finance specialist within SBA located in New Orleans to focus on the needs of businesses affected by Katrina and Rita. New Orleans had a finance specialist from 1998 until mid-2003, when that individual retired from the agency. SBA left the post vacant due to lack of funding. I believe it is important to locate this finance specialist in New Orleans because that is where the majority of Louisiana's exporters and export financing institutions are located. In New Orleans, this finance specialist also is in a prime location, within easy travel distance to the gulf coast sections of Mississippi and Alabama--where a majority of the exporters and export financing institutions in these States are located as well.

Fifteen SBA finance specialists operate out of 100 U.S. export assistance centers administered by the Department of Commerce around the country. That is a record staffing low for this program, down from a peak of 22 finance specialists in 2000. To ensure that all smaller exporters nationwide will continue to have access to export financing, this bill establishes a floor of 16 international finance specialists. I believe this will send a signal to our exporters that, despite current budget deficits, we are committed to our exporters and want to provide them with the necessary resources to compete internationally.

Mr. President, I realize that the need for export financing is not just limited to the gulf coast. There are small businesses nationwide that are looking to find markets overseas. One tool that they can use is the SBA's international trade loan, ITL, program. International trade loans can help exporters develop and expand overseas markets; upgrade equipment or facilities; and assist exporters that are being hurt by import competition. Exporters can borrow up to $2 million, with $1,750,000 guaranteed by SBA.

However, as currently structured these loans are not user-friendly to lenders or borrowers and, as a result, are underutilized. Let me explain what I mean. First, the $250,000 difference between the loan cap and the guarantee requires borrowers to take out a second SBA loan to take full advantage of the $2 million guarantee. ITLs can only be used to acquire fixed assets and not working capital, a common need for exporters. Furthermore, ITLs do not have the same collateral or refinancing requirements as SBA 7(a) loans. Because of these issues, lenders do not use these loans.

My legislation will reduce the paperwork by increasing the maximum loan guarantee to $2,750,000 and the loan cap to $3,670,000 to bring it more in line with the 7(a) program. This bill also creates a more flexible ITL by setting out that working capital is an eligible use for loan proceeds, in addition to making the ITL consistent with regular 7(a) loans by allowing the same collateral and refinancing terms as with 7(a).

The SBA international trade and export loans are valuable tools for exporters but they are useless if there is no one to assist borrowers with identifying which loans are right for them. Local lending institutions that specialize in export financing can help but at a cost over less than $2 million per year, the current group of finance specialists has obtained bank financing for more than $10 billion in U.S. exports since 1999. The $10 billion in export sales financed by these specialists helped to create over 140,000 new, high-paying U.S. jobs.

The Small Business International Trade Enhancements Act of 2006 is an

important first step, not just for exporters in the gulf coast, but also for small businesses nationwide who are looking to open markets overseas. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation since it will help our exporters in the gulf coast recover and also give small businesses nationwide more options when they are seeking export financing.

I thank the Chair and ask unanimous consent that a copy of the bill be printed in the Record, along with the accompanying material.

Mr. President, as we all know, there was a tremendous amount of criticism of the Federal Government's response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year. Things are better now and the region is slowly recovering. But we are in the second month of another hurricane season and we must be sure that if we have another disaster, the Federal Government's response will be better this time around. Disaster response agencies have to be better organized, more efficient, and more responsive in order to avoid the problems, the delays, mismanagement, and the seeming incompetence that occurred last year.

Today, I am introducing legislation to improve the disaster response of one agency that had a great deal of problems last year, the Small Business Administration, SBA. While it did improve during the course of the months after the storm, it became clear to me that SBA needs additional tools for future disasters. SBA approached Katrina and the massive floods after the storm, using the same tools that it uses for much smaller, much less damaging disasters. I do not blame all of the people who work at this agency for the problems we saw in the gulf. They found themselves in a system that was insufficient to address this disaster.

My legislation, the Small Business Disaster Recovery Assistance Improvements Act of 2006, offers new tools to

enhance SBA's disaster assistance programs. In every disaster, the SBA Disaster Loan program is a lifeline for businesses and homeowners who want to rebuild their lives after a catastrophe. When Katrina hit, our businesses and homeowners had to wait months for loan approvals. I do not know how many businesses we lost because help did not come in time. Because of the scale of this disaster, what these businesses needed was immediate, short-term bridge loans to hold them over until SBA was ready to process the tens of thousands of loan applications it received.

That is why this legislation provides the SBA Administrator with the ability to make emergency bridge loans of up to $150,000 to affected small businesses in a declared disaster area. These bridge loans will allow businesses to make payroll, begin making repairs, and address other immediate needs while they are awaiting insurance payouts or regular SBA disaster loans. However, I realize that every disaster is different and could range from a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or 9/11, to an ice storm or drought. My legislation gives the SBA additional options and flexibility in the kinds of relief they can offer a community. When a tornado destroys 20 businesses in a small town in the Midwest, SBA can get the regular disaster program up and running fairly quickly. You may not need bridge loans in this instance. But if you know that SBA's resources would be overwhelmed by a storm-- just as they were initially with Katrina--bridge loans would be very helpful.

My legislation also would expedite disaster loans for those businesses in a disaster area that have a good, solid track record with the SBA or can provide vital recovery efforts. We had many businesses in the gulf coast that had paid off previous SBA loans, were major sources of employment in their communities, but had to wait months for decisions on their disaster loan applications. I do not want to get rid of the SBA's current practice of reviewing applications on a first- come-first-served basis, but there should be some mechanism in place for major disasters to get expedited loans out the door to specific businesses that has a positive record with SBA or those that could serve a vital role in the recovery efforts. Expedited loans would jump- start impacted economies, get vital capital out to businesses, and retain essential jobs following future disasters.

We had a lot of small business owners in the gulf coast who did not qualify for SBA disaster loans, or may not have had enough insurance to cover their losses. These people usually have to expend their personal finances or seek out small grants from non-profits to keep going. My legislation authorizes a small business disaster grant program to provide small grants of up to $25,000 to businesses that are not able to get access to get other assistance. These grants will only go to business owners that certify their intent to reopen in the disaster area and pursue technical assistance to continue their operations.

Following Katrina, it is clear that disaster loan amounts need to be updated to reflect current business needs and the average cost of housing today. The bill raises the cap on SBA disaster loans for businesses from $1.5 million to $2.25 million; the cap on SBA personal property loans from $40,000 to $50,000; and the cap on real property homeowner loans from $200,000 to $250,000.

This bill also makes an important modification to the collateral requirements for disaster loans. The SBA cannot disburse more than $10,000 for an approved loan without showing collateral. This is to limit the loss to the SBA in the event that a loan defaults. However, this disbursement amount has not been increased since 1998 and these days, $10,000 is not enough to get a business up and running.

I was surprised to learn that the SBA did not have a full-time disaster planner on board before Katrina, nor did it have a comprehensive disaster response plan in place. While SBA is not a first-responder disaster agency like FEMA, they do hit the ground within days of a disaster strike. As the only Federal nonagricultural disaster lender, SBA should have an analytical, proactive plan in place to respond to disasters.

I pushed to get language in the recent hurricane supplemental appropriations bill to require SBA to develop a disaster plan and report to Congress on its contents by July 15, 2006. I look forward to this report. But writing a plan and making it work are two different things. SBA needs a full-time staff in place to ensure that this plan is implemented properly. My legislation directs the SBA to hire a full- time disaster planner to maintain this disaster response plan and to assist the SBA with its overall disaster preparedness, including coordination with other disaster response agencies like FEMA.

As we reflect next month on the 1-year anniversary of the worst natural disaster to hit our nation, now is the time for action--not words or empty promises. I want to be able to go back to my constituents and reassure them that if, God forbid, another natural disaster should hit my state or another part of the country, that the Small Business Administration is better prepared and more responsive to the needs of those impacted.

The Small Business Disaster Recovery Assistance Improvements Act will provide essential tools to make the SBA more proactive, flexible, and most important, more efficient during future disasters. In the coming weeks, I look forward to working with both Chairwoman Snowe and Ranking Member Kerry on the Senate Small Business Committee to ensure that the SBA has everything it needs to meet these goals.

Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined on this legislation by the ranking member of the Small Business Committee, Senator Kerry, as well as my colleagues from the Small Business Committee, Senators Pryor and Bayh. We urge our other colleagues to support this important legislation.

I thank the Chair and ask unanimous consent that a copy of the bill be printed in the Record, along with the accompanying materials.