Floor Statements

Will the Senator yield?

I ask the Senator if he has received the latest numbers from the Department of Labor about the number of Americans who have actually lost their jobs because of Katrina and Rita. We know it was upwards of 450,000 people who have lost their jobs because of the hurricane. Does the Senator know that his remarks are even more compelling based on the numbers of people who must be looking for work, have some skills to offer, and yet under the system the Senator has described they are finding it difficult to work in their own city or parish with their own Federal Government contracts? Did the Senator know that?

I thank the Senator from North Dakota for his great advocacy on behalf of American workers, the fair trade issues, and all of the things we have been debating in this Chamber now for the last couple of years on this subject.

People might ask, Why is the Senator from North Dakota speaking so enthusiastically or fervently on behalf of the citizens of Louisiana? He does not represent the State.

As a Senator, we all represent all of the people of the Nation, and the Senator from North Dakota is this Chamber's leading expert on contracts and contract abuse, not only at home but abroad in Iraq. He has been to this floor more times than I can count and has my great respect and the respect of many in this body for his work in trying to ferret out the great abuse in contracts, whether overseas or at home, so that American tax dollars can be spent well and wisely. He is never ceasing in his advocacy, and I thank him for continuing by calling a hearing not on contractor abuse in Iraq, on which he has conducted many, but contractor abuse and the abuse of Louisiana workers relative to the Katrina/Rita fiasco. So I wish to thank him and add just a few words to what he said and to the information he has laid out and the testimony that has been given because I did attend, along with Senator Harry Reid, Senator Carl Levin, and a few other Senators, a hearing earlier last week on this subject that shed some unbelievable light on this situation and hopefully something we can correct.

I begin by saying that the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, as I have said so many times on the floor, have really been through an unbelievable devastation of a natural disaster that has no parallel, has no peer. It was not just the two hurricanes that hit within 10 days of each other--the east side of the State first, the west side of the State second, parts of Texas in Rita's path as well-- but the subsequent breaking of not 1 levee, not 2, but 17 levee breaks in the metropolitan area, an urban center, a highly dense center, a large American city, a vibrant and vital region of the Nation, as I have said many times, the Nation's only energy coast.

When those levees broke after the hurricane winds died down, it left a region 10 to 12 feet underwater; tens of thousands of homes, large and small, rich and poor, businesses underwater, businesses that have been making profits for 70, 100 years. We are an old city in an old place. We are proud of the longstanding businesses we have.

When the hurricanes left, the levees broke, and finally, when the flood waters went down, we looked up, and we have 400,000 people who have lost their jobs. These are people who are hard-working Americans, taxpaying citizens. Many of them have never asked for any direct help from the Federal Government other than what everyone gets from their Government: good police, good fire protection, hopefully their streets paved, the potholes are kept to a minimum, schools for their children to go to, basic Government services that are required. Most of these people have not asked for any particular Government help, and yet they find themselves out of work, in a position to start building their city only to find that the Federal system of awarding contracts, because of certain rules, certain actions this administration has taken, and a lack of oversight, has allowed companies to come in from out of State and hire workers who are undocumented while literally pushing aside Louisiana citizens who have the skills to rebuild and the desperate need, the obvious need, for the job itself.

In the case Senator Byron Dorgan has brought to our attention, as the hearing went on last week, about 75 electricians from the area that was affected--many of those electricians had

lost their homes. Their homes had been flooded. Some of them had run businesses on the side that they had lost. Their families had been placed into some safe place somewhere in the region. These men, most of the men--some of them could have been female electricians--came back at the request of a former employer who said, Would you all come back and help us build the barracks, the Navy base, the Belle Chasse base, in their own backyards?

These are residents who could look across the highway, who have worked at Belle Chasse before, who put up the electrical work at Belle Chasse, who were hired by a contractor and brought to work. After a few days, another contractor comes into the base, as the story is told, and basically hands these Louisiana workers a pink slip and says, If you do not mind, could you all please leave the base, and then ushers in 10, 20, 30, 40, 100--who knows what the investigation will show--workers not from Louisiana--and some of the workers are not even eligible to work in the United States of America--to work on an American military base.

Last week, I had the distinct honor of sitting in my Senate office and having two or three electricians, men who are obviously used to a hard day's work--their hands looked pretty tough--with shoulders stooping and almost on the verge of tears looking at me as their Senator saying: Senator, explain this to me. My parish has just been ruined by a hurricane. I have lost my house. I have worked my whole life as an electrician, and on a military base in the United States of America I am asked to leave so that an undocumented worker can take my job? I do not have an answer for them, but we need to find one because nobody in America will believe this is happening. It should not be happening.

I will tell you why it happens--because when nobody is watching the store and there is money being thrown out of this Chamber, $62 billion, people grab for it. The people of Louisiana have been accused of looting. I think maybe the camera needs to focus somewhere else. All we have done as a delegation is asked for help for our ports, our hospitals. This is a city that has lost 75 percent of its revenue. The parish of Plaquemine and the parish of St. Bernard are virtually nonexistent. Every structure--and 100,000 people--has basically been destroyed, and it is uninhabitable. We still have our refineries shut down, our pipelines exposed, and all we get is excuse after excuse.

Our own workers show up and ask for a decent wage. Their wage was $22 an hour. If any Senator on this floor thinks that paying a man or a woman $22 an hour, with some minimum benefits, to work 12 hours a day because the contract said if they want to work, they have to show up and work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week until further notice--so do not tell me these people did not want to work. They had to work without a day off, week after week, for $22 an hour. We are told that it is too much, we cannot afford to hire them, they can go on back and twiddle their thumbs while we have the undocumented workers rebuild this military base. It should not be happening now. It should not be happening in the future.

Today, I sent a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security and the head of INS and asked them to please enforce the laws that are on the books, please enforce the laws so that the 478,000 people who are unemployed throughout the gulf coast, from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas, can have the first chance at a good job.

I ask unanimous consent that the letter be printed in the Record.

I know people are going to debate about Davis-Bacon, but I just want to tell the American people this point: When the President issued the order and basically said, right after Katrina, waive all the labor laws that allow people to be paid a fair wage, he said he was doing that to save money. How does one save money on a no- bid contract? If a contract is not being put out for bid, how does one save any money? All that happens is wages of the people who need them the most at a time when they have lost everything are driven down. They are not asking for charity. They are not asking for a handout. They stood up to get a job to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still were basically under the administrative rules of waiving Davis-Bacon, lack of oversight and lack of focus, and have basically been asked to leave the military base.

So I hope that in the few weeks ahead, we can get these electricians back on the job, back to their homes, back to their neighborhoods to rebuild, and build some support in this Chamber and around America for paying people a decent wage. I do not think $22 is too much. I do not expect people to rebuild Louisiana at a minimum wage or $8 or $9 an hour without benefits.

People have to make a living. That amounts to about $45,000 a year. Is that too much to pay someone working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, doing hard and sometimes dangerous work? I don't think so. But evidently somebody in Washington thinks that is too much because, instead of holding wages steady--not asking for union wages, but asking for an average wage, between union and nonunion, which seems fair to me--we are undercutting our workers. The Government should not mandate a union wage to be paid, but neither should we undercut our workers. So the prevailing wage is what we have come up with, to say don't pay union, don't pay nonunion, pay something in the middle, the average wage: $18, $20, $22 an hour for skilled labor. That is not too much to ask. But evidently it is.

Even if people can get these jobs back, under the policies of this administration, they will be told: You can work, so be happy and smile that we are going to pay you $9 an hour, on which you cannot even feed your family, invest in your pension, or send your children to school. You should smile and be happy you have a job.

People in Louisiana want more respect than that. They deserve more respect than that. The people along the gulf coast are, as I have said many times, honest, hardworking, and self-reliant. We do not come here asking for charity, but we do come here asking for help out of our National Treasury to which we have contributed so much over 300 years of hard work and toil to build the Nation's only energy coast. We are proud to do it, proud to take the risks associated with that hard work--building a port system, the greatest in the North American Continent, and building commerce that allows every State and every parish and every county in America to flourish. Without this port system, without this energy coast, our Nation would not be what it is today.

Despite all the ridicule we received, despite all of the snide remarks we have heard about public corruption and that we can't do anything for ourselves and we are disorganized, we are going to still hold our heads up, proud, tell our story, and demand to be treated with respect and dignity as every American would want to be treated--Black and White, Asian and Hispanic, young and old, rich and poor.

In conclusion, I thank Senator Dorgan for his focus on this. I will continue to come to the floor and to be at hearings with him, to help him, to hopefully build the kind of system and oversight that will allow us to give out contracts more efficiently, to make sure the work is going to gulf coast contractors, reputable contractors. There are many good contractors who treat their workers beautifully. There are many businesses, despite the fact they have no money coming in the door, that have kept their workers on the payroll, trying to hold heart and soul together and hold our community together while the Federal Government twiddles its thumbs and comes up with excuses about why it cannot help.

Let me be quick to compliment the many good contractors and many good businesses, small and large. But when we see this kind of irresponsible contracting, it makes a tough situation even so much worse. So I hope this letter will be responded to, that actions can be taken by other committees that have oversight so we can make sure we are spending the American taxpayer dollar well, that we are giving the preference, as required in the current law, to those affected by the storms and the unfortunate disaster itself, and then paying people a decent wage when we ask them to do work for their community and for our country.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if I could, will the majority leader yield for a question?

I ask the majority leader and the Senator from Massachusetts, did they know that today the report came out from the Small Business Administration, which the chairman knows, the Senator from Maine, Ms. Snowe, that 53,900 businesses have applied for help, and that only 58 businesses have received checks to date?

Let me repeat, 53,900 businesses have asked for help, and, to date, 58 in the whole region--from Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama--have received help--58 businesses. So I think the Senator from Massachusetts raises a good point.

Did you know there is some urgency, Mr. Leader, about this situation?

Mr. President, while the managers are making final decisions about the package, could I have 4 minutes to speak about an amendment I am going to offer but not ask for a vote on?

Thank you, Mr. President. I would like to ask for order, if I could. I have an amendment I am going to speak about but not ask for a vote on. I would appreciate my colleagues' focus for a moment.

The amendment I was going to offer to the underlying HUD appropriations bill is part of a blueprint for action that our delegation--Republicans and Democrats--from Louisiana has asked the Congress to consider. Not only would this work for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas today, but if something like this were in law, it could work for every city and every State in the event that some catastrophic event occurred, where hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed and people were displaced.

My amendment, which I am not going to ask for a vote on but will offer at some time, would provide for a 6-month deferral from mortgages--not a waiver of mortgages, not a forgiveness of mortgages, but 6 months for Americans, for families to get their legs underneath them, until they can figure out what their insurance is going to cover and not cover, where their children might go to school, where they might find a job. These are Americans who have worked hard, played by the rules, invested in their home--which is their largest asset--and, in the blink of an eye, it is gone.

In the United States of America, in the year 2005, we do not have in place a system to give them a break--not for

a month, not for 2 months, not for 3 months.

The average savings on a mortgage would be $4,317 in Louisiana, $4,740 in Alabama, $4,131 in Mississippi, and $4,875 would be a 6-month average mortgage. The families in my State could use this extra money. No administrative costs, no contractors, no fraud, no waste, no abuse, simple, 6-month deferment on mortgages, put 6 months at the end of your mortgage, give people some cash and breathing room.

It is a sound amendment. Our delegation thinks it is good. We cannot pass it tonight, but I think we have to have a better system of help for Americans who get caught in storms, tornadoes, earthquakes, or, for heaven's sake, a terrorist attack. The system we have in place is not working: $62 billion to FEMA, $43 billion sits in a bank. Nobody is getting money. Nobody is getting help. People are stuck in hotels. There is no plan for housing. I could go on and on.

We need to do better. I will withdraw this amendment at this time, but we will offer it again to give people hope, 6 months of a break until they can figure out whether they can rebuild, come back, or move to another place.

I thank my colleagues for their patience.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I am not going to offer another amendment. I just wanted to offer the amendment to be placed in the Record and withdraw it because I have already spoken about it. I thank the managers.

Mr. President, I like to thank the Senator from Illinois, Mr. Durbin, for his concerted oversight of the DC Tuition Assistance Grant Program. This program is an important aspect of Congress's investment in educational opportunities for DC students. I appreciate Senator Durbin's insight into the management of the program as he brings to our appropriations subcommittee on the District the perspective of the authorizing committee on which he served as well.

As Senator Durbin noted, Congress engaged the Government Accountability Office to conduct a comprehensive review of the Tuition Assistance Grant Program--TAG--in 2004. We understand this report is forthcoming and are eager to review these findings with our colleagues. This unique program was created to fit the unique need that

the District of Columbia does not have a public university system similar to states across the country. TAG supports the opportunity for DC students to have choices to further their education in small or large universities around the country. The program has been lauded as a significant tool for increasing college attendance, but I am particularly interested to learn from the GAO the college graduation rates of TAG recipients. This, and answers many other questions, will enable the authorizers and appropriators to continually examine this program for performance.

As a unique program, tailored to the needs of the District, we also must ensure the program is meeting the goals set out by the Congress and the needs of the community. We understand the GAO has found that several management and financial controls are lacking. Because we have limited resources every program must be responsive to the community and operate in an accountable and rigorous manner. I am encouraged by the recent management improvements Mayor Williams has made, but as Senator Durbin noted, there is still work to be done.

I appreciate Senator Durbin raising these important concerns to Chairman Brownback and me. I will work with the other conferees to ensure that funding for the TAG program meets the current need in the community, and that proper controls are in place for strict management of these funds. In addition, I welcome an opportunity for the Committee to examine the TAG program in our hearings next spring. I hope we are able to collaborate with the authorization committee so we may continue to manage and fund this program to generate the best benefit for all DC students attending college.

Senator Durbin, I thank you for bringing these recommendations to our attention.

Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague from Kansas, Senator Brownback, to present to our colleagues of the Senate this DC appropriations bill. It has been a joy and a privilege to work with the Senator from Kansas. Prior to the Senator's service, as chair I had the great opportunity to work with the Senator from Ohio, Mike DeWine, who is, indeed, a pleasure to work with and a great partner.

This is a very important bill for our Nation. Not only does it matter, of course, directly to the 500,000-plus residents of the District, but the life and the quality of life in the District has a tremendous impact on this whole region, which is made up of millions of people, as the District was actually

carved out of Virginia and Maryland and serves as a hub of this region.

As the Presiding Officer knows, in his home State as well as my home State of Louisiana, people all over the Nation feel very warmly attached to their Nation's Capital, what happens in neighborhoods, in schools, downtown, on the riverfronts, our monuments as a tourist mecca. For people to seek inspiration, this is very important. This bill, while it is one of the smallest in terms of dollar amounts, has a great deal of interest from people all over the Nation.

I have been pleased to be the appropriator, and I am particularly happy all of our colleagues have worked in such a cooperative manner that we can bring this bill to the Senate and handle it with great dispatch, with very little controversy, if any at all. From my perspective, since I have had my time taken helping Louisiana and the gulf coast recover from two major storms, Rita and Katrina, and then the subsequent massive levee breaks that have left the gulf coast region in a great challenging state, I thank our colleagues for letting us take this bill up and move it forward so I personally can get back to the issues in front of the State of Louisiana at this moment.

I will be relatively brief, but I follow up Senator Brownback's statements with just a few comments. I thank Senator Cochran and Senator Byrd, the chairman and ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations, who made it possible in their decision as to how to organize and to reorganize the Committee on Appropriations, saw fit to keep some independence for the District of Columbia. That is extremely important. The outcome is something I supported, as well as others, but without Senator Cochran and Senator Byrd's support, it would not have been possible.

Our House colleagues have merged DC into a bigger committee. I think some of the focus gets lost. The Nation's Capital deserves appropriate focus and support from all, and our focus has not been lost. We in the Senate continue to help strengthen and develop our Nation's Capital appropriately as reliable partners for their progress.

I thank Senator Cochran and Senator Byrd.

In addition, I note that the large majority of the money in this bill is not national taxpayer money. It is local money, levied, raised, and appropriated to the tune of $7.3 billion of local money. The Federal money in this bill for which we have responsibility to be accountable is $593 million. It is a lot of money but a small percentage of the $7 billion total levied and raised by the residents and citizens of the District of Columbia. Our focus is on that $600 million portion we allocate in trying to be partners with city officials.

Because of Mayor Williams' outstanding leadership, in my view--and I think it is shared by Senator Brownback and many Senators--his outstanding leadership as a good steward of taxpayer money, as a good manager for reform, as a great salesperson, an advocate for this great city, nationally and internationally, our confidence in his leadership, and the confidence in the management of the city, has increased substantially. So we are pleased to invest in its continued growth.

One major investment this Congress has made is in the establishment of a family court structure. I wish we could have family courts all over the United States. It is not an inexpensive operation. In many States, the last courts to be funded are those that need the most help. The courts that regulate or try to work out situations of marriage and personal lives so important to people, that settle disputes about marriages, wills, and estates, and most importantly, settle the issues of divorces or reconciliations, child custody, child abuse, and spousal abuse, unfortunately those courts throughout our land are the last funded, the least resourced, and the most overly taxed in terms of responsibility.

Over the course of the last few years, we have stood up, Democrats and Republicans, and said it is time to help our Nation's Capital create a model in the Nation, a family court that puts families first, that understands that these decisions of child custody, of separation, of protecting women from abuse and children from abuse, are truly life- and-death matters and are truly important decisions to keep the fabric of society together. So we have invested in this family court, one family, one judge, so children are no longer lost in the bureaucracy, lost in the file rooms, their lives are meaningful, and they are treated with dignity and respect. It has been an expensive project but one well worth investing in the families of the District of Columbia and particularly the children.

We march on to improve child welfare in the District, to work with the city to strengthen and improve the quality of our foster families and, most importantly from my perspective, promote adoption, believing that every child in the District, in America, and, in fact, in the world, deserves a family to call their own.

Governments, as I have said, do a lot of things well. Raising children is not one of them. Parents--a parent, a responsible adult-- raise children. And we as a Nation need to do a much better job of connecting these needy children of all ages--infants, toddlers, young children, teenagers, young adults--with parents wanting to give them the benefit of a stable home and family. I am very proud of the District's performance and improvement in that area.

Finally, one more point before I speak about education which is going to be the focus today. I encourage the continuing development of good land use in the District of Columbia. We have planned the revitalization and cleaning up of the Anacostia River to be a balance with the beautiful Potomac on one side, to bring the Anacostia back to be a place where people can recreate--citizens and tourists alike-- where there could potentially be exciting new developments of multiuse housing, wonderful commercial waterfront developments that contribute to recreational opportunities and sporting opportunities for children.

The city has a tremendous vision. The Nation should be excited. Although we are able to offer a just small amount, our committee wants to be supportive of that effort in any way we can. That is reflected in this bill.

Let me speak for a moment on the main subject of this, which is education reform. Every city in the country and every county in the country is struggling with the challenge of providing quality education for our Nation's children. We decided as a Nation many years ago to do that through a public system. It has worked in large measure extraordinarily well over the long term.

There are clearly signs in America--whether urban areas, rural areas, or poor areas; sometimes we even find crises in wealthy areas that are growing too fast or there is too much strain in an area--that school systems are really struggling. Either they do not have enough space and too many students, too many students and not enough teachers, not enough quality classroom space, or there is no tax base to pay for quality teachers, so students are failing. There are all sorts of challenges to our public school system. This Congress has been spending a lot of time--from No Child Left Behind to accountability to strategic investments--to try to fix this. Although there have been some setbacks and it is not perfect, from my perspective, we are moving in generally the right direction with the exception that our investments have not matched the rhetoric from the Federal level. But should we ever be able to fix that, I believe we will see increased student performance, increased parental satisfaction, more choice in the public school system, and excellence across the board.

Why do I say this is so important? Because in this Senator's view, the only way to have great cities is to have great schools. The only way to have great communities is to have great schools. If you do not have great cities and great communities, you cannot long have a great nation.

Our forefathers said to us when we created this democracy that one of the fastest ways to end it is to stop educating ourselves to the responsibilities of being citizens of the Nation and the world. That education, yes, begins at home, where children are educated primarily by their parents, their guardians, people who brought them into the world. But we supplement that education of parents by offering, in America, an education to any child wanting

to take the chance to walk through that kindergarten door. We do not limit it only to the wealthy. We do not limit it only to those who can afford it. We provide universal public education. It has been the cornerstone of this democracy, and it should remain that way.

But we have some problems because some of our schools are failing our children. Some of our systems are failing our children and the employees who work in the system. So we have to change. I am very proud that in this DC bill, the Members of the Senate and the House-- Republicans and Democrats--have come together to negotiate, to reason together, to try to see what could we do in this city to show a model for some things that can work.

We had a very fierce negotiation and debate 2 years ago about this and have settled, if you will, on three approaches. One is what Senator Brownback spoke about, a scholarship-voucher approach that some people believe will work. A large number of us settled on negotiating for investments in charter schools, keeping the money in the public system, not taking it out but providing more independence, more choice, more exciting options to create new models of ``coopertition,'' if you will, in the public system. I happen to be a very strong advocate of that approach to changing and reforming public education in America.

Then there was another group of us who negotiated for more help to traditional public schools, more investments, more help, and reforming in a more traditional way.

This great experiment is underway. It is going to be a 5-year experiment. We are committing $40 million a year, which is a lot of money. There will be $200 million going to this effort. That $200 million, while it sounds like a lot, is a small percentage of what the District residents pay to support their system. But it is an important investment.

I want to say how proud I am of the efforts being made to expand opportunities for public charters, for two reasons. One, it provides choice to parents. There is not one cookie-cutter approach. Some parents want their children in schools that have strong academics and athletics. Other parents like choices that stress the arts. Some parents like to see that their children may be in a school that may give them a pre-med education and direct them more to medicine or science or research.

I believe all parents should have more choices, that one size does not fit all, that we need to get away from this industrial model. We moved away from it in our economy. Why can't we move away from it in our school system and move to a more decentralized, more independent, more entrepreneurial, more choice-driven, more consumer-directed approach to schools? Just because we have not done that for 200 years in this country does not mean we can't.

So that is what we are undertaking: creating opportunities for quality, independent public charters so the money stays in the public system. But it basically acts almost as if it were private in the sense that it is independent but meeting all high standards.

Twenty-five percent of the public school population in the District is in public charter schools. That is one of the highest percentages of school populations in the Nation. So this is really a laboratory to see what is working, what is not. I am proud to say we are making progress not only in the increased number of charter schools but, most importantly, in the quality of charter schools. It is not just quantity but quality.

There are actions being taken now by the certification boards that if a charter school is failing, those schools can be closed and reorganized and supported so that quality education is being provided. That is one of the focuses of this bill. We want to not stress just the increase in quantity but quality. We want to ensure accountability, and we want to make sure, just as in traditional public schools, that any child who walks through the door of a public charter--whether it be a bilingual opportunity, which has been so successful; whether it is a residential Monday-through-Friday school, which has been tremendously successful in giving people hope and raising grade levels--whatever the model, when they walk through that door, they can get a quality education. That is one of our goals.

So we have continued to press for that $13 million piece. The charter school community has come together in unison to lay out how that $13 million should be directed to this movement, a great movement for quality, for opportunity.

I will submit a summary of that for the Record.

One of the exciting components, from my perspective--and I will close with a comment about this--is part of our charter school movement has been a new initiative called the Citybuild initiative. It is part of the charter school idea that says that in many cities, including the District of Columbia, there are certain neighborhoods that are revitalizing, I would say on their own, but nothing happens on your own.

It is a combination of some public investments that are occurring, a change in housing patterns, young couples, Black and White and Hispanic, moving into a neighborhood with young children. They like the housing. They like the location to their work. The only problem is, they move into a neighborhood that has affordable housing, restaurants, theaters, but there are no ``good'' schools or ``quality'' schools.

So what happens is, in 3 years or 4 years these children move, the families put their houses up for sale and move to either another part of the city where they can find the quality education they are looking for, or, worse, they move out of the city. That is what has happened in the District of Columbia. It is what happened in New Orleans. It is what happens in Cleveland. It is what happens in Detroit. It is what happens in Atlanta. It is what happens even in Houston.

So we have to think about a new way to encourage the development of quality, independent, entrepreneurial public schools, placing them in neighborhoods that can easily be identified as up and coming, with near-term improvements, where parents, if they had a good public school choice, would not leave.

That is what the Citybuild charter program is. So I am excited that this is part of our charter school effort. We are now in the second year. There have been five Citybuild charters designated by the city through a process that is open and competitive. There will be, hopefully, two or three more new schools placed in these neighborhoods that will anchor families with small children so we can grow the population of this city and cities all over America.

Mayor Williams, when he came in as mayor, stated his goal that he wants 100,000 new residents. So we have joined him in that challenge to provide more safety in the city, better transportation, better economic opportunity. But what most families need to stay are good schools for their children to attend. That is why we spend so much time working on education reform and promoting, from my perspective, this exciting new opportunity for charter schools, public charters, and particularly Citybuild charters.

I thank, in closing, Deputy Mayor Robert Bobb, Council Chairperson Linda Cropp, DC Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Shadow Senator Paul Strauss, who is in the Gallery today. Specifically, I also thank Council Member Kathy Patterson, Superintendent of Schools Clifford Janey, and School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz, and our staffs who are here, both Kate Eltrich and Mary Dietrich, who were mentioned. Without their support we could not do this bill and present it in a way with such limited controversy and such maximum benefit to the people of the District and the people of our Nation.

So, again, I thank the mayor for his leadership. He makes it easy to work with him. I wish him the best of luck in his future, as he, Mr. President, as you know, said he will not be running for reelection. I suggested he come down South and help us. We need some help in New Orleans, and in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and a good manager like that could be a great help to us. We appreciate his support, and we wish him the best in the future.

Mr. President, I would like to submit for the Record a summary of the $13 million investment in public charter schools in the District of Columbia appropriations bill.

The bill directs funding to specific initiatives which will strengthen

schools, enhance capacity, improve academic quality, and create a network of integrated services. The committee recommended the following initiatives within the amount provided for charter schools: $4 million for the Direct Loan Fund for Charter Schools; $2,000,000 for Credit Enhancement; $2 million for continuation of the Citybuild Charter School Program; $1,500,000 for flexible grants; $2 million for grants for public charter schools for improvement of public school facilities which are leased or owned by public charter schools; $400,000 for college access programming; $300,000 to create a truancy center; $250,000 for administration of Federal entitlement funding; $300,000 for data collection and analysis; and $250,000 for administration within the State Education Office.

The committee report also included language to pursue access to facilities for charter schools and support ongoing efforts to make space available. A significant initiative of this committee, continuing on the work started by the Congressional Control Board, was to make surplus school property accessible to other educational opportunities. We have required an accounting of surplus school property, encouraging schools to be leased or sold to charter schools, and recommend a dedicated account for any proceeds. I look forward to working with the Mayor and Council to finally open these sometimes vacant, but assuredly underutilized in their capacity as a schoolhouse, these surplus public school buildings.

In addition, I would like to submit for the Record several highlights from a recent report on the impact of public charter schools on providing quality public education for children across the country, as well as providing healthy competition to the entire public education system.

The following are excerpts from the ``State of the Charter Movement 2005, Trends, Issues, and Indicators,'' by the Charter School Leadership Council.

The Charter School Leadership Council found that:

demand for charter schools is clearly outstripping the

supply. The charter sector would be much bigger in the

absence of charter caps and if it could accommodate the

throngs of students on waiting lists. Charter schools are

concentrated in certain States and cities, though less so

than five years ago. Public charter schools are serving a

disproportionate share of minority and low-income school

children, and this has been the case since the beginning of

the charter movement. Charter schools are significantly

smaller than district public schools. The charter movement is

producing a wide array of instructional and organizational

models, providing lots of choices for families.

In relation to public opinion on charter schools, the Council found that:

charter schools remain a mystery to much of the general

public. Misinformation abounds, but attitudes become more

favorable as knowledge grows. Twice as many registered voters

favor charter schools as oppose them.

By the numbers, there are 3,400 public charter schools operating nationwide educating one million students. That represents 2 percent of all students nationwide. Forty States have public charter school laws on the books and 42 percent of charter schools are concentrated in three of those States, Arizona, California, and Florida. The Council report states:

The average number of charter schools per State has been

increasing steadily each year, from 25 in 1995, to 59 in

2000, to nearly 90 today. On average, over 250 charter

schools have been added each year for the past 12 years.

Of all the public charter schools in the country, 16 percent converted from a traditional public school, 7 percent were created by a private entity, and 77 percent are newly created.

Dr. Brian Hassel conducted a meta-analysis of major studies and concluded the following:

The existence of high quality charter schools and high

growth rates for charter schools, at least in many States and

studies, suggests that chartering holds promise as an

approach to getting better schools. What we have is an

experiment worth continuing and refining.

One missing element in nearly all charter studies is the

question of productivity: how much learning gain is produced

per dollar spent? A Rand study in California found that

``Charter schools, particularly start-up schools, reported

using fewer resources per student than do conventional

schools . . . Most noteworthy, charter schools are achieving

comparable test scores despite a lower reported level of

revenue.'' (Ron Zimmer et al., Charter School Operations and

Performance: Evidence from California, Rand, 2003). According

to a 2004 study of ten Dayton charter schools, average per-

pupil funding was $7,510 vs. $10,802 for district public

schools, yet on average Dayton charter students outperformed

Dayton public school students on all portions of the 2004

fourth and sixth grade State proficiency tests--in some

subjects by a significant margin--indicating higher

productivity from charters. (Alexander Russo, A Tough Nut to

Crack in Ohio: Charter Schooling in the Buckeye State,

Progressive Policy Institute, February 2005, 24).

The Council report suggests that we should be asking the right questions:

Is it working? How do we know? At the moment the country is

not thinking clearly about these questions . . . Chartering

is an institutional innovation . . . With chartering we want

to know which pedagogical, governance, and management

practices succeed--and what provisions of law are

responsible--so policy can do more of what works better.

(Bryan Hassel, Studying Achievement in Charter Schools,

Charter School Leadership Council, January 31, 2005, 8.)

Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Harvard University stated in her studies that:

The goal of charter reforms is not creating good charter

schools in the midst of mediocre public schools. The goal is

boosting the performance of all schools by fostering

competition and innovation.

In conclusion, I found this observation to be fitting to the current status of charter schools in the country. The Council report examined the potential for impact and noted that Nelson Smith stated in a 2003 Progressive Policy Institute report, ``Catching the Wave: Lessons from California,'' ``Charter leaders are often asked to document the ripple effects of their work. But it is hard to have ripples when the lake is frozen.''

I yield back my time.

Mr. President, as the majority leader stated a moment ago, I also thank Senators Stevens and Inouye, who worked here very late last night as we got to the end of the debate on the Defense bill. Of course, under the rules we have established, we could speak on that bill for up to 30 hours. Those 30 hours will be coming to an end at 9:15 under the rules of cloture.

Throughout the 30 hours as we debate this very important bill which funds our military men and women and continues their operations moving forward and helps to try to find a solution in Iraq and allocates resources to keep our military strong, we also have been talking a great deal about keeping strong right here at home, particularly keeping strong in the areas that need strength and support right now. That area, of course, is the gulf coast of our Nation, the great energy coast, the great trade coast, the great commerce coast. There are so many important parts of that coast, but the largest city, of course, in the middle of that coast is New Orleans, my hometown.

We have spent a lot of time this week talking about how we can get the help we have promised to this region, to all the people of this region who have suffered. The poor have been crushed, the middle class are staggering, and even wealthy individuals with substantial businesses wake up every morning in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama thinking, How are we going to get through this day to keep our business open, our employees employed, and take care of the community we have served so proudly for so long?

It is very hard to describe the magnitude of the destruction. Nothing anyone has seen on television captures it. I have watched a lot of television--not as much as I would like because we are busy doing other things, but I have seen a lot of what has come over on the television from CNN, from FOX, from MSNBC, I have listened to NPR, and I have tried to listen to the television. I have been there so many times and seen so much myself, I keep thinking I wish there were some way I could take a bigger camera or make a 4-hour movie to describe to this Nation the depth of the destruction along the gulf coast. Unfortunately, in situations such as this we cannot make a movie quickly. There will be many movies made and many books written. We cannot make one, though, in the next few days or weeks.

I was very fortunate to find the National Geographic special edition to describe our situation as my colleague, Senator Vitter, and I asked for help, more direct help, more immediate help, real help that we need to begin this long, complicated, difficult, and challenging rebuilding effort. I was very fortunate to find this National Geographic issue. We have sent copies to all of our colleagues. I thank the National Geographic again and mention that I just found out this morning that all of the proceeds from the sale of this special edition National Geographic entitled ``Katrina, Why It Became A Man-made Disaster, Where It Can Happen Next,'' all the proceeds are going to the victims of Katrina--and Rita because that storm came after Katrina hit--and will go to help the victims along the gulf coast from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, to Alabama. We so appreciate that effort.

In searching for ways I could describe the depth of the destruction, there are some pictures in National Geographic that give people some idea of what we are faced with. Again, these pictures cannot quite tell the story. While this looks like blocks and blocks along the gulf coast, this is probably the city of Waveland. It could be parts of Biloxi. It could be parts of Pass Christian. I am not exactly sure where, but it is somewhere along Mississippi. You can tell how pretty their beach is. We have a different kind of coastline in Louisiana.

The reason I have been spending so much time on this Defense bill talking about this issue is this is our war. This is our Baghdad. This is a picture of parts of New Orleans with water as far as the eye can see. There is another picture that shows the city in the background and the depths of flood around it. This picture is a graveyard in New Orleans. Of course, we bury our dead above ground because there is so much water we cannot even dig a few feet down to bury them. This picture is one of our graveyards.

Looking through the National Geographic, when you see the pictures of destruction, I don't know if the camera can see the depths of the destruction, the industrial canal, the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. These pictures could be shown from the western side of our State to the eastern side of our State, to New Orleans, to the gulf coast of Mississippi, into some parts of Alabama, and into some parts of Texas. Two million people have been displaced and are searching for high ground, for stability, for housing, for jobs. From the cities they fled, from communities they fled, in boats a lot like this. They are searching for housing, apartments, jobs, safety. Most important, what they need is help, real help--not promises, not photo-ops, but real, serious help.

Let me show some other pictures of people who need help. This is a gentleman in Lafitte. I would say he needs a little help. He may be interested in some tax breaks that people have offered around here. I don't know at this exact moment what tax breaks might help him, but a fireman would be good or someone who could help drain out some of the water--maybe one of his employees from Lafitte, which does not have a tax base, who is about ready to go out of business, maybe someone who works for the little town of Lafitte that was created by Mayor Tim Kerner's father, the father of Lafitte who helped create this town. I actually went to his funeral last week. He served with my father. When he was mayor of Lafitte, my father was mayor of New Orleans. We went to his funeral to pay respects to the family. His son now is mayor of Lafitte. I don't know how long he will be mayor because Lafitte does not have a tax base to stay in business. This man used to live in Lafitte. If this town folds because we cannot get a loan to them, that is all they have. I don't know where he goes, but he is looking for help.

This is a woman--I am sorry I don't know her name, but there is a picture and description of her in the magazine. This woman looks pretty self-reliant to me. She obviously looks troubled and anxious. She is doing what she can to carry her two children to safety. People all over the gulf coast did this, basically by themselves, with limited support. A lot has been said about people not helping people, but David Johnson, who was unable to work, is carried from his home in eastern New Orleans by Mickey Monceaux. The authorities say the water is leveling off as Lake Pontchartrain empties in the gulf. We have had people helping each other during this time, being as self-reliant as possible.

Here is another picture. National guardsman Jon Eric Miletello comforts his grandmother. This young man probably--because most of the National Guard in Louisiana have pulled triple and double duty in Iraq--probably just got back from Iraq. You can see how much he loves his grandmother, the way he is looking at her to help her get out of the floodwater.

I don't know what city she lives in, but I can promise you that National Guard specialist would appreciate it if this Congress could take a billion dollars of the $43 billion that is sitting in a bank account going nowhere, doing nothing, and lend it to the cities and the towns and communities on the gulf coast to help his grandmother figure out what she might do in the next few weeks and months and years. We are not certain about what his grandmother's future is, but we would like some time to figure it out.

I know a lot of people have died in Iraq. I have had 42 soldiers die in Iraq. Our elected officials have gone to as many funerals as we can possibly go to. We have written as many letters to their families, and called them. We have had about 942 people die from this disaster.

Our challenge right here at home--and not to underestimate in any way the lives that have been given to protect this country. We want to get our soldiers home and protect them. That is why we are passing this bill, and that is why I am not holding this bill. I can't hold this bill because we have 30 hours of debate, but I have taken time through this 30 hours to talk about the war right here at home.

``Here lies Vera. God help us.'' In New Orleans, as people were dying with no place to go, the neighbors built makeshift coffins. This one could still be there. It was there when a National Geographic photographer took it maybe a week or two ago. It could still be there in a neighborhood in New Orleans. Many of the bodies that are yet unidentified are in the prison at St. Gabriel. That awesome and gruesome situation is being worked out as I speak.

In the midst of all of this tragedy and destruction of cities and towns and high water and inadequate FEMA response, my colleague and I came to the floor and have been working through the week in meetings and letter exchanges and telephone calls, working with Senators, trying to work with the House, trying to work with the administration to say: OK, we know things aren't working as well as they could. What can we do to try to fix it?

We came up with a suggestion. Let's take a billion dollars from the $43 billion that FEMA has sitting there that has already been allocated and move it to an already established loan program to give the cities and counties and sheriffs and law enforcement the help they need for 3 months, just 3 months,

while we go on vacation again. Just give them 3 months. Lend them some money to keep their lights on, to keep their cities and their communities and the hospitals open until we can figure out a long-range plan.

We may have to refinance some debt. We may have to close areas down permanently. We hope not, but maybe we will have to. We are going to have to do a lot of things we never thought we would have to--such as build a good levee system. We will have to do that. So we came to ask for a loan under the program that has been established since 1972.

We have basically been told--even after working through the night, after offering a variety of different compromises--I am sorry, to the Louisiana delegation; I am sorry, to the Mississippi delegation; I am sorry, to the Alabama and Texas delegation, but the only way that we will lend you the money is if you pay it back under different terms than anyone has before and that anyone will be asked to do in the future.

With 45 minutes left in the debate, still the only way that we can get 3 months of operating expenses, under a program that already exists, with money that we have already allocated that is sitting in a bank account doing nothing, is to agree to tight-fisted lending policies that have never been applied to anyone else in America and, according to the draft that I saw last night at 2 o'clock in the morning, will not be applied to anyone in the future. But for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, the Gulf Coast States--and not all of Alabama but just the regions hit by the storm--for those counties, the only way you all on the gulf coast can get the money is under a new, tight-fisted, basically what one could describe as higher interest rate loans because there is no way under any circumstance, according to the draft I have seen, no matter how dire your situation, that you could ever be given any reprieve whatsoever to not have to pay the whole thing back.

Some people have classified this latest offer from the Republican leadership as a compromise. A compromise is an effort to do the best you can for people while preserving some important principle. This is no compromise; this is an agreement between the rightwing and the far rightwing, people who are holding the power and are not willing to use it on behalf of people who need help. The gulf coast of Louisiana has been hit by the worst hurricane in the history of our country. Then we were hit by a disastrous break in a levee system that was not supported, not built to standard, and not invested in by a nation, and in some measure by our own selves, but in large measure by a nation that refused to recognize the importance of this levee system, not just for the people of Louisiana and the southern part of Mississippi but a levee system to continue to bring trade and commerce and jobs and wealth to a nation that needs and was actually built on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River.

Despite decades of speeches from members of our delegation about the importance of investing in levees and even agreeing to take some of our own revenues generated off of our coast to invest in hurricane protection and levee protection, we were in large measure left to fend for ourselves in a way that while the Federal Government contributed money, those moneys kept getting less and less relative to other spending and other priorities in Congress, until we were left with a second-rate levee system. Now we have a major disaster on our hands.

It is extremely important that the people of our country know that there is a way that we can rebuild this region; that there is a way that we can pull together to do it. When we make suggestions as simple as getting $1 billion to go through a loan program that is already established with money that has already been appropriated, when we are told, that is too much to ask, we can't do that, we can't afford to do it because the people of the gulf coast just have to understand that you have to take this on terms and conditions that no one has been asked to before and no one will be asked to after, is a hard thing for this Senator to accept.

A historian once described New Orleans as an inevitable city in an impossible location. That pretty much captures where we are today. We are having an inevitable debate that places the people of Louisiana and the gulf coast in an impossible situation. We are asking for a 3-month loan to keep our cities and communities operating, for our sheriffs, for police, for firefighters, for critical city workers, for some of our hospitals that, despite the worst storm in the world, stayed open, kept their lights on, kept serving people, and are sustaining a region of this country that is vital for the future of the Nation. We ask for a loan, and we get nothing but empty promises and tight-fisted lending policies when we need help.

We have been stuck by the worst natural disaster. We now have a third-rate FEMA operating, a second-class levee system, and now, to pour salt on the wound, a tight-fisted lending policy applied only to us. I am asked, basically: Senator, take it or leave it. That is a hard question to ask any Senator--take it or leave it. That is why I have taken all of these 30 hours to consider what our options are, to try to bring our case to the American people, to ask the country: Is this fair? I don't believe it is, but life isn't fair.

Our job is to try to make it more fair. That is why I am here. I don't know, I hope that is why everybody else is here. But that is why I am here. I would hope that my colleagues would think, particularly in the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, that that is why we are here.

Talking about Senators, I thank the Senators who worked through the night trying to come up with a real compromise, a compromise with dignity, a compromise with some hope, a compromise that would give our cities some hope that somebody in Washington is listening. The junior Senator from Delaware, Mr. Carper, who has no immediate interest other than he was a former Governor, a former House Member, he spent time on my and Senator Vitter's behalf on the House side trying to talk to the leaders of the Republican Appropriations Committee to say: Why are you asking for new terms for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas when you have given these terms before to others?

We know we are asking for the cap to be raised. The cap has been raised before. There is a $5 million loan cap on a program where our cities, not only New Orleans, which is the largest, but the parishes of Jefferson and St. Tammany and St. Bernard and Plaqueman--their monthly operating budget in the city of New Orleans is $20 million. So ask me what borrowing $5 million would help? A week? That is what we would be able to borrow, 1 week?

So we have asked for the loan cap to be raised so the cities can borrow some money, and the parishes and the sheriffs, which are not included specifically in the language of the ``compromise'' that has been offered, they are not specifically included. It has been inferred that our sheriffs are included. But our sheriffs are elected. They are different from the rest of the country. They perform a tremendous service to our State and to our parishes. They were the ones who carried people on their backs to safety. They were the ones who helped keep law and order. They didn't do everything perfectly, but they did the best they could under a very difficult circumstance. They are not even specifically in the compromise. If we can't keep law enforcement operating, if we can't keep our lights on, if we can't keep some running water in what pipes we have left, if we can't keep the mayors and the parish councils at work having meetings, turning on city hall, trying to mop out their city halls, could anybody here tell me how we begin to rebuild a region without basic, essential community services? I don't know.

I know the private sector can do a great deal. But you know what the private sector people coming into my office tell me, whether they are big business or small: Senator, we need lights. We need water. And, Senator, please tell them to stop sending us bottled water; I need for the water to go on in my business because my employees want to come back to work, but I can't bring them back to work without water. If we lay off the sewage and water board and the people who work to turn on the water, how in the heck are we going to get water and electricity on? If you are trying to give a

tax credit to a small business or big business, I don't think it is going to work very well.

The Democratic leader, Senator Reid, worked through the night. The junior Senator from New York, Mrs. Clinton, worked through the night. Senator Barack Obama came down here at 1:30 in the morning and asked if there was something he could do. Senator Blanche Lincoln from Arkansas, who has been a great voice for us, although her State was not directly impacted, has come to the floor many times this week to say the 75,000 citizens who were evacuated to Arkansas would be well cared for and well taken care of but has asked for some help with their health care system as Arkansas struggles to provide health care services to these individuals, and they have been turned down time after time.

I have a word for the people of Louisiana. The men and women I mentioned are your true friends as Senator Vitter, my colleague from Louisiana, and I have worked together to try to forge the best possible arrangement we could make for the people of our State. Without a bit of self-interest, they have fought for you. They have searched throughout the night for a true compromise.

I am proud to serve with these colleagues of mine because they do not believe the people of Louisiana should have to trade their dignity for cash. But that is basically what we are being asked to do, in the opinion of this Senator. In other words, Senator, you can have the loan for the people of your State, but you are going to take it under a tightfisted policy that has never been applied before to anyone and, by the way, according to the script that we are going to give you, it won't be applied to anyone in the future, but only for you--for Louisiana, for Mississippi, for Alabama, for the poor, for the middle income, and for the rich. Only for you all in the South is this going to be applied. Take it or leave it.

I hope the people of Louisiana, whom I have proudly represented for so long, can understand why I spent the evening here and why I am going to continue to stay at this desk as often as I can in between trips home visiting with local elected leaders trying to help organize meetings, supporting all the local officials--Democrats and Republicans, Black and White, urban and suburban, rich and poor citizens to try to help us rebuild a State that is not only a State we love, but a region that the country needs, even though the country refuses to understand how valuable we are to them.

I think people can understand why the situation is as critical as some of us are trying to show. The devastation is enormous. It is unprecedented. Our options are limited. FEMA is not working. The Red Cross is getting very mixed reviews, and I say that with the greatest respect for a very great organization. But we are getting very mixed reviews about the Red Cross. We have 50,000 people in shelters with nowhere to go, no housing available even if you presented vouchers. I am not saying we do not need them, but it is not an option that is working well because our cities are so full of people who have left the south of our State to find shelter, to find jobs, to find stability, and to find their families because the old voucher program is not working very well.

We have people in hotels. That causes problems with the business community because when they have conferences or visitors, they cannot get their own executives into the hotels to do business in the city.

I have talked a lot about New Orleans. I have talked a lot about Lafitte, Grand Isle, Plackman, St. Tammany, and Calcasieu, but let me, for a minute, talk about Baton Rouge, our capital city, and Lafayette, the heart of the Cajun culture in our State, and Monroe, the home of my husband and our home for 6 years, and Shreveport. These are our other major cities that sit to the north in our State. These cities were struggling to pay their bills to make things work for their communities, some of them growing quite fast and doing quite well but, as we know, when counties and parishes grow, their school systems are strained and their transportation systems are strained.

They were managing just like we all manage and do the best we can. And then overnight, the city of Baton Rouge, under the great leadership of Kip Holden and a great council, ended up getting 150,000 new citizens in 1 week--150,000 new citizens in a city of 350,000. They might need to borrow a little money. When you try to move in Baton Rouge from one part of the city to the next, the traffic is back to back. Lafayette is the same way.

So I do not want the people of my State to think I am not aware that there are not impacts everywhere. Again, this is a program that has existed for the benefit of everybody in this country, and we have asked to take $1 billion from FEMA and move it--not new money, but money that is sitting in FEMA's bank account that they cannot spend, and give it in loans under the same terms and conditions as other States to which it has been given, and we are told ``no.''

From the authorization of this loan program in 1974 through December 31, the Federal Government disbursed nearly $100 million in 42 loans. Of that amount, millions have been repaid, some of it has been canceled, 7 were fully canceled, 3 were partially canceled, and 29 remain outstanding, of which one has been partially canceled.

This is a program that has worked for everybody in every disaster-- earthquakes, hurricanes--but when the people of the gulf coast ask for it under the leadership of the tightfisted House of Representatives, the only way we can get the loans is under new terms at basically a higher interest rate. The higher interest rate is reflected in the fact that there will be no forgiveness, under any terms, whatsoever written into the law.

It is not available to sheriffs, and it is not available to hospitals--not explicitly available to law enforcement. You might interpret it, someone could make the argument, but we have read the proposed language, and it is not in the bill.

Some people have said this is a way to help law enforcement. They are not in the draft I have seen. We tried to put them in and that was rejected.

Not at this minute, but I will in just a second. I will be happy to yield in a moment.

So we have worked through the night, Mr. President, trying to come up with some available options for the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas as they seek to work through a very complicated and difficult situation to try to pull efforts together to make loans available for 3 months.

I have shown this picture throughout the week. That is why, as I close over the next few minutes, I would like to show it again. You can find this picture in the National Geographic, ``A World Upside Down.'' This is Long Beach, MS, a week after Katrina hit. This is Mrs. Leona Watts. The National Geographic says that her home ``rests amid the bones of the home where she has lived for 61 years.''

The National Geographic goes on to say:

Many Mississippians felt abandoned in the days after the

storm as national attention--and relief efforts--seemed

locked on New Orleans.

I have asked throughout the week if the city of Long Beach or the cities in Louisiana can get some infusion of cash to help them go through. I don't know what kind of tax credits and other possibilities could help here, at least not in the next few weeks or few months. I am confident that targeted strategic tax cuts can help to rebuild this city.

I am almost certain that in Mississippi--I am not completely certain--that the State could actually borrow money to help this situation. But I do know one thing because I was State treasurer of Louisiana for 8 years: Our State is prohibited from borrowing money for operating expenses because our constitution states that it is fiscally irresponsible because, under normal circumstances, it is irresponsible to borrow money for operating expenses if you are a State. You should borrow money to invest in ports, roads, and infrastructure, not to maintain a lifestyle. Every family knows that. So in Louisiana we have not allowed it for quite some time.

So if I have stood on the floor a little longer for some people and tempers have gotten a little short, I have to stand here to try to explain that while

our State might be in a position to borrow money, although they got a report last week that they are $1 billion short in their own revenue, but even if they were not $1 billion short, the Constitution of Louisiana does not allow the State to borrow money.

The State's largest city is laying off thousands of workers by the day. In the city that we keep saying we are going to stand up for, people are being laid off, the city that people still visit for photo ops to say, We are with you, we are not abandoning you, we are there.

My colleague and I come here to ask for $1 billion out of $43 billion to give a loan for 3 months for police, fire, law enforcement, to get the lights on and to get the water through the faucets. And we are told: Sorry, the only way that we will give you that money, the only way we will lend you that money is under new policies designed especially for you that no one in the past and no one in the future has to accept. But you, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, have to take it or leave it.

So through the night, we offered one compromise after another--a real compromise.

Again, the Senator from Michigan is in the Chamber. He helped through the night. Senator Reid was particularly supportive, and I have said thank you to Senator Stevens who is not now on the floor but will be here. He was quite patient through a difficult night. This is a difficult bill.

We have had to take some time, as we have gotten it at the end of the debate on defense, to talk about this. It was our only option. We said just lend us the $1 billion under the same old and good and steady and traditional programs. That was not accepted.

We have said if the Senate would come together and act, my colleague and I have made it clear that we want the money to be for sheriffs, for several of our hospitals that are in a desperate situation, to allow the cities and parishes to borrow money, and we would be willing, or I would be willing, to send two bills over to the House with Senator Vitter and Senator Frist's name on both of those bills so the Senate could go on record saying we are ready to act. And if the House wants to pass either one of these, they can pass one and send it to the President's desk and then they can decide whether we should be treated the same or treated differently. And I would live with that. I have made my point clear, I believe, and I have made myself clear in representing the State. We should be treated the same way. But if the House of Representatives decides that we should be treated a different way, if the President of the United States wants to explain why we should be treated differently, I would be happy to send two bills over and let the House of Representatives, under the control of the Republican leadership, decide what they want to do. But that was not acceptable.

So I have stayed here through the night working on as many suggestions as Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, and my colleagues for whom I have a great deal of respect, suggested, and yet at this hour, a few minutes before the 9:15 vote, the only ``compromise'' we have is for the people of the gulf coast to take it or leave it--under different terms than have ever been asked by anybody before and will not be asked of anybody in the future.

Last night when I pressed this issue of whether we would be treated the same way, we were told that we could be and we would be. But when we read the bill, the text, it says in added language on page 2--it is a very short bill, so I want to read it for the Record. This is the new provision that has been offered to us:

Provided further, notwithstanding section 417(c)(1) of the

Stafford Act, such loans may not be canceled.

. . . notwithstanding section 417(c)(1) of the Stafford

Act, such loans may not be canceled.

That language has never been in any act, and before anybody tries to say, well, we are lifting the cap, the cap has been lifted before. Loans have been extended. Never has this language been put in. But this is the Republican leader's tight-fisted money policy that says ``such loans may not be canceled.''

So the people of my State are in a pretty tough situation--and the people of the gulf coast. We have had a category 5 storm, the breaking of a levy system, everything people have worked for, hoped for, dreamed of--destroyed.

The Federal Government sent us a third-rate FEMA, offered a second- rate levee system, and now a tight-fisted lending policy, and then criticized us for not being more self-reliant.

This woman lived in this house for 61 years. The reason I like to keep showing this picture is she looks a lot like my grandma. And because I know, because I know how self-reliant my grandmother was, I am just going to assume that she was a lot like my grandmother, Loretta Landrieu. My grandmother never graduated from eighth grade. She worked her whole life three jobs. She raised 2 boys and 19 grandchildren. She never asked the Government for any money. When she died, she had $19,000 in the bank. She gave each one of her grandchildren $1,000, and she bought us a little camp for $15,000 on Lake Pontchartrain. In 42 years, the 8 of us raised 37 children in that little camp, with no air- conditioning, and we had a great time. Then as we grew and the family grew and we got a little more prosperous, we put in air-conditioning and we expanded it.

But this is what my grandmother, if she were still alive, this is probably what she would be looking at right now. And I have to listen to people in Washington, the power in Washington, the Republican power from the White House, to this Senate, to the House, tell me that people in the gulf coast area need to be more self-reliant. This woman has lived in this house for 61 years. She has probably paid the mortgage. She has probably raised children, worked in her church, never been late for her taxes, just like my grandmother was--every Sunday morning of her life in church. The Catholic Church that she went to doesn't exist anymore. It was washed away in the 29 feet of water that came over Slidell, LA. And I have to listen to the Republican leadership tell me: Just rely on faith-based institutions and private sector involvement.

Our faith-based institutions have done great work. I am so grateful for the many missionaries and churches and synagogues that have come to help. The church in this neighborhood is gone. Maybe another church from Ohio will come down, or Michigan, but this lady's church is gone. Our churches are gone. Our synagogues are gone. And our businesses that are always there to help, that have been helping, that have been keeping people on their payrolls when they had no money coming in the front door, keeping their employees on the payroll, putting up trailers, putting up tents so their employees could come and sleep in the parking lots so they could work in the offices, we are not self- reliant enough.

So this Senator comes to ask for $1 billion to lend to the communities such as this, and I am told: Sorry, Senator, we can't loan you the money the way we have lent it to everyone for the last 30 years. And by the way, when we do it again in the future, we are going to lend it to everybody under the old program, but just for you we have a special deal. Just for you all we have a special deal.

Here is another man who needs help, and for him we have a special deal--the Republican leadership. We lent money to everybody in America since 1974 under certain terms, but for you, you get a special deal. For this lady walking out of the Superdome--I think this is the Hyatt in New Orleans; I think this is where this is--she is doing the best she can. Obviously, she only has two arms and she has two babies and she is carrying them both--with one blanket, a bottle, and a bottle of water for two babies. No store open, and she comes here to ask for help, and I am told by the Republican leadership in power: Sorry, we are going to lend you the money but under different circumstances.

How much time do I have remaining?

How much time do I have remaining, please?

I thank the Chair.

This is the National Guard, Jon Eric Miletello. He has probably pulled double duty in Iraq because our National Guard has been there, trying to stand up Iraq, standing up water systems in Iraq, putting down sewer systems in Iraq, so he comes home and this is what he finds: his grandmother in 5 feet of water. And when we come here to ask for a loan for this town to help

them out just for 3 months, we have to get a different deal.

So in the last 3 minutes I am going to ask the Senate, since they said that they would do this, they want to help, to send this over to the House. Let the House make the decision. Let the House leadership make the decision whether they want to lend us the money under the traditional program or give us yet a special deal for people of the gulf coast.

So I am prepared to ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 1855, and for that bill to be read and passed. This bill would allow the Stafford Act money to be given under the same terms and conditions as it was to everyone else.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate would send the bill over to the House to say that such loans may only be canceled with the approval of the Office of Management and Budget, so that they could be canceled but only Management and Budget could make that decision.

Mr. President, those are the best ideas we have had. They are obviously not enough. I thank my colleagues for their patience. I understand it has been a difficult time, but this is a difficult situation, and I know that we have held everybody here a day longer than they thought they would be here. We thought we would get out of here about 10 o'clock last night, or 11. I thank Senator Stevens for his patience. He has been very patient, and Senator Inouye, as they have managed this bill. I thank Senator Frist for the hours of discussions that he has had, but I will say in closing that when you have power, Mr. President, I believe that we should use it in the wisest and best way. I don't think the work we are doing here is the wisest and the best. It may be the best we can do, but this Senator does not think it is what we should do.

I yield the floor.

Hear hear.

Mr. President, I thank, so much, the Senator from Delaware who, before he was a Senator--because he wasn't born one either--was a Governor of Delaware. Before he was Governor, he was a husband and a father, which he still is. I know he does a magnificent job at family and in the Senate because I have seen him here at late hours.

Last night this Senator from Delaware, who does not, obviously, have a dog in this hunt, stood through the night and negotiated with myself and with my colleague from Louisiana, with Senator Frist, with Senator Reid, and we negotiated and offered one compromise after another in meetings, on the telephone, on the floor, when we could speak--because speech was limited last night. Despite the notion that is out there that Senators can speak any time they want, the rules of the Senate actually prevent Senators from speaking. So I was not able to speak as much as I would have liked through the night last night. When I was not able to speak on the floor, we were in meetings, in phone calls, speaking with the White House and the House leadership and Republican colleagues and Democratic colleagues, trying to work through this situation.

We put our best efforts forward. We are now down to this time, which is basically the end of this debate, having passed a bill by Senator Vitter and Senator Frist that will basically allow us to have the loans we seek, loans that are so necessary, but a bill that forces us to take it in a discriminatory fashion.

I believe this Senator has shown, on many occasions, a willingness to compromise and to work through difficult situations. I helped negotiate No Child Left Behind on this floor, one of the premier centerpieces of the current President's administration, of his agenda, even when half of my caucus was opposed--not sort of opposed but very opposed. But I knew what was best for Louisiana was to move forward because we had already gone down the road of accountability. It was showing some results. The children in my State were learning. The gap between the rich and the poor was closing, not because the rich were coming down but because the poor were coming up.

White children and Black children, who had been by law separated for over 150 years in schools, were then thrust together in the 1960s and 1970s. I believed that law, and I still believe this law, could help lift those who had limited opportunities. I have worked with Senators on both sides of the aisle, for the 8 years that I have been here, to try to craft and negotiate some of the toughest legislation the Senate has seen--compromise on missile defense, compromise on Corps of Engineers to move a WRDA bill. I worked for 10 years to compromise the Conservation and Reinvestment Act where 4,500 organizations in this country, from the most liberal to the most conservative, came together one time on one bill to provide coastal money for all the communities in the Nation: 10 years of meetings, 10 years of phone calls, 10 years of speeches, 10 years of pleas, 10 years of press conferences, 10 years of alliance building, only to get down to the last minute some years ago to be told, with 72 signatures on that bill at the last minute, 5 years ago: Senator, we cannot bring your bill up, there is an election around the corner and it may have repercussions for one or two people here. We can't do it.

You could have taken a knife and stabbed it in my heart, but I stood there and took it, not because it was me but because the people I represent I knew were getting a bad deal. But in my heart I knew that I and our delegation had literally done everything we could possibly do. When it came to the end, the death was quick.

When I got back in the next session, after my State had been stabbed in the heart and left for dead--which we have died, through this hurricane--I started putting yet another bill together because there is nothing wrong with me that I don't know how to work through difficult situations. My family has been doing it a very long time.

I thank Senator Clinton for her remarks. She obviously understands what the people of New York went through. I also thank Senator Schumer. Although he was not here in person, he was here in spirit. He and Senator Clinton stood by the Republican mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, lifted him up and helped him. No second-guessing; they helped him and they lifted the city up.

I thank Senator Jeffords, who has been a champion. He stood at the Leeville Bridge with me. I have been on so many trips down to Louisiana I lose count, but one of them I remember very well. Senator Jeffords came down with me, so far to the bottom of Louisiana if he had taken one more step he would have been in the Gulf of Mexico. There is not much down there--no big cities, no big money, no big press conferences. There is hardly a camera at the end of LA-1, at Port Fourchon, but Senator Jeffords went. He stood there, and while I was explaining to him the difficulty of getting people out in an evacuation for a hurricane on a highway that goes underwater when there is rain, let alone when a category 5 hurricane comes bearing down on you--he stood there on the bridge with me and at the moment--if I could have scripted it myself I could not have done it any better, and people who were not there are not going to believe what I am going to say but I have a lot of witnesses--at the very moment I was pointing to the Leeville Bridge, a shrimp trawler came in, lifted their nets up as they do--they look like butterflies out on the gulf--they lifted their nets up and ran into the bridge, with Senator Jeffords on it, and shook the bridge and shut it down like that.

The words had just come out of my mouth: Senator Jeffords, not only is the road a problem but when the hurricane comes, if this bridge shuts down, there is no way out. And the shrimp trawler hit the bridge.

He said to me, laughing with his good sense of humor: Senator, don't you think you went a little too far to make your point?

And we had a big laugh about it, not that I laughed about the shrimp trawler, but we literally cannot believe that and have talked about it for 3 years.

Our strength is found at home in our neighborhoods, in our churches, on corners, in our workplaces, and in our places of worship. Right here is where our strength is found--not in anyplace overseas, right here at home.

I am going to wrap up by showing you pictures of the homes to make my point. This is our home on the gulf coast. After the photographer took this picture, the commentary in the National Geographic magazine was something like: It looks like a weapon of mass destruction went off on the gulf coast. This is exactly what would happen if a weapon of mass destruction would go off, except you wouldn't have the trees and maybe the beach would be a little disheveled. That is what it looks like. It was a storm of massive destruction.

Our strength begins at home.

The underlying bill is sending $415 billion overseas. We ask for a loan program of $1 billion already allocated under the same terms and conditions that everyone in America has received. And we are told no. It was too much to do.

I am going to close with this.

This is a picture of New Orleans. It doesn't look like this today because all the water has gone down. But when people say, Why can't you be a little bit more self-reliant, I am not sure any city in America could stand itself up by itself with no loans, no grants, with the police force being laid off, a fire department being laid off, city workers being laid off, an electric company taking bankruptcy, no water in the pipes. And when we come to ask for a loan, we are told: Sorry, there is no money in the Treasury. We have made other arrangements for the taxes that you have paid over the last 300 years.

Let me submit for the Record a letter from the U.S. Conference of Mayors

which they sent to this Senate. They said:

We greatly appreciate Congress' attention to America's

cities devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and now Hurricane

Rita, and to those cities home to hundreds of thousands of

evacuees. The leadership of the U.S. Conference of Mayors,

convened in Long Beach on September 22-24, resolved that

Congress must pass legislation to provide direct fiscal

assistance to cities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and

Rita--

All cities, cities that are Republican cities and cities that are Democratic cities, communities that do not vote for Democrats and communities that do not vote for Republicans--all cities.

Most importantly, we urge the Senate to reject language

that would for the first time in history remove the

possibility that communities' disaster loans be forgivable,

if needed, due to the dire situation many of the impacted

cities will continue to face in the months and years ahead.

It goes on to say they are going to keep a vigil. I hope somebody keeps the candle burning.

I ask unanimous that the letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I have shown all the pictures I can show for the week. I have done all the talking I can do for today. But I can promise you this. This talking will continue and these meetings will continue and this debate will continue. It is not going away.

The leadership of the House of Representatives needs to be put on notice that this debate is going to go on for a very long time, until we get relief, recovery, respect, and the dignity that we deserve as American citizens from Louisiana to Texas to Alabama to Mississippi and the people whom we represent, Black and White, rich and poor, young and old, small and large businesses alike, and our faith-based community, get the respect it deserves from the floor of this Senate and the Congress of the United States, and gets the help it needs to get through and rebuild.

I assure you that we will rebuild this coast. We will rebuild the gulf coast. It was paid for by a great President, President Jefferson, at 3 cents an acre in 1803 where he borrowed money. He knew what he was borrowing money for. He had a good reason to borrow it, and he bought the Louisiana Purchase. Andrew Jackson came and defended it. His statue never went underwater.

We will rebuild this region all through the gulf coast and into Louisiana--the ports, the energy infrastructure, turn our lights on again, and keep the lights on all over America, to try to keep people's bills as low as we can and keep their heat on this winter, which is approaching. Even if you do not give us one penny, even if you do not lend us money, we have been self-reliant for over 300 or more years. The people here are pretty tough and it takes a lot more than this to beat our spirit.

The bill is gone. It is the best we could do. It is not the best we could have done, but it is what we have. We will live with it, but we will not stop this debate.

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 rescinded.

Mr. President, I would like to speak as in morning business. If any other Senator comes and wants to speak about an amendment on the underlying bill, I would be pleased to wrap up my remarks.

Yes, I would.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I begin by thanking the Senator in the chair for his leadership in trying to help us move this Defense appropriations bill through the Congress. It is, of course, an extremely important bill, and it is a very difficult bill to manage because it is large and complicated and multidimensional and a great need. I thank the Senator from Alaska and the Senator from Hawaii for helping us to manage through this as we try to wrap up this week.

(Ms. Murkowski assumed the Chair.)

Hurricane Katrina

Madam President, one of the reasons I come to the floor this morning is to speak about an issue that I brought up on the floor, now many times, and so has the other Senator from Louisiana and Members of our delegation, as well as Members from the Gulf Coast States that have been affected by Katrina, to try to see what we can do to get some aid to our States, directly into the hands of people who can actually put that money to good use, so we do not leave here this weekend without having done something very clearly and very specifically.

Now, this Congress has acted with dispatch over the last 4 weeks to allocate and appropriate money to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that is tasked with the responsibility of managing disasters such as this when they are of such a magnitude it is really impossible for individual cities or individual counties or individual parishes or even regions to handle them.

This storm was just that. It was a category 5 storm, with a surge of tide that had the highest recorded level at 29 feet of water--a tsunami basically of 30 feet, approximately--that slammed into the gulf coast about 32 days ago and devastated the energy coast of this Nation--or a large part of the energy coast.

Assessments are being done by insurance companies, corporations, multinational companies, small companies, law enforcement, cities, parishes, and counties to try to get a handle on the damage, but it is staggering.

This special edition, which I have been reviewing since I picked it up yesterday, is done by National Geographic. It is a special edition on Katrina and Rita. It was contributed to by the Times-Picayune, the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times, and it truly is remarkable work: ``Katrina, Why It Became a Man-Made Disaster'' and ``Where It Could Happen Next.'' It takes us through a series of not just the way the hurricane formed and how powerful and devastating it was, but how the levees could have been breached or how the levees might have collapsed, because that assessment is still being made about how many houses have been lost, about how many thousands of square miles were flooded in New Orleans, in Saint Bernard, in Saint Tammany Parish, in Plaquemines Parish, how the entire parish of Cameron, that had 10,000 structures 8 days ago, now has one structure standing; a courthouse that was built by the New Deal, the only structure standing in Cameron Parish.

It talks about how the combination of these two killer storms, and the neglect on the part of many--cost cutting that obviously did not pay off--how it has now wrecked this economic powerhouse. It says, actually, the economic power has been brought to its knees. The center of that powerhouse would be the State I represent in the Senate, the State of Louisiana, that is home to the Mississippi River, the greatest delta on the continent, the greatest river on the continent.

On that river are the largest ports in America. The eye of the first storm, Katrina, went right over the Port of New Orleans, the South Louisiana Port, and barely missed the other large port, which is the Port of Baton Rouge, which hosts the energy industry, the petrochemical industry, the refining industry, the agriculture industry, the commercial industry, the maritime industry--the bulk of it in the Nation. It was a direct hit to the heart of the energy coast.

Not only is Louisiana feeling this, with 2 million people along the gulf coast displaced--hundreds of thousands of people have lost their entire home, their entire business; the people of New Orleans, in large measure, and Saint Bernard and Plaquemines have lost their entire parish--but everyone in America is feeling this because of the higher price of goods, the higher price of gasoline, and the higher price of natural gas.

There are 9,000 miles of pipeline connecting oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. We have been struggling to get those pipelines back up and running. The trade and commerce of the Port of South Louisiana, combined with the Port of New Orleans, dwarfs the Port of Houston, the Ports of New York and New Jersey, and the Port of Beaumont, TX, which was also hit and has some destruction from Rita-- thank goodness, not the same level of destruction, thank goodness that we didn't lose the Port of Beaumont or the Port of Houston.

Our ports, from the Port of Lake Charles, from the western side, to the Port of Iberia, to the Port of Morgan City, to the ports along the Mississippi River, to the Port of Fourchon, which is the only deepwater energy port in the Nation right on the gulf, the damage has been extensive and tremendous. To this day, 30 days after--and we will be for months and perhaps even years--we are struggling to stand up that infrastructure.

The long-term building effort is going to be difficult and complicated. I am sorry to say this because we have been criticized for saying it, but it is going to be expensive. There is no cheap or easy way out of it. How we pay for it, what revenues we assign, whether we raise revenues to do it, use revenues we have, assess new approaches, borrow the money, in some

way the Federal Government and State governments and industry have to come up with the billions of dollars it is going to cost to restore the infrastructure and the marshland that protects this infrastructure, that services the economy of the Nation and the world.

Let me try to be as clear as I can on some of these points. There are only a few ways to get grain out of Kansas and the Midwest. You can put it on railroads, put it on trucks, or you can put it on big barges. It is a little slower on the barges, but it is a lot less expensive. You can move the grain that we supply and literally feed ourselves and the world with it, but it has to go through on barges, down some rivers, and the Mississippi River is the River that we primarily use, that the Missouri and the Ohio run into down the Mississippi for trade around the world. If this infrastructure is left vulnerable, as it has been by exposure to the hurricane, if we don't figure out a way to invest better and more wisely, the commerce of this whole Nation will be undermined, unless you want to put all the grain that comes from the Midwest and all the wheat and the corn on trucks and put thousands of more trucks on a highway system that is already overcrowded, where people are already wondering how are we going to survive the next few years on a highway system like this, with trucks stacked up one after another.

We better keep our river channels open. We better invest in our inner waterways. We better start investing in more sophisticated lock and dam systems along the Gulf of Mexico. If we are not going to, then the other alternative is to abandon the coast and move somewhere else. Maybe we should consider that. I think it is a foolish idea because you couldn't accomplish it anyway. I don't know where we would move all the refineries. We can't even get another State anywhere in the country, except maybe Arizona, to build a refinery. Nobody wants to build refineries. Everybody wants to put gas in their car and turn the electricity on, but we can't get anybody to lay a pipeline, build a refinery, put up a petrochemical plant. I don't know how Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi would lift 40 percent of the industry and relocate it somewhere in the United States, but if some people think that is a cost-effective way, maybe we should do that.

Having studied this issue for a pretty long time and represented this State for over 25 years, it is a foolish and foolhardy suggestion. I have a better one. The better one is a little bit of money every year, smartly invested, to protect this infrastructure, to restore our wetlands, to protect one of the greatest cities in the world and the region that surrounds it and the infrastructure that supports the commerce and trade for the entire Nation--if we just do a little bit well every year. Instead, we chose to do other things with our money.

This is a picture of the gulf. This is Mississippi. The title surge hit the gulf coast of Mississippi 30 feet high, cleared everything in its path for a half a mile back. We saw this kind of destruction with Camille. We hoped we would never see it again. But there are vulnerabilities living on the coast. When a hurricane hits you directly, this is what it looks like. Right here we had houses and casinos. We also had a major shipyard that was damaged pretty badly. You can't do a lot of shipbuilding inland. You have to have some waterways and build your ships in a place where they have access to water. Thank goodness we didn't have just one shipyard on the gulf coast. Thank goodness we had two because the hurricane hit one and not the other. Avondale is today up and running and building ships for our military and the private sector.

I don't know if you can see this, but the Presiding Officer knows because she is from Alaska and they do some oil and gas drilling for the Nation, we do most of it along the gulf coast. These are the pipelines that support that industry, as we send fuel and gas and electricity to Chicago, New York, California, the Midwest, and supply the energy necessary to keep this economy functioning. We have laid these pipelines for over 100 years. Maybe we could pick them all up and move them somewhere else, but I don't think that is going to happen. We can't even find the money to get a pipeline from Alaska--or figure out how to get a pipeline from Alaska. How are we going to take up all these pipelines and move them somewhere else? We don't have a choice.

We have to take some of our general fund dollars, more than we have. We need to, as I have said for over 10 years, redirect a portion of the offshore oil and gas revenues that Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama contribute to the tune of $5 billion, actually $6 billion a year last year, $155 billion since the 1950s, redirect some of that money into restoring our coast that protects this infrastructure and, working in partnership with industries, large and small, have more security around the energy infrastructure, whether it is pipelines, petrochemical plants, or refineries, not just for the protection of the industry but for the safety of the people who live and work in this region.

There is a beautiful series produced by Louisiana Public Television that I will submit for the Record. It is not in written form but in video form. I am hoping there is some way that I can submit that officially for the record. When Bienville and Niverville came and settled Louisiana and claimed it as a colony, they didn't come to sunbathe on the Mississippi River. They didn't come to put up condos. They came to secure the delta, the mouth of the greatest river in the country, for the strategic expansion and economic future of a nation. They asked people to come to Louisiana in hot, mosquito-ridden territory, not to sunbathe or to vacation. Who would vacation in a swamp with mosquitos? We leave the low-lying areas and leave the mosquitos when we want to vacation and go to the mountains. If you are lucky to be able to afford a tank of gas in your car, you don't stay in Louisiana to vacation. You go to Louisiana to work, even though a lot of people do come to New Orleans to enjoy themselves because it is a wonderful city. But down in the bayou, people fish, they trap, they hunt, they skin alligators, they drill for oil and gas, and they lay pipelines. They build ships, they fabricate so that we can produce jobs for people in America as well as ourselves.

For 300 years, we have been growing crops, growing sugarcane, growing cotton, growing soybeans, shipping goods around the world, drilling for oil and gas, building ships and pipelines, and asking for a little bit of money, just a little bit, to help us invest in an infrastructure that doesn't just save us from death and destruction but supports a nation's future. I have been on this floor so many times giving this speech that I am positive that every Senator could give this speech better than I because they have heard it a thousand times. And they have not just heard it from me. They heard it from Senator Breaux when he was here. They heard it from Russell Long when he was here. They have heard it from David Vitter since he has been here. How much more clear can we be? They heard it from Billy Tauzin when he was chairman of the Energy Committee in the House. They heard it from Charlie Melancon who represents this district now. They have heard it from Gene Taylor who has represented the gulf coast of Mississippi since he was a kid.

These are the kinds of people who live along the coast. They don't have a lot. But they do have their pride and their dignity. They have waited for 31 days now, but they have waited for decades actually for the Federal Government to recognize they are not in condos, having lunch at a club, sipping tea on a balcony, watching the waves. These people don't belong to a country club. They couldn't afford the monthly dues. They could barely afford gas in their automobile to get out when storms hit. Why do they live there? No. 1, because they love it; 2, because they work; 3, because the jobs are there; and 4, you can't move the jobs. Where would you put them?

Let me show you another picture of people. This is Charlene Veillon and her son Thearon. This is a sad picture to look at. This is a picture of them after being told that Charlene's daughter--I am assuming his sister--who had been driving from Tennessee to the gulf coast to try to help her family, when no one else would come to help them, this is when they learned that she died.

For a month and a half the people of the gulf coast have been crying for

help, asking for help. I know that we didn't do everything right every minute of every day. But I can tell you one thing our delegation has done: It has come down here year after year and laid the case. We are happy to host the oil and gas industry, we are happy to build refineries, we are happy to organize our ports to transport goods all over the world so everybody can benefit. We are even glad we don't have to take a lot of vacations--some of us couldn't afford to go--to those highrises in Florida, anyway. But all we want is a little bit of support of money that we generate to protect us and to protect the Nation from something such as this disaster.

I have to read news articles from some of the supposedly smartest magazines in the world telling me the reason this happened is because the levee board in New Orleans--I am not going to support everything the levee board did, but I have to read in some supposedly elite magazines the reason this happened is because the levee board took a few hundred thousand dollars and built a fountain when they should not have built a fountain, they should have been building a levee.

I don't know about the fountain, but I can promise you this: $100,000 or $200,000, or $300,000 for building a fountain when they should have put a few more sandbags on top of the levee would not have prevented this disaster. What would have prevented this disaster is better priorities in spending, smarter investments, and a better partnership between a Federal Government that has decided it has other things to do, such as building levees in Iraq, building schools in Iraq, and I cannot get 5 cents to build a school along the gulf coast.

Then I have to have magazines tell me the people in the South are not self-reliant; we don't know how to walk on our own two legs. I am going to show a picture of self-reliance. See this family. They may or may not be related. They are of different colors of skin. Some people are related who have different skin color, but I don't know. This is how people all over the gulf coast are living--helping each other out, sharing the two bedrooms they have, sharing the food they have, not complaining. But it is my job to complain. I represent them.

Before I keep talking about Louisiana, because people say the Senator only cares about her State, let me tell you what the last page of this magazine says, the National Geographic. It is the last page. Pick it up and read it.

The next Katrina? New Orleans was a hurricane tragedy

waiting to happen.

It describes why this was inevitable. We knew it during Betsy. We knew it again at 9/11. We have known it for a long time. We didn't do what we needed to do. But according to NOAA--which is a very excellent organization, I must say, out of the Commerce Department for which I have a lot of respect--according to meteorologist Joe Golden, ``the five places in the U.S. at greatest risk for calamitous hurricanes are: Tampa Bay, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; Houston, Texas; New York City and Long Island, New York; and Miami, Florida.''

Wake up, delegations from these States. Many of these Senators have been helping. Many of these Senators understand the danger.

Why do we have to go through this again? Why do we have to go through it this time? You can't stop hurricanes, but you can protect yourself. You can set up a communications system so families who are trying to help each other will have their cell phones work. You can help your police officers by giving them radios that function. You can figure out how to have more redundancy so if your electricity goes down, somebody can get a message through.

The head of our National Guard from Alabama, during a CNN interview with me on this subject, said the Senator is right; we are sending runners in Alabama, as we did in the War of 1812, and it is 2005 and we do not have a communications system that protects Americans.

I know times are tough in Baghdad. Times are tough on the gulf coast.

This is a picture of a man named Pete. He is holding a 1950s picture of his grandparents' home in Empire, LA. I think Senator Cochran from Mississippi has fished off Empire. He knows it well. He fishes a great deal and respects the environment.

When Pete's grandparents moved here in the 1950s, this camp--which was in a vulnerable place even before the marsh eroded. It was vulnerable. I don't know if this was his grandparents' home where they lived or if they were shrimpers, trappers, or campers, or if this is a camp, as we call them, where you go on the weekend to try to relax and get out of the city. Anyway, what you can see beyond this camp is a lot of marsh. They didn't go out in the middle of the water and build this camp and come miles by boat to camp, although some do that, but very few. Most of these camps were attached to land, or they were in the 1950s. But 50 years later, there is no land around them because the saltwater has intruded because we channeled the Mississippi River, and the delta cannot replenish itself.

We laid 9,000 miles of pipeline, took all the oil and gas out of the ground, and did not give anything back to keep the land stable so that Pete could maybe have a place to take his grandchildren. Of course, the place is gone.

On page 57 of the National Geographic, there is a great article that begins ``How the Defenses Break Down.'' It talks about barrier islands. We have barrier islands all around the coast. We are losing them rapidly off the coast of South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Dolphin Island because we don't take care of our barrier islands, we don't protect our barrier islands, we don't invest in coastal erosion projects. We let them wash away into the ocean. Then we wonder why, when hurricanes come, they destroy a whole region. Every time a storm comes, we throw a little sandbag on the islands and say we did something. We are not doing anything.

We used to have hundreds of miles of marshland between New Orleans and the ocean. Please don't insult the ancestors of my city to think that they would put a major metropolitan area right on the coast. If anybody would get the map of the Mississippi River, they had to go up over 100 miles from the mouth of the river, and they found the highest ground they could find, and they put the city of New Orleans there.

Amazingly, even in Katrina, Jackson Square did not flood. The cathedral is still there, and the statue of Jesus is still standing in front.

They did not put the city on low ground. Three hundred years ago, they went inland away from the coast to build a city to secure the westward expansion of the Nation. Thomas Jefferson had the sense to borrow money from the Treasury, not to spend it on tax cuts, but to invest it in the Louisiana Purchase at 3 cents an acre. Then Andrew Jackson went there in 1803 and fought the British again. Not once; we fought them twice because they knew when we beat them in 1776, they could come back and take New Orleans and take the country away, and we fought them again.

But we have a Federal Government for the last couple of years--I have made some mistakes since I have been here, so I am not the only one; I am not saying I have not made mistakes. But we have a Federal Government whose only answer to any problem we have had, whether it is a recession, depression, or irrational exuberance, a high stock market, a low stock market, a war or no war, is to give tax cuts.

Let me ask something: Could anybody describe to me how this woman could take advantage of any tax cut? What would she do? Do you think she has any money in her IRA she could borrow to help her rebuild her house? Do you think maybe she could call her accountant and see if he could figure out a strategy for her to save a few dollars on the next income tax check she pays? I don't think so.

This woman--I don't know her name, but she looks a lot like my grandmother before she died. There are grandmothers and grandfathers all over the gulf coast sitting in chairs just like one looking at total destruction, and they have to hear from this Congress that we are about ready to pass yet another tranche of tax cuts, but we cannot send somebody to help her pick up the debris.

And please don't tell me you are sending faith-based organizations. And I say that with the greatest respect. You know why? Because the church that used to be here does not exist any longer. I am certain some church could

come from New Jersey or come from New York or come from California, but this woman's church does not stand any longer.

In my State--this may be Mississippi, I don't know--but in the State of Louisiana, the Catholic Church, which is the largest church in New Orleans, is basically telling me and our delegation and any leaders who will listen that they may have to lay off thousands of workers at the archdiocese because their churches are destroyed and their schools are destroyed. But yet we have a Government that wants to say: Let the faith-based organizations do it. They are faith-based organizations. They are the Catholic Church. They need help.

We have a bill we have been asking for--and the President has asked for it as well--and we cannot get this Congress to move to give some help to some of the children who were in Catholic schools so they can get through this school year--70,000 of them. We cannot move that bill.

That is why I am on the floor today to talk about a lot of issues. As Senators come, they may want to talk about the Defense bill, but our war is right here at home. Our war is right here in the gulf coast. This debate is about the protection we seek, our security, our way of life. Millions of people from the gulf coast have given their lives for this country in war after war, in crisis after crisis, and now we ask for help and we get $63 billion to FEMA, which cannot seem to function well enough to get anybody help. So I have come to the floor to say: OK, let's catch a breath. FEMA is not working that well. Let's not worry about why now, let's try to fix the problem and take $10 billion of the $43 billion FEMA has that is sitting there, not getting to any of the people I showed, take it, and give it through whatever accountability mechanisms we can come up with, to give people health care they desperately need, to give relief to our schools that are about to stagger and collapse--elementary, secondary, and our universities that are also our major employers, that also have the brain power that is going to help us rebuild this region; they are about ready to close their doors--to give direct aid to our sheriffs, our police, and our firefighters who are desperately trying to keep the doors open on the cities and counties and communities, large and small, throughout the gulf coast. Give us a few of those billion dollars we have given to FEMA, which cannot function, and let us use that money. And if FEMA needs more money down the line, we can always give them some more.

But we cannot do that. All we can do is pass a Defense bill, argue about Defense authorization, take care of the war in Iraq, rebuild Iraq, but we cannot even focus on rebuilding the gulf coast where Americans have paid taxes their whole life and cannot get the Federal Government to act effectively.

I compliment the Senator from Alaska for moving our Defense appropriations bill. It is an extremely important bill for our Nation, and he has been very gracious to allow me this time. I am looking to see if another Senator shows up. I will be happy to end my remarks and take some time later today. We are on the Defense bill, and we have to move this bill and, of course, under the rules we only have 30 more hours of debate and we have to vote on that bill.

The bottom line, I guess, is this: We have been in negotiations with the White House and with the Republican leadership to pass something before we leave, something that is substantive but also in some ways symbolic, that somebody in Washington is hearing what people from the gulf coast are saying, which is, We know FEMA was funded, but we need help now.

FEMA is not well led, even though we have a new leader and he is doing a better job than the former one. It is not well resourced. It is not well organized, and it is not being that well coordinated at home. We can fix that, I am confident, over time. I am certain we have learned some of the mistakes that we have made with FEMA, and we can fix it; FEMA can be fixed, and we will have some time to do that. But right now, we need to get help to the people of Louisiana and the gulf coast.

We have asked for $1.5 billion for our State and local governments so that they can keep their doors open, not lay off their core workforce, either their police, their fire, their permitting offices, the support that a city or county needs to function, so that over the next few months and few years, we can actually rebuild our towns.

Last night, from what I understand, the White House offered $300 million, but $300 million is not enough to help the towns that are about to have to close their doors, including the city of New Orleans, which is struggling to stay open and to track people back to the third or fourth of the city that can function that is out of water.

The mayor announced yesterday that he has to lay off 3,000 people. We do not need to be laying off people. We need to be hiring people. There is enough work to be done. Just imagine 90,000 square miles of destruction. Does anybody doubt that there is not a lot of work that could be done? We do not need to be laying off public employees and laying off people in the private sector. We need to be stabilizing those who are working now and then be smart, strategic, wise, careful, and accountable as we hire help to stand up a region that is not just for the people who live there but for the whole Nation. Does anyone doubt that there is enough work to be done?

Let me show a picture of New Orleans. This is what parts of it looked like only a few weeks ago. It goes on for miles and miles, water standing 6 feet, 8 feet, 10 feet, interstates underwater. Does anybody doubt that there is a lot of work to be done? Why are we laying off people anywhere? I will say why--because sales taxes cannot be collected from empty buildings. Sales taxes cannot be collected from people who no longer live in their house and there is not a WalMart or a mom-and-pop store to shop within miles. How does a city with a $40 million monthly payroll exist for more than a month or two?

If somebody says, Well, they can borrow the money, let me talk about that for a minute because I was a State treasurer. I know a little bit about this issue. The constitution of the State of Louisiana smartly does not allow the State to borrow for operating expenses. Isn't that unique. We can only borrow money to build highways and invest in capital infrastructure. It is a very smart and wise restriction because if there are not restrictions like that, we end up being like the U.S. Government, which borrows to give tax cuts to people who did not even ask for them.

I am sorry we cannot organize a constitutional referendum in the next 30 days. Even if we could organize a constitutional referendum in the next 30 days, there are no polling places for people to vote, and if we tried to find our voters, we could not find them. So I am a little confused about how we would do that.

The State of Mississippi does not have that same restriction. I understand they have borrowed $500 million. So this woman right here, who I am pretty sure is from Mississippi--and I am not criticizing Mississippi. They have their own plans, and maybe they are great. But this woman will have to pay that $500 million back. I do not believe that is a great idea. I do not think she has enough money to put food on her table the next couple of months. If that is what they want to do, I do not know how they are going to pay this $500 million back, but I promise they are either going to cut programs this woman benefits from or she is going to get charged directly for it. That might be a good plan. I would not support something like that.

My State cannot borrow the money, and even if we could, we have a billion-dollar shortfall at the Federal level because the income is not coming in. The oil wells are not producing, so we do not get our severance taxes. The ports are crippled, so we are not getting that revenue. The sales taxes are way down, and the expenses are way up.

I have listened to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal tell me the people of Louisiana are not self- reliant. Why can't we just fix our own problem? First, it is not our problem, it is the Nation's problem. The last time I looked, we were the United States of America. I am not sure we are anymore, but that is what we were the last time I said the Pledge of Allegiance.

Either people want me to keep talking or they do not have anything to say because nobody else is on the floor, so I will talk for a few more minutes and then I am going to sit down and just

hold my time. I will talk more about the general subject, but I wish to be clear about why I am standing here and what we have asked for. We have asked for some help, just anything that we can take home before we leave so that people will have some hope that somebody up here is listening to them.

I have asked to pull up the Grassley-Baucus bill, which has been unanimously approved by Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, not a Democratic bill--thank God led by a great Senator, a Republican from Iowa who is the chairman of the Finance Committee. He understands, even though he is not from Louisiana, how much people are suffering, and he wants to help. So he and Senator Baucus, leaders that they are, 3 weeks ago, with the help of Senator Lincoln from Arkansas, put a good bill together. It cost about $13 billion. If there were some things eliminated, we could scale it back to about $6 billion or $7 billion. When I say eliminated, there is some help for all the States. Maybe we just eliminate helping everyone else and help ourselves. We are trying to be generous. If other Senators want to try to help their States, who am I to say they cannot help their States. But if the Senate agrees to just help Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, fine with me. They put a bill together, we passed it unanimously, and we cannot get any action on that bill. So we have asked for that.

We have asked for some education money to keep our schools open. We are trying not to ask too much because every time we ask for something, we are told we are greedy, we are looters, we are not self-reliant, how dare we ask on behalf of the people who have nothing for a little money out of the treasury, from their own money that they put in the treasury, how dare we ask for it. I am not going to stop asking, and I do not care how many editorials are written about me and my State at this point. Just go ahead and keep writing them.

I would be happy to.

I would be happy to, and I thank the Senator for his leadership because the Grassley-Baucus bill does a couple of important things that are essential for the rebuilding and emergency needs of a population--not just the poor but the middle income and those who had private insurance the day before Katrina hit. The Baucus-Grassley bill allows the States to know that they are going to be reimbursed for the care they are providing to people who have virtually no insurance. For a State such as Louisiana, whose legislature may be meeting in the next few weeks, with a billion-dollar shortfall looming, I say to Senator Durbin, it is critical that the States of Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama and Texas have some idea now about what the Federal Government is going to do regarding their insurance. We share it 70/30. The State cannot put up a 30-percent match. This bill waives that match so that our States can start making good budget decisions at a very difficult time, in addition to providing health care for those who are 200 percent or below of poverty--which in our State is only $18,000 or $20,000--to make sure that people have health insurance.

But for middle-income families, working families, and even wealthy families that had health insurance, this bill allows them--even if their employers have gone under or taken bankruptcy or closed their doors and laid them off--to keep their health insurance for a few months, for 6 months or 12 months, depending on their category.

A Senator said on the floor, Senator Durbin, that people can get health insurance, they can get health care. Yes, in some way; they can go to an emergency room and wait for 3 days. But if they want to go to their doctor's office to whom they have been going for their whole life, and take their child to their pediatrician and they now don't have health insurance, unless we pass this bill, they can't go knock on the door of their pediatrician, for example, unless they give them a credit card or cash because there is no health insurance without the Baucus-Grassley bill. People who don't have a home, don't have a church or don't have a school now do not even have health care because we have to go home on a 10-day break and leave them wondering where they are going to get their medicine. That is what the bill does, I say to Senator Durbin.

I do not know, I say to Senator Durbin. That is a puzzlement for us. I do not have a good answer for that. All I can say is there are 2 million people displaced, many towns are destroyed, many communities, both urban and suburban, rural as well as highly dense. Neighborhoods of black and white, Hispanic and Asian, poor and middle- income are wondering the same thing.

Why does Congress keep giving money to FEMA? FEMA is not functioning very well. So when our Governors and our mayors and our sheriffs ask for a little bit of help with health insurance and education and the basics to turn running water on--we have had enough bottled water. Please don't send us any more bottled water. We have plenty.

We need to turn the faucets on so water will come out so a small business

that wants to operate can actually function with some water. You cannot have a business operating without water. That is what we need.

We have asked for these emergency things, to be told we do not have the money. I am going to sit down. In this amendment, we are asking for four or five things, for education, for health care, for immediate needs, for help for some hospitals that stayed up. Three hospitals stayed up the whole time in the region. If we do not help them, these hospitals will close, employees will be laid off, and whatever modest health care system we have for the region will basically be dysfunctional.

But what we really want--we want those things, but what we want is some action taken before we leave. We can vote on these individually. We did get a commitment from the administration that they will do more than $300 million. Because if we do not get more than $300 million before we leave here, the city of New Orleans, the Archdiocesan--the Catholic Diocese--or St. Tammany Parish, or some parts of it, or Plaquemines or St. Bernard or any number of other places, I say to Senator Durbin, will have to lay off workers who then will lose their health insurance, lose whatever means they have of keeping themselves and their families intact, and the situation will be spiraling downward, not spiraling upward.

The Senator has been very gracious. I am going to reserve the remainder of whatever time I have, but that is what we are asking for, and I hope we can get something done before we leave for this week-and- a-half break.

I object. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I ask to speak for as much time as I may consume. I understand there will be other amendments that may be offered. We are trying to debate and pass the Defense appropriations bill. I thank the Senator from Alaska and the Senator from Hawaii for their good work in trying to move this bill through because they have done an outstanding job.

I find myself in a very unusual position because, of course, I voted for cloture because I want to pass this bill. We absolutely have to pass a Defense appropriations bill. Unfortunately, we have had 48 soldiers from Louisiana die, many more wounded. Families are still mourning those losses and we have to figure out a way to get the job done over there, and get it done right and get our soldiers home.

We need to move on with this bill. As my colleagues know, at about 4:30 this morning this bill will pass under the cloture rules and we are going to go on. But I have decided to take some time until 4:30 this morning to talk about a war that is going on at home and that is a war we are fighting on the gulf coast to stay alive, to protect our way of life, to keep the American flag flying over Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Yes.

Mr. President, I probably will not take all 94 minutes at this moment, but I will probably take that and even some more as we move through the evening trying to get some closure on a subject we have now been talking about, unfortunately, it seems, with no end in sight, or no resolution on the horizon to try to get some real money-- not photo ops, not promises, not press conferences, not visits, but some real money to some real people in Louisiana who need help, our cities that were devastated, our parishes that have been crippled, our law enforcement that has been set back on its heels. Three hospitals stayed open the entire time in the New Orleans metropolitan area to provide desperately needed emergency health care in a region of almost 1.5 million people. Heroically, they stayed up, and because they did, one of those hospitals cannot claim insurance because the only way they can claim it is if they closed down. They stayed open so they may lose their hospital if we do not try to get some money.

The reason I do not feel the least bit guilty standing here asking for it on this bill is because the underlying Defense bill--if the staff will bring me the final numbers of this bill--has a tremendous amount of money we are spending in Iraq for our defense and for the standing up of Iraq. While I have questions about some of the things we are doing, some of the things we have done, and how we are going to get ourselves back home after stabilizing it, I have to say when I went on the Web site today, it was hard to actually read. The people of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are going to be quite surprised if they go on this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web site and pull up this gulf region division because they might think this is about the gulf region right here in the United States. But it is not. It is about the gulf region in Iraq.

In the underlying bill we are passing, and we need to pass, I am trying to get the administration--the leadership here to at least agree to take $1 billion of the FEMA money we have already allocated, $62 billion, and send to Louisiana to begin some construction projects and some standing up of some critical programs to keep cities, parishes, and law enforcement whole as we begin our rebuilding program from the largest natural disaster that ever occurred. That is all we are trying to do is give $1 billion to the cities and parishes so they can hold heart and soul together, so as we pass additional help, whether it comes from levee construction, or whether it comes from small business, or whether it comes from health care, the entities of the government, the parish presidents, the cities, the sheriffs, the police officers, and the fire departments are there to help us build a region.

I was surprised to see on the Web page that this is the goal we have in Iraq: to establish a government, provide security, enhance basic services to the Government of Iraq. It sounds like something we are trying to do in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama--provide security, enhance basic services, and keep our cities, our police forces, our fire departments operating through the worst and largest natural disaster in the history of the United States.

We are getting ready to send billions of dollars to Iraq, finance billions of tax cuts for other people, finance billions for programs. We have already given $62 billion to FEMA that everyone says does not work, and I can personally testify to that, having been in the State now almost every day since this hurricane. We cannot seem to get an agreement to get $1 billion for the people of the gulf coast to keep their security open, their basic services operating, their electricity running, and their water turned on.

We have been working for weeks diligently on these 815 projects in Iraq for ports of entry, military facilities, police facilities, fire facilities, prisons, and courts. The last time I checked the New Orleans court system, we did not even have a court operating. The last time I checked, the supreme court had moved to Zachary. The supreme court used to be operating in New Orleans until Katrina came. The whole supreme court went to Zachary, LA. They do not even have a court building to operate in.

I am all for this bill. To my knowledge, I have never voted against a Defense appropriations bill and do not intend to tonight, but because Senator Vitter and I have been asking for some money directly, not even new money, not even money out of this bill, for the House of Representatives to send us a commitment, for the President to send us a commitment of $1 billion to our sheriffs, to our police force, to our firefighters for 3 months, to keep them operating, is it any surprise that I cannot sit in my chair and smile while we are sending all of this money to stand up public works in Iraq--354 planned projects in water treatment, sewer projects, buildings for health and education; 1,091 projects, including schools, primary health care centers, hospitals, and public buildings?

This is what my city looks like. Actually, this is not New Orleans. This is probably Waveland or Bay St. Louis, but it could be New Orleans. It could be Slidell.

This is what the gulf coast of the United States looks like today. Most of it is gone. These are the cities Senator Vitter and I and our delegation have been trying to get help to. I do not see any houses here, but maybe someone does. I do not know how we collect ad valorem taxes to pay for police and fire protection. There are no stores people can shop in to generate the sales tax necessary to keep the mayor and city hall functioning. When we pass tax credits, which we might want to do and have already done to entice businesses to come back, where would they go to get a permit? When they file their plans for construction, who would review them? When they have to file their plan to meet the EPA standards that would be required before they could build here, who would be there to take their application?

This photo is what my constituents look like. I wouldn't be surprised if this man was in the Army or the Navy. Maybe he is a Reserve officer. I wouldn't be surprised at all because I have thousands of them who put the uniform on and went to Iraq and came back, and this is what they have come back to. I have an administration that is going to pass this Defense bill to put electricity in Baghdad, build schools in Baghdad, and will not give the Louisiana delegation $1 billion--out of $62 billion that has already been allocated so it wouldn't cost anybody a penny--to help keep the lights on in the cities that were destroyed.

This is what my people look like. I don't know how many times they have to cry. I am sorry she doesn't have a lobbyist to send to Washington. I happen to be her lobbyist.

Here is one for the books. ``Here lies Vera. God help us.'' I think this grave is in New Orleans. I am not certain. But neighbors in the middle of the flood, when no one would come to get them, took this 65- year-old woman who was killed in the flood and built a grave for her and wrote ``Here lies Vera. God help us,'' before they left.

This is a picture of a woman who the news media does not think a lot of--not all of them, but a lot of them don't think she is self-reliant. We don't have self-reliant people in Louisiana because we have the nerve to come up here and ask for money. That is our money that we put in the Treasury. We don't have self-reliant people, one of the newspapers said, in Louisiana.

Our people put money in the Federal Treasury thinking they belonged to the United States of America, so when one county or one parish or one State is hurt, the other 49 might come to their aid. That is what the United States is about.

This woman looks pretty self-reliant to me. She does not have much, but you know what. She has her two children in her arms. And if she had three, I am sure she would have figured out how to bring the other one on her back. She brought them to safety.

This woman may be complaining, but I can tell you I have seen a lot of people who have been through a lot of stuff, and they still come up to me and say: Senator, we appreciate everything everybody is doing for us. I just wish you would hurry up.

Not everybody is complaining. But let me put it down right now: I am complaining. This Senator is complaining about the treatment that our people have received.

I tried to be patient. I tried to say: Fine, FEMA is not working. I understand it. We all made a mistake. We all messed up. We put it where it can't work. We put someone in charge who didn't know what he was doing. We gave them money, they can't spend it, so let me just have $1 billion of the $62 billion that they have. There is $43 billion sitting there they cannot even use. Let me just please get it to my firemen, to my police officers, to the mayors to let them operate for 3 more months.

I have to be told: Senator, I am sorry. We want to go home on a break. You know what. We are not leaving until 4:30 in the morning. We might go home on a break, but it will be 4:30 tonight.

Right after the storm, a lot of people didn't have electricity. After hurricanes you don't have a lot of electricity, so people are used to it. After about a week or 2 weeks, the electricity comes on, but of course a lot of things are ruined in your house. But I still have places with no electricity. How do you get businesses to come back if they don't have electricity? I still have places that don't have running water.

Please stop sending us bottled water. We have enough. It is not the bottles we need, it is the faucets that need to get turned on. But we are going to stand here and pass a bill delivering on power for Iraq.

A total of 2,760 megawatts of power have been added to the grid in Iraq to service more than 5 million Iraqi homes, and I can't get $1 billion to help keep electrical workers on the ground in New Orleans turning on the power in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Alabama.

We never have any money for anything, but here in the Corps of Engineers budget here is $4.3 billion allocated from supplemental appropriations for general system improvements for electricity. The World Bank estimates the total necessity to be $12 billion, so I am sure we are going to come up with the other $8 billion to turn the lights on in Iraq. But the people who produce the electricity in the United States of America to turn on lights everywhere in the country, from Chicago to New York to California, can't get the lights turned on in their own backyard because nobody around here can find $1 billion to give to us.

They say: Senator, how do you know FEMA is not working? I have been home just about every day and have been to most of the shelters, talked to most of my mayors, talked to my sheriffs, talked to everybody at home, trying to be patient, understanding they are working little kinks out. But let me tell you what comes into our office on a daily basis.

Phone calls to my office:

The attached pages are records of some [underline some] of

the calls received in the last few days. Nearly all of them

from constituents who have not received any assistance from

the Federal Government or Red Cross.

Some of the first calls were for search and rescue, and in

the 35 days since Hurricane Katrina made landfall, countless

Louisianans are in no better shape than they were on the day

the hurricane hit.

I am sure Senator Vitter has a stack at least this thick, if not thicker, as has every member of our congressional delegation, and even some of our neighbors from the neighboring States. They have calls recorded--names, phone numbers.

When people say, Senator, how do you know FEMA is not working, I do have an idea it might not be working very well. So we could take $1 billion from FEMA, send it through an already existing program called the Community Disaster Loan Program that worked in New York, that worked in Puerto Rico, that has worked everywhere in the country when disasters strike, and transfer some of that money there and just give it to our cities, our sheriffs, our law enforcement, and the three hospitals that stood up. Not the 21 other hospitals that are closed, not all the other needs that we have, from levees to environment to housing to education to health care--none of that. We can wait for that until we get back. Just keep us operating while we are on vacation.

We have yet to hear from the White House, from the House of Representatives. I know the Senate would pass such a proposal, but the reason I cannot accept the passage from the Senate is because all that would be is a Senate-passed bill.

I am sure the Senate would pass it unanimously, but it would pass and it

would sit and no one in Louisiana or Mississippi would get help because until the House of Representatives acts, until the President says that he will do this, it cannot be done.

I know the President wants to help. He has been down to the State. He recognizes that FEMA is having some problems. He has said he wants to help. But we just cannot keep waiting. So I am going to stay here through the evening. I am going to continue to negotiate. I am going to continue to talk with the Senators handling this bill. I am going to continue to have telephone calls and meetings with anybody who would like to talk about this subject and see what we can do to get this money committed, in real dollars, in any bill in any way for this one community disaster assistance program.

Then we need a commitment when we get back to have a vote on Grassley-Baucus, a bill that gives emergency health care that this Senate has already approved in a bipartisan way, and three amendments to that bill. They would cover some emergency education for elementary and secondary grades and emergency education for our universities that are teetering on the brink of collapse--all of them, public and private, and historically black colleges included. If we can have a vote when we come back--the Senate can vote no, the House can vote no, or you know what--the President can veto the bills. But at least I will think I did everything I could to try to get people help. If the President wants to veto the bills, fine. If the Senate wants to vote them down, fine. If the House wants to vote them down, fine. But at least we can get a commitment to get votes on those bills, get the $1 billion now, and we will come back.

I assure you we will be working on this not for weeks but for months, for perhaps years--until we stand up this region.

I am not one who doesn't believe in nation building. Some people don't think we should be engaged in it. I happen to be inspired by the idea that maybe the United States has some things we could share in a positive way and help countries to achieve what we have achieved, which is remarkable in the history of the world. But I have to tell you, the first nation we need to be building is our own. We have had the largest natural disaster in the history of the country, Katrina, followed by Rita, which was a vicious and very tough storm, and in between those things a disastrous collapsing of a levee system that put the Nation's energy coast underwater--or a large segment of it. It put 10 feet of water in a major American city and virtually has shut it down and shut down the surrounding areas.

I have to walk around the Senate for 31 days pretending. Are people saying to me, What can we do to help? We have laid down many things that can help. Many committees have responded. Yet the only thing that has happened for 31 days is that we have given FEMA money, and they can't seem to get it out. So we need to try something a little different. We need to try something a little different.

I wish FEMA was the way it used to be, and maybe it will be again. But it is not today, and it won't be next week, and it won't be next month. We can't keep waiting for FEMA to organize itself. We are the Congress of the United States. We are Senators. We understand these things. We have been through them before. And to just keep doing the same old thing and expecting different results is crazy. It doesn't make any sense. It is not right.

Let us figure out a way to take $1 billion out of FEMA, transfer it either through this bill or through another vehicle, and send the money to our parishes, to our cities, to our police, to our fire for 3 months of operation, which is already authorized in the law. But the reason it can't be done administratively is because there is a legislative cap of $5 million. The budget for the city of New Orleans alone, salaries only, is $20 million a month. Why would anybody think that a program that only allows you to borrow $5 million would help them? We have to find $1 billion, approximately, to keep these entities up and running, or by the time we get back in 10 days they might have already had to lay off police, fire, and critical personnel. How do you start building up again once you have closed down your city hall, shut down your fire department, shut down your police department, and people have had to go out and search for jobs elsewhere? How do you recruit them to come back? How do you get them back after you have broken their spirits and laid them off is beyond me.

Let me correct myself. No matter what Congress does, having represented this State for a long time, I want to say that you are not going to break our spirit. It has been around a long time. We are a pretty old place. We were here before the country and are worth saving. We will figure it out.

But people in Louisiana are having a hard time figuring out how we can spend weeks on the Defense appropriations bill, which is doing more than supporting our troops, which is building up Iraq, actually, with a gulf coast region. I want to repeat, gulf region division. We don't even have a gulf region division of the Corps of Engineers in the United States of America today. We have a New Orleans district which covers the southern part of Louisiana. We don't even have a gulf coast region. That would be an advancement. But we have one in Iraq. Meanwhile, the gulf coast of this United States, the heart of the energy industry, looks something like this with the water down.

As I said many times, while there is a lot of vacationing that goes on in the gulf coast, particularly along the coast of Mississippi, we have enjoyed that beautiful coastline for years, and we have enjoyed the beautiful sandy beaches in Alabama. Most of the people in the coast of Louisiana and many in Mississippi and Alabama work at the ports. They work at shipbuilding. They are shipbuilders or they are commercial fishermen who put food on the table that everybody in America eats, and around the world. They light up Chicago, and they are proud of it.

Do you know what the National Geographic said about it? I think this is a very reputable publication, and it is written, I am very proud to say, with the help of the Times-Picayune, our newspaper which has been in the city I think as long as the city has been there, evacuated itself. They are writing the paper in Baton Rouge and printing it in Houma. We don't even have a newspaper in the city of New Orleans, not the major newspaper. We have several other good publications, and they are all struggling to stay in business. But with nobody in the city, where would you deliver your paper and to whom would you sell the advertising? There are no businesses in the city that are operating very well. But our newspaper, thank goodness, is still working. They collaborated with the National Geographic and the Dallas Morning News and put together this amazing report on Hurricane Katrina, ``Why It Became a Manmade Disaster and Where It Could Happen Next.'' I highly recommend it for reading here and around the country.

On page 49, it talks about an economic powerhouse brought to its knees. We are not a charity case in Louisiana. We are an economic powerhouse, and we have been so for over 350 years. I reminded my colleagues today, thank God for President's like Thomas Jefferson who understood borrowing money and what you borrow it for. He borrowed money from the Treasury and bought the Louisiana Purchase for 3 cents an acre because he knew that this country could not grow and meet its destiny, that western expansion and getting to the West was impossible without the Mississippi River.

Andrew Jackson went down there after he fought one war and defended it again. Why? Because after he won the first war, the British tried to come and take New Orleans because if they could take New Orleans, we could never be the country we are. Thank God Andrew Jackson knew about it, and thank goodness the storm didn't topple his statue, which is still in Jackson Square.

An economic powerhouse brought to its knees. Eight hundred manned and thousands of unmanned platforms are in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest platform, Mars, is teetering on its side. They cannot produce oil and gas. We are trying to get it stood up again.

If anybody wants to know why the price is going up, it is because this monster hurricane hit the heart of the oil and gas industry. Despite our best efforts to protect these infrastructures, despite begging for decades--decade after decade after decade--to restore

our marsh, to protect the investment this country has made, for 200 years we have been turned down time and time again. So now it is time to pay the piper. And I am sorry if it is going to cost $40 billion. I am sorry that is what it is going to cost over the next 10 to 20 years to stand this powerhouse up again. If anybody wants to check the figures, just come to the Hart Building on the 7th floor, and I will go over every single dollar with you.

Do you know what the biggest ports are in America? It is not New York, it is not Seattle, and it is not Houston. It is the Port of South Louisiana, the Port of New Orleans and the Port of Baton Rouge. We dwarf the other ports. We dwarf them. Our port comes up here and asks for some money, and they get told they are a charity case. They have been taking grain out of Kansas for 200 years. We have been draining the whole continental United States for 200 years. We have been shipping everything--goods--all over the world for 200 years. And I have to hear that when our port comes here for help, maybe not even a grant, just a loan to get them through the next 3 or 4 months until they can get back up on their feet, that there is something un-American about them, they need to be more self-reliant.

Over 9,000 miles of pipeline connect the gulf with the Eastern United States. We have laid pipelines. No one in America wants them, but we have been laying them down for a long time. Why? Because we have oil and gas. We believe in energy, energy independence. We don't think we should get everything from Saudi Arabia. We would like America to be more independent, so we produce some oil and gas, and we make no apologies for it. But when you lay these pipelines and do not invest in the marsh in which you lay them down and you let it erode and the saltwater comes in and you levee your rivers for channelization and you don't invest in the technology and science that we know would protect our marsh, catastrophes happen.

Unfortunately, as in every case, the poor have suffered the worst. But they are not the only ones who have suffered. Middle-class families, very successful, money in the bank, house paid for, children through college, looking forward to the next 10 or 15 years, 20 years maybe, and they deserve it; they have worked hard all of their lives, they have paid their taxes, they have kept up with their interests, they go to church every week, and this is what they look like today. They are told to be more self-reliant? I do not know how much more self-reliant people can be.

I will continue to explain why our region is an economic powerhouse, why it needs to be so again, why we need to rebuild it, and why, unfortunately, it is going be more expensive than it should have been because of the things we should have been doing for the last 40 years and haven't, the investments the Federal Government should have made and didn't, even when they knew that this was inevitable. Yet there are some things that we didn't do at our State level. And yes, there are some things we didn't do at our city level.

But again, this river does not serve only the 4.5 million people who live in Louisiana, it serves the 300 million people who live in this Nation and the billions of people who live in this world and depend on trade for prosperity and for commerce and for peace, because the more we trade with each other, the more we know each other, the more we can rely on each other in a mutually respectful way, the greatest chance we have for peace.

These levees do not just protect the people who live in the neighborhoods around them. They protect billions and billions of dollars in investment made by this country over a long period of time. And a levee system failed. We have struggled to keep the levees up. We have spent a lot of money keeping them up. But we needed more help from the Federal Government. We could have been more efficient on our end as well. We could have taxed our people more. But it gets hard on all of those fronts. People want tax relief. They don't really want to face the expense of what we have to do. We are not always disciplined about the way we build.

But again, it is not impossible if we make some decisions now to get some emergency money to our cities, to our sheriffs, to our law enforcement officers, and to our very basic health care in the region. This is not just New Orleans, this is all through south Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama. This would cover all of them. Under current law, that is no help to them right now--or very little help. We can cover some places in Texas if they need help. I don't know if they need as much help as we do in Louisiana or as we do along the gulf coast in Mississippi which I am more familiar with than I am the coast of Texas, although of course I have been there. I really grew up on the coast of Mississippi, as well as on the coast of Louisiana, so I am more familiar with it. But I can tell you that these cities that look a lot like this throughout the gulf coast are going to have a hard time meeting payroll.

Some cities have money in the bank, but the needs are so great and so overwhelming and FEMA has not been, as I said, very efficient. If we can't get them just a bridge loan, if you will, for 3 months a lot of our cities won't operate.

Now, I understand--and this is a Mississippi coast. You can tell because they have white beaches. We don't have beaches. Our coastline is marshy. I am pretty sure this is Mississippi. In Mississippi, I understand their legislature has borrowed $500 million so their cities could get some money, and that might be a solution for them. The problem with Louisiana is that our Constitution prevents us from borrowing money for operating expenses. And that is, in my view as a former State treasurer and current Appropriations Committee member, not a bad rule, if you will. You don't want to borrow money for operating expenses. If you are going to borrow money and have people have to pay it back, you want to invest it in that which will return to you something in the future. So you borrow money to build ports, to build highways, for capital improvements. So our State cannot borrow money at the legislative level to give out to our cities for operating expenses or to our firefighters and police. The FEMA law today only allows the payment of overtime. So while we can get overtime paid, we can't get straight time paid. We can't get regular time paid. Even if we would, they can't lend them more than $5 million. And as I said, the operating budget in the city of New Orleans is $20 million a month, so $5 million will not do us very much good. If I thought we could organize a constitutional amendment in 30 days and have a vote, I might suggest that. But the polling places have been washed away, and I am not sure how we would find all of our people to vote since there are people in all 50 States, and we have no mechanism right now to do that, to my knowledge.

So we cannot borrow money at the State level to help them. The cities can't go to the capital market. We are restricted by the Constitution. FEMA has $63 billion, with $43 billion sitting there, and Senator Vitter and I and our delegation have asked for $1 billion to keep the lifeline until we get back from our vacation, and we are told we can't afford it, but we are going to stay here and pass a bill to stand up the country of Iraq by building schools, health care facilities, electric grid, sewer and water, water treatment plants.

Well, I can understand, you all can understand why the people of my State would want me to stand here and try to make this case. So we will be standing here, I will be standing here until 4:30 in the morning until we get a resolution on what we are asking for. I am asking for $1 billion of real money anyway, outside of FEMA or take the $1 billion from FEMA. Let us keep our lifeline going until we get back, and when we get back have a vote on Grassley-Baucus, which this Senate has put together in a bipartisan way, with three amendments for emergency funding for our schools and our universities, for health care, and housing.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

If the Senator will yield for a question and comment, let me thank my colleague from Louisiana for his extraordinary leadership on this issue. He has been in meetings all week, literally for weeks, as I have, and on the phone with everybody you can talk to. Of course, the time he spent in the House in Louisiana has served him well because he knows how much our needs are. But I want to ask him a few questions because he and I are committed to stay tonight until we get some kind of resolution.

Is it the intention of the Senator, the junior Senator from Louisiana, that these loans be in the same line as the current legislation, which gives discretion on the part of the administration to forgive them or not? Or is it the intention of the Senator for us to leave current law and absolutely make it certain, when no one else has been required to do so, that these loans would have to be repaid under all and every circumstance?

I can appreciate that. If you don't mind me pursuing that line of questioning. I can most certainly appreciate what the junior Senator is saying about the reluctance of the House of Representatives and the administration at this point because I have yet to receive any letter or assurance, but it is right now the House of Representatives that basically would be willing to make loans to the devastated cities in the gulf coast, but would insist that those loans be paid back, when not insisting on that for other loans that have been given to Puerto Rico, and to Florida, and to Alaska, and to other places, which were waived.

I understand the House of Representatives, while allowing others to borrow this money and then ask for forgiveness, would not allow Louisiana that same privilege. I understand the position of the Senator is that we be treated the same, as a first-class State, not a second- class State. I know that is your position. But it does concern the senior Senator that we would have to be dictated to by the House of Representatives, that we would have to be treated in some second-class fashion.

I am also appreciating that, while the administration has given you an assurance that they do not intend to treat us as second-class citizens, I would feel better, before we left tonight, if we had something in writing from the administration that they think Louisiana deserves the same treatment. For that reason, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas--that we would deserve the same treatment as other States.

That is why I am in a situation here where I want to commend you for the compromise we have tried to reach today. It is, indeed, tempting. But we are going to have to go home, if we do not get something from this administration, and say we have agreed to a second-class status, and our people have been hurt and offended and left by a FEMA that is not operating very well. That is my concern.

I know you and I agree about that, but do you want to go ahead and answer?

If the Senator will yield, I can most certainly appreciate that perspective. I definitely agree it is extremely important to not just give speeches but to get something that is real for our people. But because we have no written commitment from the administration, and no resolution, and no letter, and no written commitment from the House, no assurance, no resolution, no promise to pass the legislation that you have presented and outlined, I am not sure even if you and I could manage--because there is not very much disagreement between the two of us; but our colleagues have some disagreements--if we could pass this legislation in the Senate that it is actually really going to do anything for people at home other than say the Senate has come together.

It would not be the first time the Senate has come together, as the Senator knows, because this Senate is ready to pass emergency health care legislation, and this Senate is ready to pass emergency education legislation, and this Senate is ready to pass--and already has passed-- help for small businesses. So it is not the Senate, as the junior Senator----

Just 1 minute. Let me finish.

The Senate is not necessarily the problem. We have been amazingly bipartisan. Our committee chairs and ranking members, as the Senator knows, have done yeoman's work. And in the Small Business Committee that you and I serve on, we have already passed that legislation. But the senior Senator remains concerned that we still do not have any written assurance or a resolution or something we could take home to our mayors, et cetera.

Let me say one other point. I have read carefully the proposed language about lending Louisiana and Mississippi and Texas this money, and then making us pay it back when no one else in the country has been forced to do that. I have read that language. I have also read the language about who is eligible.

I ask the junior Senator, are you confident in the language--and I do not have it in front of me, but I can call it up, not that it is filed--that the sheriffs of Louisiana would be included in this proposed compromise? Is the Senator from Louisiana indicating that the sheriffs of our State are absolutely, positively included?

OK.

Go right ahead.

I have not yet expressed an objection, but I am considering it on the grounds--I am not yet expressing objection, but I am considering it, respectfully, having complimented the junior Senator for the great work he has done, because I am hesitant to accept terms of aid that are applied only to us and to no one else, and not because the junior Senator objects or other Senators, but because the House of Representatives, which is in control of the Republican leadership, has decided that the only way that they will amend the law is to force us alone, uniquely, to have to agree to pay it back, when no one else in America, in the past or the future, will be required to do so. That is a hard thing for the senior Senator to agree to, but I am considering it, if maybe that is our only option.

But you can understand why I might be a little bit exercised about the House of Representatives saying to people who are desperate--like on the front page of the National Geographic--we know you are suffering, we know you need help, there is no question you have no money to pay your bills, there is no question that we have lent other people money and forgiven their loans, there is no question that this is the worst natural disaster in the history of the country--but the only way we will compromise with you, Senator Landrieu and Senator Vitter and Senator Frist and Senator Reid, is if your desperate people promise to pay the loan back. And, by the way, we are only making the law for you.

Hold on. I will not yield at this moment. If someone-- --

Can I answer that?

Can I answer that?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to dispense with the calling of the roll.

I thank the Senator from Alaska.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, it has been a very long day. I am hoping, as this day continues into the evening hours, as we continue to work on the underlying bill, which is the Defense appropriations bill, to have an amendment dealing with Hurricane Katrina in a way this Congress might respond to this urgent need. I thank the Senator from Alaska for his patience through this day because the issue that is before us really is not an amendment on the Defense bill. It is a separate issue but needs to be handled before we leave, in my opinion.

That is why I have stayed here throughout the day and have been here, of course, throughout the week, in many meetings and phone calls, and now in time on the floor throughout the day, to try to find a way to get some immediate help to our cities and parishes and counties along the gulf coast. It looks like there is a possibility that still might be the case.

But because of the lateness of the hour, really for the staff that has been here so long, I am going to agree to continue to work through the night, allow the staff to take a recess, and spend some time on this, as I have throughout the last few hours, working with my colleagues, particularly Senator Levin from Michigan, who has put in a tremendous amount of time, other Senators, Senator Carper from Delaware, Senator Clinton, Senator Durbin, Senator Reid. And Senator Frist has been here for a while. Of course, Senator Vitter was here earlier trying to get through this process, with the specific focus of mine being to try to get our State in the same situation that other States have been put in when they needed help.

We are not quite there yet, but we may yet get there by the time we close the debate in just a few hours. But, really, the staff has done more than they should be asked, to stay this late.

We have tried four or five different compromises in the last 8 hours, and we are not quite there yet. But we may be there in the morning when the Senate comes out of recess.

I am going to continue to work through the evening to see if we can find some sort of solution so that our four States--Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas--can be treated in the same way with the same respect as other States have in disasters in the past.

I thank the Senator for his patience throughout the evening.

I thank the Senator from Alaska.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, it has been a very long day. I am hoping, as this day continues into the evening hours, as we continue to work on the underlying bill, which is the Defense appropriations bill, to have an amendment dealing with Hurricane Katrina in a way this Congress might respond to this urgent need. I thank the Senator from Alaska for his patience through this day because the issue that is before us really is not an amendment on the Defense bill. It is a separate issue but needs to be handled before we leave, in my opinion.

That is why I have stayed here throughout the day and have been here, of course, throughout the week, in many meetings and phone calls, and now in time on the floor throughout the day, to try to find a way to get some immediate help to our cities and parishes and counties along the gulf coast. It looks like there is a possibility that still might be the case.

But because of the lateness of the hour, really for the staff that has been here so long, I am going to agree to continue to work through the night, allow the staff to take a recess, and spend some time on this, as I have throughout the last few hours, working with my colleagues, particularly Senator Levin from Michigan, who has put in a tremendous amount of time, other Senators, Senator Carper from Delaware, Senator Clinton, Senator Durbin, Senator Reid. And Senator Frist has been here for a while. Of course, Senator Vitter was here earlier trying to get through this process, with the specific focus of mine being to try to get our State in the same situation that other States have been put in when they needed help.

We are not quite there yet, but we may yet get there by the time we close the debate in just a few hours. But, really, the staff has done more than they should be asked, to stay this late.

We have tried four or five different compromises in the last 8 hours, and we are not quite there yet. But we may be there in the morning when the Senate comes out of recess.

I am going to continue to work through the evening to see if we can find some sort of solution so that our four States--Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas--can be treated in the same way with the same respect as other States have in disasters in the past.

I thank the Senator for his patience throughout the evening.

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

I ask unanimous consent to lay aside the pending amendment.

I call up amendment No. 1942.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, as we consider many important amendments to this underlying bill, I will take just a moment to speak about this amendment which I offer that will call the attention of my colleagues to the important investments that we should be making in interoperability and communications.

As my colleagues know, we have had a very recent disaster along the gulf coast that has made quite apparent the lack of a communications system that is adequate to handle natural disasters of this magnitude and even manmade disasters that we could contemplate. So this is quite serious. I know there are many committees of the Senate and the House that are working very hard on this issue right now.

Since Katrina and Rita and even before these terrible hurricanes and the subsequent flooding of this region, which has been devastating, we have known for some time that we have to get a better system of communication. Our military has some interesting and very promising initiatives underway that could truly help us at this time. That is basically what this $30 million amendment will do, is dedicate or allocate $30 million to U.S. Northern Command for the purposes of implementing IMT-2000 3G Communications Capabilities. The IMT-2000 3G Standards will be used for the Gulf States and key entities within the Northern Command Area of Responsibility, AOR.

We have many needs that have shown themselves out of this storm and out of the subsequent disaster. It would be hard even for the Senator from the State that was most directly hit to have to list them in an order of priority because they are overwhelming and they are so great: water, food, electricity, housing, direct help to our local governments. We will debate that as these days unfold, and we will debate that as these weeks and months unfold.

One thing I am positively sure of is that the communications system we had in this country did not work well in 9/11. It did not work well for the hurricanes that hit the Presiding Officer's State in such a devastating way only a year or two ago, and it did not work well for Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, which experienced one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country.

To address the devastating problems caused by the lack of communication, $30 million is a small investment. I offer this amendment and ask, as we move through the next few days of consideration of this Defense bill, if we would please take a very careful look at the importance of this amendment.

I submit the amendment for the Senate's consideration.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.