Mary Landrieu

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. She is right. We have worked across the aisle as much as we could. But for some inexplicable reason, we can't seem to get unanimous consent to move such an important and extraordinary bill forward. The small business bill, the Main Street bill, has $12 billion in tax cuts for small business. Democrats are for tax cuts for small businesses that will help them to create the jobs we need. It is very targeted, very strategic, very thoughtful, very careful, and focused on reducing the deficit as well. All I hear from the other side is: Extend tax cuts permanently to everybody, to heck with the deficit. Who cares if we get to a balanced budget. We want to go back to the way things were. Democrats don't want to go back to the way things were. We want to go forward in a new way--with sound fiscal policy, balanced budgets, focused on Main Street, focused on small business. That is what Democrats and a handful of our Republican colleagues want-- unfortunately, not enough to get the job done. I do thank the great coalition of Senators who have helped. I also wish to submit an article by Jeff Cox, of CNBC, ``Four Things That Could Help Companies Start Hiring Again.'' He talks about positive momentum, loans to small business, and foreign demand. One of the things he mentions is: American consumers--even those with jobs and savings--are focused on paying down debt and not greasing the economic skids. As such, job markets may have to rely on low export prices and consumers in robust developing economies to help generate demand. He is correct. We are going to have to rely on markets outside the United States to sell our goods there and pull ourselves out of this recession. Do Members think small businesses get the least amount of help with exports? No, they don't. In our bill, we have extra support for the Department of Commerce and the Small Business Administration to help small businesses in Louisiana, in West Virginia, and around the world to reach out from our main streets to main streets in foreign countries to try to sell goods. It is going to be a Main Street-to-Main Street partnership around the world. With the Internet, this is possible. Before the Internet, it would be laughable to even suggest such a thing. But with the Internet, with the global air transportation, with expanded trucking and train transportation, we literally can move goods from Main Street right here. I would not be surprised if Georgetown Cupcake, which I spoke about yesterday, ships their cupcakes to India or China because they are really good cupcakes and maybe they do not make them as well there. That may be a little exaggeration, but I think it makes the point that if we can help our small businesses, there is no telling where these cupcakes--and in my State, it would be King Cakes--can go to support businesses on Main Street. So I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the Record.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I know there are Senators who wish to speak, but I have one more subject to speak about before I yield the floor. In addition to fighting for Main Street, I am going to come back here in September--and continue through the August recess with many hearings in my State and meetings in my State--to fight for justice for the gulf coast. I have not spent a lot of time in the last week or two here on the floor on this issue because I have been handling this small business bill, but I have been spending an awful lot of time on the phone, in meetings, and in Louisiana and will continue around the country to talk about this tragedy that has occurred. As shown on this chart I have in the Chamber, this is what the gulf coast looked like before the moratorium was put in place--this blanket moratorium, unnecessary moratorium--by the administration. We had 33 deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. As you can see, many of them were off the coast of New Orleans and Louisiana. As shown on this other chart, this is what it looks like today. Nobody is working. There is one rig being drilled. It is the Deepwater Horizon current site of the relief well. Everybody else has been put out of business in the Gulf of Mexico. This represents, at a minimum, 40,000 direct jobs--40,000 direct jobs. I want to show you a picture of the shallow water. This other one is of the deep water. That is what it looks like shut down. This one is of the shallow water. There is no moratorium in the shallow water. But before the moratorium, there were 55 wells in the shallow Gulf of Mexico. These wells--each one of them--represent hundreds of people supporting them and on the shore supporting them. We are down to 13. And I have to fight so hard to get one permit issued by MMS. I am proud, very proud, that my colleague in the House of Representatives, Charlie Melancon, did what I did not believe was even possible: he got the entire Democratic caucus on record asking the President basically to lift this moratorium. Yes, there was some language in there. I would have liked it to have been immediately. But the fact that we have now every Democrat and every Republican in the House of Representatives on record lifting this moratorium and helping us get back to work in the gulf is really extraordinary. I am looking forward to coming back to lead the effort in the Senate to follow the lead of the Congressman from the district that is most affected, Mr. Melancon, to get the gulf back to work. There are 25 idle rigs, there are 5 nondrilling operators, one Deepwater Horizon, and 2 wells being drilled. We have to get the gulf coast back to work. So in addition to passing the small business bill that we have to pass for the whole country, we have work to do along the gulf coast. We have a liability issue to settle. We are working on a compromise. I have a justice for the gulf document I am going to submit, a bill I am going to ask to be filed right now so that we can work in earnest. I hope that before we get back here, the President will administratively lift this moratorium. That is what he should do. We have put new safety requirements in. BP is going to pay the fines, billions of dollars of fines. They put $20 billion in escrow. Claims are being paid. That part is working fairly well. What is not working are the people in the gulf of Mexico. We do not want handouts. We do not want welfare. We do not want food stamps. We want to go back to work, and that is what we are going to work on. So this Senate has some work to do. The House has done its job in this regard. I hope, Mr. President, you and your team and the Secretary of Interior will think very hard about the economic damage that is being done right now. I understand safety is at issue. I understand we want our oceans clean. Nobody wants them cleaner than those of us who swim in the gulf, live in the gulf, fish in the gulf, and have for decades and centuries. But enough is enough. We have to get back to work. There are things that can be done, and I submit the bill at this time. I yield the floor.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Banking Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 5981, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Ms. LANDRIEU. I ask unanimous consent the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statement related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Ms. LANDRIEU

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

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I understand we are in controlled time. I will speak for the next 10 minutes, and if someone else comes to the floor, I will be happy to yield. I know the discussion today has primarily been on our new potential Supreme Court nominee, but that is not why I have come to the floor. I have come to the floor to talk about an issue I have spent a good bit of time talking about in the last several weeks--particularly the last week--and that is the issue most Americans have on their minds right now, and that is, when is this recession going to end? That is a good question. My answer to that is that this recession is going to end as soon as we can get Main Street moving again. The First Lady has been so wonderful in her advocacy to help Americans understand the importance of activity and moving, with her campaign ``Let's Move,'' to help us all get into better shape-- particularly the young children of our country. I think we can really use almost that same slogan for Main Street--to get Main Street moving again, percolating again, and generating jobs, because that is the only way this recession is going to end. We can pass bill after bill up here regarding big bank bailouts, saving the big auto manufacturers. We can step up and send money to big, troubled banks. But until we figure out a way to get money to Main Street, this recession is going to be with us a long time. I think that is really what is on people's minds, at least in Louisiana, my home State, the places with which I am very familiar. Our situation in Louisiana is even more complicated, and right now I am not going to take the opportunity--but I will before this session ends--to talk about the gulf coast disaster and the moratorium that has been placed on drilling in the gulf, which has exacerbated our problem. Suffice it to say that on Main Street all over America, people are wondering--we know that Supreme Court Justices are important, that health care is important, and we know that stabilizing the financial situation is important. When is Congress going to focus on Main Street and small business? That is what our bill, the small business lending bill and particularly the small business lending fund, does. I want to start the first few minutes of this discussion--there will be some Members coming down to the floor--by reading an e-mail I received in my office 2 days ago. This e-mail was so well written and so passionate and so encouraging to me that I was afraid it was not real. I actually had my staff call the man who wrote it to make sure before I came to the floor of the Senate, because I did not want to be fooled or embarrassed by someone sending some kind of form e-mail and not being sure it was correct. I want my colleagues to know that we called Mr. Bryan Gipson, Sr. I am going to read his e-mail because I think this says better than I could what is at stake for those who have tried to obstruct this bill, unfortunately, for many of my friends on the other side: Dear Senator Landrieu, I wanted to start this e-mail by telling you I am a life long Republican and a former member of your district. I currently reside in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and I am a Commercial Real Estate Broker. I watched with great interest today as the Senate debated H.R. 5297, the Small Business Jobs Credit Act. I was very, very disappointed by the unjustified stonewalling of the Republicans. To think that a Bill, whose only purpose is to provide funding for small business, create jobs and help the most battered segment of our economy recover from the worst recession of all time could be held up because one side had their feelings hurt because they don't have enough amendments is sickening. Senator Landrieu, I am a commercial real estate broker. My company sells hotels, throughout the southeastern United States. We have not completed a transaction in almost two years. There is no third party commercial financing for commercial real [estate] in the United States today our industry has been battered because of this. Hotels are closing through out this country and workers are being laid off. These workers make beds and clean rooms. They work as wait staff, accountants, reservationists, and front desk personnel. Thousands of these hard working Americans have been laid off. It's time for Congress to do something to put Americans back to work on the jobs. As I said, I am a life long Republican. I was sick to my stomach to see the leadership of the Republican Party do everything in their power to kill this bill. Please remind them they have lost my vote. I will do everything in my power to defeat my two Republican Senators when election time comes. It is plain to see the Senators of the Republican Party are holding the American economy and it's workers hostage for selfish, partisan politics, and the American voters are tired of it. I will not read his last sentence because I do not think it is appropriate for the Senate. Today I had the opportunity to speak with one of the region's most outstanding community bankers by phone. My phone call was prompted by a roundtable I held earlier this week--it was not yesterday but the day before--with some of the country's most outstanding entrepreneurs. I had several individuals from Louisiana--surprising to many people. You may be surprised to know that New Orleans, LA, has been on the front cover of Entrepreneurial magazine twice in the last year because after Katrina, some of the leaders, including myself, had the sense to say: We are not going to build back just what we had; we are going to build back better and stronger, and part of that is inspiring young people around the country to come and start new businesses in New Orleans and help us build a greater city and a better region. We also had individuals from all parts of the United States. One of the two most interesting individuals who owns arguably the most famous small business in America today, Georgetown Cupcake, better known as DC Cupcakes, the reality show--Sophie and Katherine were in my committee 2 days ago. I want to tell you what they said, and nobody is going to believe it. There is a transcript of this record. This is one of the most famous, most popular small businesses in America. They have their own reality show. They testified to my committee that they could not themselves get a business loan. They knocked on bank after bank until finally a community banker--the chairman of the bank is Ron Paul. I spoke with him today. It is EagleBank right in this region. They finally gave them a loan which they paid back in 3 months. For 2 years they used every credit card they had. They used their entire savings. Even with a line 2 blocks long--if anyone in Washington, DC, doesn't know about it, they should know about it. I have not been there, but my children have been there. They ask me to take them there all the time. The line is 2 blocks long, I hear, every night. If a small business not 10 minutes from the Capitol, with a line 2 blocks long, cannot get a loan from a bank and has to go through all this trouble--but they finally, thank goodness, found a community bank to lend them the money--do I have to say anymore about what we are trying to do? Another young woman showed up in our committee. She graduated magna cum laude from Duke University. She received a scholarship from the Fulbright Scholarship Program. She went to Sri Lanka to work for a year under the Fulbright Scholarship Program. Her idea as a scholar was that maybe she could create a business using environmentally sensitive methods and practices designing very fashionable clothes that she could then sell to college students because our college students today are much more sensitive to the environment and to these sorts of things than we were when we were in college. She had a very brilliant idea. She had a great market. She went to bank after bank with $250,000 worth of purchase orders and could not get a loan and does not have one today. If our young people who are graduating at the very top of their class, who have the most extraordinary ability to create jobs in America, cannot get money in their hands, we should close these doors and turn these lights off because it is never going to get fixed. That is what this bill tries to do. It has been stopped by petty politics or slowed down considerably. We are still hoping we can get this done by the other side, which wants to pretend this is not important or that the Small Business Lending Program that got 60 votes on the floor of the Senate is somehow damaging to this bill. It is the heart of this bill. I want to use fact versus fiction to clear up another point. I could go on and on about what these young entrepreneurs running small but extraordinarily exciting businesses said at that roundtable. This bill will help them, and we are going to continue to do more. One of the things I want to speak about today is fact versus fiction about the one article that has criticized us. It was an AP article that was written 2 days ago and was circulated in defense of the opposition, so I want to take this issue by issue. The article was written by Daniel Wagner of Associated Press. When we called him, he admitted that he failed to call anyone from our office or the Small Business Committee to get any real information about the bill. He had not written in an updated way. He had gotten this information some months ago. He was frustrated. He couldn't get Treasury to respond, so he just wrote the article. The problem is half of his article is completely factually wrong about this bill. I want to go point by point. He comments in his article: Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and others have questioned whether the problem is lack of capital or if there simply are not enough creditworthy borrowers. I have given two examples in the last 2 or 3 minutes about creditworthy borrowers. I think every Member of Congress knows a dozen businesses that are good, solid businesses with good cashflow and a good product with a good record that are beiing told they cannot get funding. If you do not believe me or what you are hearing back in your States, the fact is our Chairman stated last month: It seems clear that some creditworthy businesses, including some whose collateral has lost value but whose cash flow remains strong have had difficulty obtaining the credit they need to expand and, in some cases, even continuing to operate. Part of the article, quoting the Chairman, is factually wrong. Chairman Bernanke did not say that. Chairman Bernanke said what I just quoted. The second fiction he said was that Congress was at work on a new program to send $30 billion to struggling community banks. No, that is not what our bill does. We do not send $30 billion to struggling community banks. We allow healthy banks, not struggling banks, healthy community banks to apply, completely voluntary, for money from the Treasury so they can increase the capital they have to lend hopefully to wonderful young people such as the two young women who started Georgetown Cupcake, now better known nationally as DC Cupcake, and other small businesses that are hiring people and increasing their locations and starting to bring this recession to an end. The facts are that you have to be a healthy bank to apply for this program. The next thing Mr. Wagner said--and he has retracted this already. We appreciate him retracting this statement. He said: Under the new program, the 775 banks on the government problem list can qualify for the bailout. A, that is not true, it is not a bailout. And B, they are expressly prohibited in our bill. The 775 banks on the problem list would be ineligible to receive capital. Only the strongest banks, and they are registered as CAMELS 1, 2, and 3, not 4 and 5. Finally he said: This time the money is more likely to disappear as a result of bank failure and fraud. It is not the community banks we have to worry about failing. Their record has been extraordinary. In fact, there was not one bank in 2005, 2006, all the way up to 2007--there were less than a handful of community banks that failed. In 2009 and 2010, those numbers shot up because of the despicable and reckless policies perpetrated by many big banks and international lenders which put the whole economy at risk because of what they did, and then that had a ripple effect on our economy. It is not going to be the small community banks that take this Nation down, I can promise my colleagues. It is going to be the small community banks and other nonbank lenders in places that have a hard time getting the capital they need to expand that are going to lead this country out of the recession. So I wish to put this up--this ``Party of No''--because, unfortunately, we have on the other side an unprecedented number of objections. This is the graph that I think Senator Stabenow has used for 246 objections. It is one thing, of course, politically, if you want to say no to the President. I don't think it is great, but sometimes you have to, if you don't believe the President is right. I understand that. But to say no to the small businesses of America, most of which have done absolutely nothing wrong but try to build their businesses and try to expand their businesses? To say no to them is one no gone too far. I wish to put up the chart about the businesses that will create jobs, because if we would spend some time focused on passing this bill--and I hope this chart I am using is an effective visual for the share of net new jobs by firm--these are our own statistics for 1993 to 2009. So for the last 16 years, 65 percent of new jobs have come from small firms. This goes to show that if we can get this bill--and maybe there are others but this bill for certain because it was built with bipartisan support. It has $12 billion of tax cuts targeted directly at small business. It is a $30 billion small business, healthy bank partnership fund that will help spur investments on Main Street, and it is an increase of lending limits and loan guarantees through the Small Business Administration for their very tested and proven and successful lending programs. This bill could have a tremendous impact on Main Street throughout America. We have only a few more days here. The leaders are still talking about what can be worked out. I would suggest we get this bill on the floor, we agree to one amendment on both sides, and get this bill passed for the American public. I know the Chair has been supportive, and I see Senator Cantwell and others on the floor who have been arguing successfully and passionately for this bill. When people say we need more amendments, this bill has been built with bipartisan amendments, section by section--I have said this over and over again-- every section of this bill. We call this chart our red-line, four-page outline of this bill. It is well known and has been well reviewed by not only Members here but staff and reporters as well who can see for themselves. This is a Snowe-Landrieu; Crapo-Landrieu-Risch; Snowe-Landrieu; Snowe-Merkley. I mean, every single section has been bipartisan, and we now have a strong bipartisan vote for the lending program. So all we need is for the leaders to agree on one amendment. It could be the 1099 amendment, which has generated a great deal of interest around here. Let's make a decision about how we move forward with that provision. I think it needs to be adjusted or completely repealed, but that is worth debating. Let's get that done and move this bill forward. In addition, as I yield the floor for the Senator from Washington, we continue to receive more and more endorsements. Today, we got a letter from the United States Conference of Mayors: On behalf of the Nation's mayors, I am writing to thank you, Senator Landrieu, for supporting and sponsoring the Small Business Jobs Act. The U.S. Conference of Mayors firmly supports this legislation and urges all Senators to vote for its immediate passage. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the entire letter.

Ms. LANDRIEU. Five minutes. That is great. I thank the Senator from Washington, who has been a partner on this bill with me from day one. She is a member of the Small Business Committee, quite an expert in the field of small business financing having built her own small business successfully and helped many others to build others. She brings that expertise to the Senate. I appreciate her focus and commitment. Together with some of our other colleagues we have worked the extra hours and time, and we are still hopeful that we can get this bill done before we leave for the August break to go home and work in our States through that time. I want to read just another short paragraph into the record. This is going to appear, I understand, in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow. I received a copy of it today. It is going to be in response to a wrongheaded editorial by the Wall Street Journal. They entitled their editorial a couple of days ago, ``Son Of TARP.'' As Senator Cantwell from Washington said, this doesn't look like TARP, it doesn't walk like TARP, it is not TARP. But there are a few critics out there who, because they cannot say anything bad about it, want to put a bad name on it and scare people away. This gentleman, Mr. Richard Neiman, let me say, first, is a superintendent of banks for the State of New York. He knows something about them, and is a member of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel. So he most certainly understands TARP since he is an overseer of TARP. I think he would know if this was TARP, but this is what he writes-- ``Small Business Lending Fund Will Help Recovery, Jobs.'' Your editorial, ``Son of TARP'' [on] July 30 is unfortunately titled, and underestimates the potential of the proposed Small Business Lending Fund. Small business growth is the only way out of this recession, yet our entrepreneurs are not being provided the credit they need, as the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel often hears from small business owners. Our recent report on the issue demonstrates that, during the crisis, lending to small business fell by 9 percent at our Nation's largest banks. . . . In other words, the Nation's big banks took the TARP money and cut lending to small businesses. That is what happened. This bill is to reverse that and to give small banks a fighting chance, and small businesses, to get a voluntary lending fund to start flowing capital to small business. He says: Unlike TARP, the SBOF would incentivize banks to lend by lowering the dividend rate at which banks must repay the government if banks meet lending performance metrics. Further, the SBLF removes the TARP stigma that discouraged small banks from participating in government program. . . . The SBLF is not a sequel to TARP, It is not the son of TARP, it is not the daughter of TARP---- but it can be a segue toward a stronger future for our Nation's small businesses and their employees. I could not have said that better myself. I ask unanimous consent to have the letter printed in the Record.

Ms. LANDRIEU. This recession is a national recession, but you feel it in every town, in every community, in every city where mayors and Governors out there--Democrats and Republicans--are fighting every day to bring vitality back to their communities. This bill has the potential to help them, to be some wind under their wings and to get this job done. So I am proud to have the thousands of mayors in our country who have stepped up to support this legislation. I am also proud to have almost 28, if not 30, Governors who have written personally, sometimes numerous letters, to say they support this legislation. I have used the time in conclusion to rebut the only article we know of that was a negative one. We have had many positive articles and editorials, and we are grateful because the bill is self-explanatory. The one reporter who wrote, I thought, a very misleading story has retracted portions of it, which he admitted were not accurate, and I have given the detail to rebut the other sections of his article. But we continue to pick up endorsements. The bill is bipartisan. We have to get Main Street moving again. When we do--and only when we do--will this recession end and our constituents can go back to work or they can fulfill their dreams to build a business of their own that can employ them and bring security, prosperity, and happiness to their families. But this Congress should act and we should act now--in the next 24 hours. I yield the floor.

Ms. LANDRIEU. I understand the time controlled by the Democrats is coming quickly to an end. I ask for 2 more minutes, if that is OK, to wrap up.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to a period of morning business with Senators permitted for up to 10 minutes each; that upon the conclusion of the so-called wrap-up period the Senate then resume executive session and continue the debate on the Kagan nomination provided for under the previous order in the specific hour blocks.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. I ask unanimous consent the Senate resume legislation session.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, it brings me great sadness that I come to the Senate floor today to reflect upon the passing of Robert Hicks, a lion in the Louisiana civil rights movement whose legal victories helped topple segregation in Bogalusa and change discriminatory employment practices throughout the South, passed away Tuesday, April 13, in his home at the age of 81. Born in Mississippi, but moved to Bogalusa at a young age, Robert Hicks was the youngest of three children born to Quitman and Maybell Hicks in 1929. He graduated from Central Memorial High School, where he played on the school's State champion football team. He later played offensive guard on The Bushmen, an all-Black semipro team. Mr. Hicks began his civil rights work as a member of the local NAACP before working with the Voter and Civic League. He helped organize daily marches to protest racial discrimination by merchants and city government in a crusade that thrust Bogalusa into the national spotlight. The Hicks family opened their home to White civil rights workers and national figures. Because of this, the family was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, which in turn motivated the formation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed band of African-American men who stood guard at the Hicks' home and protected civil rights workers in the city. The 2003 Showtime movie ``Deacons of Defense'' was loosely based on the group. As fellow civil rights worker Peter Jan Honigsberg wrote in his memoir recalling his experience volunteering in Bogalusa in the summers of 1966 and 1967 about Hicks, ``Even today I still think of him . . . He was determined to do what he had to do to change the South.'' Mr. Hicks filed a landmark lawsuit against the city and police department of Bogalusa, obtaining a Federal court order requiring the police to protect protest marchers, and a lawsuit that overturned officials' refusal to allow protest marchers. In 1967, Mr. Hicks filed a suit against the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing, which resulted in the prohibition of the construction of public housing in segregated neighborhoods in Bogalusa. Mr. Hicks began working at Crown Zellerbach, the local paper mill, at a time when few Black people were employed there and eventually he served as president of the Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers. After fighting Crown Zellerbach for years in Federal court, Mr. Hicks became the company's first African-American supervisor, a position he held until his retirement. Mr. Hicks and his wife Valeria had six children during their 62-year union. With his wife, Mr. Hicks traveled the country, spreading the word about the conditions for Black people in the South and encouraging people to travel to Bogalusa and other Southern cities to campaign for civil rights. Besides his wife, thoughts and prayers go out to his survivors, including a daughter, Barbara Maria Hicks; three sons, Robert Lawrence, Gregory Vince, and Darryl Hicks; a sister, Grace Berry; 17 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. The work of Robert Hicks will be forever remembered by the Bogalusa community, which is renaming a street and holding a ceremony in his honor.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. I ask unanimous consent the Gillibrand substitute amendment at the desk be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time, and that a budgetary pay-go statement be considered read and printed in the Record and that the bill be passed, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate, and any statement related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Ms. LANDRIEU. I ask unanimous consent the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 5283, which was received from the House and is at the desk.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. In my final minute I would like to change subjects and speak about another subject that is very important to people in Louisiana, particularly to some of my African- American farmers and the small communities that they primarily reside in throughout my State. These are farmers who were blatantly discriminated against in the last several decades. We have a bill right here before us. It is referred to as the Pigford settlement. This group of farmers took their grievances to the courts. Before they could get a final judgment from the courts, the Justice Department stepped in and smartly attempted to settle this situation because the Federal Government is probably going to be very liable for past discriminations that were blatant and proven. We came up with a fair way to solve this issue, to get money to many African-American farmers. We have acknowledged there were some wrong things done by the Department of Agriculture and by the Federal Government. We want to try to make amends. We cannot make everything right and everything perfect, but the Pigford settlement is a fair and just resolution to this issue. One thousand African-American farmers in Louisiana would be benefited by this settlement. Again, this is being held up. I don't understand why, but I wanted to lend my voice to say that this settlement is not just about correcting past wrongs but about ensuring future prosperity. It is time for Congress to end the 12-year delay and approve this settlement as quickly as possible.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Banking Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 5872, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Ms. LANDRIEU. I ask unanimous consent the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statement be printed in the Record.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. Mr. President, I understand we are not in any particular order. I wish to speak for about 15 minutes, and then I understand there will be leadership time prior to the vote scheduled for 5:45. I wish to take a minute to refocus the Senate on the issue we were debating when we left on Friday. We took some time over the weekend-- many of us worked through parts of the weekend--to see if we could try to bring a very important debate to a close. It looks as though, from conversations through the weekend and this morning with the leadership, we are making progress, so I am encouraged at this point. However, of course, until the motions are made and the votes are in, we are not 100 percent certain. But it feels as though the debate last week really moved many Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, to understand how important it is to focus our efforts--particularly in this last week before we leave for the August recess--on Main Street, on small business, on getting directed help and support, through a variety of different avenues, to Main Street. That is what we spoke at great length about last week. Before I speak about a few pieces of the bill and parts of the bill, I would like to follow up on what my colleague from Florida, Senator Bill Nelson, just said regarding a provision we had hoped could have potentially been in this bill, but there is a possibility it could be included in an extenders package or some other tax bill that comes along either before we leave for August or when we come back in September. I most certainly support his bill and what he outlined. He said it clearly, but just to restate, there are businesses along the gulf coast that are having an extremely difficult time not just with the major oilspill but now with the moratorium that has been put in place. Regardless of how one feels about the moratorium, it is having a very significant negative economic impact on businesses--not just big oil, which can usually find a way to take care of itself, but it is the smaller service companies and the machine operators. It is the helicopter pilots. It is the divers. It is the businesses that service the gulf that are having such a difficult time. I don't have the details here at my desk, but it is mounting every day--millions and millions of dollars in losses. The backdrop of this devastation in the gulf, of course, is the fifth anniversary of Katrina this August. This is August 2. The anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is August 29. So the Senator from Florida is absolutely correct. There are businesses reeling along the gulf coast, having just recovered from a terrible spat of storms, including Wilma, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike, and now the same area is being hit with the effects of the spill and the moratorium. So the Senator from Florida is absolutely correct. If we could provide some relief, which we have done--not routinely, but it is not unprecedented--as suggested by the Senator from Florida, I hope we can get that done. I made mention--it is not in the small business bill, but it is an amendment I had filed earlier to this bill, and unfortunately I don't think we will be able to get it on this bill, but we will continue to work on it. It is sort of a companion bill to the bill of the Senator from Florida, and that is to provide interest relief to gulf coast businesses that have outstanding business disaster loans. Again, they are trying to get specific, targeted help to an area of the country that has been extremely hard hit. They have been affected not just by the national recession, but they have been book-ended by the national recession and the slams from Katrina and Rita and now the slamming from the oilspill and the moratorium, and the middle part is that we got hit by the recession. So we just need some special help and support. I thank the Senator from Florida for coming down. I thank all of the gulf coast Senators who have been working so hard, unified, across party lines, to bring the kind of help and support we need for the gulf coast. That will be debated on other bills to come. But I am looking forward to an opportunity to offer that amendment with my good friend, the Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Cochran, to again waive interest charges of up to $15,000 for all the outstanding business disaster loans on the gulf coast. That will give them a little reprieve, a little break at a time when they most certainly could use the reprieve and use the break. It only costs about $100 million. We have a way to pay for it. The money has actually already been set aside in another provision. We are going to use $100 million of a portion of money that is remaining in an account so that it does not add to the deficit. The Senator from Florida--I am not sure what his offset is, but, again, $100 million in the scheme of things is not an exorbitant amount of money by Washington standards, and we can most certainly find a way to pay for this special help to gulf coast businesses. There are many Main Streets in the gulf coast. Whether it is the strip, as we call it--not just Las Vegas has a strip, but we have a strip running down through the panhandle of Florida; whether it is other Main Streets in resort towns; whether it is in Alabama or in Mississippi; whether it is Biloxi or Gulfport or Pensacola Beach--and I could go on and on; whether it is the Main Street down Grand Isle or through Morgan City, these businesses on Main Street are hurting. So I have spent a good bit of time in the last week as chair of the Small Business Committee talking about the fact that we have seen significant job losses in this country from small business. This, again, is the monthly national employment report from Automatic Data Processing, so this is the government's official data: U.S. jobs lost by firm size for the last 2 years, from 2008 to 2010. We can see that 81 percent of the jobs being lost are being lost by small businesses, and these are defined as businesses with fewer than 500 people. If one would do the data based on businesses with fewer than 100 people or fewer than 50 people, I don't know what it would show, but I would venture to guess that the lion's share of business loss has come from the smaller businesses. So it goes without saying that when we want to replace the jobs, the fastest way to get them replaced is to give those same businesses the help they need to rehire. If we could give those small businesses an opportunity to rehire, which is what this small business bill does, we might be able to have a job-filled recovery instead of a jobless recovery. People have called it that because it is showing signs of being just that. Many companies have been making profits. Wall Street has had a little bit of a good run lately. Big banks have been doing pretty well. So while the economy seems to stabilize, Americans, at least in my hometown of New Orleans and around Baton Rouge and Lafayette and Shreveport and New Iberia and other places, say: But Senator--and, of course, our situation is compounded even more than this--they say: We are losing jobs. Jobs are disappearing. Small businesses are laying off. So whether we are talking about Louisiana or Michigan or Florida or Maine or South Dakota or Missouri or other places, if we want to see jobs created, we should be focusing some time and effort on helping small businesses to create those jobs. There are some things small businesses need. I wish to spend a minute talking about the base of the bill again, of which we are very proud. This bill was built through the Small Business Committee and the Finance Committee. This is a description of the small business access to credit. The top item is one of the important provisions of this bill. I wish to stress--because several Members have come to talk to me about credit unions--that credit unions and banks are included in this top provision. Credit unions and banks can use the programs of the SBA, and these programs will be expanded from $200 million to $500 million--the 7(a) Loan Program, which is basically the loans that small businesses make for capital and for investments. The 504 loans are traditionally real estate loans. Right now, they are capped at $1.5 million. We know lots of businesses out there that--I mean, $1.5 million sounds like a lot of money, but, of course, when you are in the real estate business, it doesn't go that far these days. So raising that to $5.5 million will go a long way. In fact, I received a letter from a businessperson in the real estate business, and I wish to read a paragraph about what he said over the weekend about real estate loans, and then I will read the other part of his letter later. This is Mr. Gipson, Bryan Gipson, Sr., from Mississippi. He said: Senator Landrieu: I am a commercial real estate broker. My company sells hotels throughout the southeastern United States. We have not completed a transaction in almost 2 years. There is no third party commercial financing for commercial real estate in the United States today. Our industry has been battered because of this. Hotels are closing throughout this country. Workers are being laid off. These workers make beds, they clean rooms, they work as wait staff, accountants, reservationists, and front desk personnel. Thousands of these hard-working Americans have been laid off. It is time for Congress to do something to put Americans back to work, back into jobs. He is actually exactly correct. That is one of the main focuses of this. This is a Landrieu-Snowe provision on which we got almost unanimous consent out of the Small Business Committee to do. We did this in the stimulus act that was done earlier in the year, but it expired. So why are we doing it again? Because it worked the last time we did it. The documents are in, the review is in, and it was a roaring success. So we know it was successful. It expired, and we are now making it available for the next year. We know this program will get loans and capital out to businesses, much like Mr. Gipson from Mississippi. He could potentially borrow some of this money to keep one or more of his hotels open. The small business trade and export promotion--this, again, was a bill from Senator Snowe and myself. Of course, we had a tremendous amount of input from other Senators, but we learned something very-- well, I learned something quite troubling. I didn't realize this until this year. I am going to get the chart to show it. Big businesses in America do a lot of exporting. Of course, that makes sense. They have big law firms. They have special tax counsel. They even have probably people who can do advance work in other countries to introduce them to all the right people. So big business has access to that. But small businesses don't get a lot of help from the Federal Government. They need help to try to open markets across the world for them. It is interesting to think about what the greatest potential growth for small business in America is. It is not just the market in the United States, it is the market around the world. According to population, not buying power, 94 percent of the market isn't even in the United States; 94 percent of the market is somewhere else in the world. So if we can help our small businesses export, which is what this chart shows--small business is only at 1 percent. Think about that. Only 1 percent of small businesses export and 42 percent of large businesses export. They know what these companies should know: The markets are elsewhere, as well as here. But if you have a good product, if you have the ways and the means to sell that product or service, there are people with a lot of money or with some money around the country who can buy that product. One way, as chair of the Small Business Committee, that I looked at strengthening small business just in sort of a conceptual way in America is if we could focus on helping them export. Look at the potential for growth. That is what we are looking for, potential for growth, because every small business that grows and one or two or three jobs are created and American products are sold around the world, we can kick this recession once and for all. Senator Snowe and I worked together on this export provision. Then we were joined by Senators Klobuchar and LeMieux, who I think both serve on the Commerce Committee. Commerce, besides the SBA, has a significant role to play. We basically enhanced our underlying provision with a Klobuchar-LeMieux amendment, and now we have, we think, a very strong provision to help businesses export. Just in a portion of it, we believe it could create 40,000 to 50,000 jobs in the next year. This is a very important component. Small business contracting. Again, this was done by Landrieu-Crapo- Risch, Landrieu-Snowe, and Snowe-Merkley. It was a combination of what we could to have the Federal Government do a better job of contracting with small business. The Federal Government is so big and spends so much money and it has such large contracts that sometimes it is hard for small businesses--whether it is a printer in Delaware or a small manufacturer in Delaware or in Louisiana--to get any Federal business. The Federal Government has been getting better at helping small business, but it has been a focus of this Committee now for several years. We have improved this contracting provision. We believe, just this provision, without spending any more Federal dollars, using those Federal dollars that we are spending contracting with small business when they get those contracts--the best thing about them is they can take a Federal Government contract, particularly, and go to a bank and say to their banker: I just got a contract to provide 50,000 apples to the Federal Government, and I now have a contract for 5 years to do that; can I borrow some money from your bank? Because Federal accounts are looked at as a pretty good thing to have in your hand, they will then lend that small apple picker that amount of money, and they can go ahead and hire the workers to pick the apples and deliver them to the Federal Government. That is the idea. This works thousands and tens of thousands of ways for different products and services. The Federal Government itself should be doing everything it can to help small business, and that is in our bill. Again, it is a bipartisan effort. We then went to small business management and counseling. This might be considered soft to some people, but I think it is extremely significant in this time. It is not just the women business centers and the minority business centers, but it is also things such as the SCORE chapter, which used to stand for Service Corps of Retired Executives. Now it is expanded beyond senior executives. It is a large nonprofit organization, broad-based, that reaches out to a small business that has seen their market evaporate or their product not being in demand anymore. They are good in business, but they need new and fresh ideas and a fresh approach. That is what we do behind the scenes to support them in thousands of places throughout this country--in universities, women business owner centers, nonprofit organizations that can step up and, at no charge to the taxpayers, say: Why don't you try this or that? We have tremendous stories of success. This was something Senator Snowe and I felt strongly about. That is in the bill. These were estimates that were done not by our office but by those responsible for making such estimates, which said that maybe 10,000 jobs could be created. Who knows. If the counselors work hard and the economy starts picking up, thousands of jobs could be created because somebody was counseled through a difficult period, got a new idea, retooled their product or their shop, and they managed to survive the recession. The small business disaster loan improvements was an important issue to Louisiana. I am happy I was able to include this. It is important to Florida also and potentially Alaska, which has a lot of aquaculture. In the past, for some reason, these particular businesses were not given any ability to apply for Federal disaster assistance, so many crawfish farmers and fishing and other aquatic businesses were left out in the cold after a disaster. We noticed that after Katrina, and we fixed it. We are extending it and extending help to aquaculture businesses. Let me show this chart. This is to describe the importance of the small business bill, how many things it does focusing on small business, which is where I think the focus should be, and how bipartisan the underlying provisions are. This is something that was worked on with Senators Kerry and Snowe. It is the 100-percent exclusion of capital gains tax. It is interesting, and it came out of the Finance Committee. They said: Why don't we jump-start things by saying to anybody who has a little money or a lot: If you invest in a small business and hold that investment-- invest in any small business, I think below $50 million in capital, any small business--you make that investment and you hold it for 5 years-- let's say you quadruple your money--you don't pay a penny of tax on that capital gain. That is what I call an incentive--zero capital gains if you invest in a small business in America in the next period of time. We have a difference of opinion about what that time should be with the House. It will either be 6 months or a year. I am hoping for a year. It is a little more expensive to do it that way, but I think that would be a tremendous incentive to people sitting on some cash and looking around for what to do with it. You can invest in a good small business in your community. If you hold that for 5 years and make a quadruple--or 400 percent--return on your money, you can keep it all. You don't have to pay tax back to the Federal Government. We are serious about jump-starting small business. The other is to increase deductions for startup expenditures. That is Merkley and Alexander. It is bipartisan. Another one is tax equity for the self-employed. Senator Bingaman worked on this provision for years. He literally has led this fight, with Senator Durbin and others, myself included, to try to get tax equity for the self-employed. There are 20 million self-employed people in America. The vast majority of small businesses in America are self- employed individuals. So we want to give them an opportunity to write off their health care costs, just like big corporations do. This is their No. 1 request. They have worked on it for 10 years. We couldn't find the money in the health care bill or any other bill, but we found the money in this bill to do it for them. I thank the Finance Committee and Senator Bingaman for leading that effort and Senator Grassley as well. That provision is in the bill. It is a $2 billion tax cut for the self-employed. Again, we have an extension of bonus depreciation. That was very successful in the Stimulus Act. Some people get on the floor and don't read the details of anything, and they want to talk about how bad the stimulus package was. The fact is, that is not true. There were pieces of it that were extremely positive and we know it because we have the data and it was so good we want to repeat it here. So, yes, there were some things in the stimulus provision that were very good. One of them was the bonus depreciation to small business. You can immediately write off 50 percent of the cost of capital expenditures for 1 additional year for new property purchased and placed into service by 2010. This is an expensive provision; it is $5.5 billion. But we know it works, and we believe this incentive will go a long way. It is a little bit of a stretch, but this came to mind and I am going to say it. Incentives work. Recently, in Washington, DC, the DC City Council passed an incentive, if you will, that when you go to the grocery store--which I do with my family--if you bring your own bags, you don't have to pay the bag charge. They just decided they don't want to have plastic bags floating in the Potomac. I thought it was odd when I first went to the store and came across that provision. I thought, nobody is going to pay much attention to having to pay 5 cents for a bag. But I can tell you, it is working. How do I know? Because I observe 80 percent of the people who come into the grocery store walk in with their own bags. For 5 cents a bag--I thought you would have to make the charge more than that to get people to do it. But it works out that a little incentive, placed in the right way, actually changes behavior. I am now bringing my own bags to the grocery store. When they ask: ``Do you want to pay 5 cents for a bag,'' I say, ``No, I have my own.'' So this can work. We know it works. I gave a small example. This is a more complicated and bigger example, but that is what we believe a good bill, drafted correctly, thought through carefully, can do to incentivize people to take actions they would not necessarily have taken. You are not going to pay people for doing it anyway. But if you can incentivize a business in the right way, they might say: I was going to hold off buying X, but because the Federal Government is giving me a 50-percent writeoff, I am going to buy it now. That is what we want. We want them to buy ``it'' now, because when they buy it now, the people making the ``it'' have to make more of them and it goes on and on and on. The small business penalty relief is a bipartisan provision, again. This all came out of Finance. These get down into a little bit of minutia, but the point is there are small incentives that can provide credits to businesses, and they were done in a bipartisan fashion. Here is Kerry and Ensign. Here is Snowe and here is Grassley. This is Baucus-Grassley-Brownback. Here is Inhofe-Johanns-Menendez. It has been a real bipartisan effort. I am proud of that. There are some differences of opinion about some portions of the bill. We have had a debate. The lending program is something that not everybody supports but 60 of us do. We got a strong vote on that lending fund. That is now added to the bill. So we have the LeMieux- Landrieu lending fund added by 60 votes. We have Senator Nelson, and Senator Murray was the lead designer of this--Senators Murray and Cantwell. I am grateful for this $30 billion lending fund that will go to small banks, not big banks. You have to be below $10 billion. So if you are greater than $10 billion, go look for another program; this is not for you. But if you are a small bank--and most of your community banks are below $10 billion, so most of my banks in my State qualify, except for two or three. I don't know about Delaware or New York or other States, but I assume that would hold true. Probably 90 percent of all banks in every State, at least, would be eligible, but not every bank would because it is not for the big banks, just the smaller banks. We want them to get to this loan program. It is completely voluntary-- completely voluntary. If they lend to small business and increase their lending to small business in their neighborhood--to people they know, to people they trust, businesses they believe in--then they have to pay less money back to the Federal Government. But even doing that, we think the score is so significant that the Federal Government will actually make $1 billion. That is what the official CBO score says, that we will make $1 billion over 10 years. Then we have an anti-Medicare and Medicaid fraud provision which Senator LeMieux came up with. I think he has some good ideas, and we have structured it in such a way that we do believe we can save the Federal Government a significant amount of money by including this. That money just comes back to the Treasury for deficit prevention. We haven't used a score against this, so this will go to deficit prevention. Then the final part of the LeMieux-Landrieu amendment was expanding the export promotion. Again, this is done in a bipartisan fashion. I know we are getting to the 5:30 mark. I don't see anyone else on the Senate floor, so I will speak for just a minute or so more because we are going to a vote on a different subject. But I would like to just put up the Main Street sign again to reiterate how important this is for Main Street and for small business. I am not sure what is going to happen on the 5:45 vote which was supposed to be taken regarding funding for health care and education. But at some point right after that action at 5:45, I think the leaders will come to the floor of the Senate, and I hope I will hear them say we have reached an agreement on one, two, or three amendments on the small business Main Street bill so we can vote on those amendments either later tonight or tomorrow and then vote for final passage. Again, I want to thank the list of sponsors and cosponsors. I think we have over 70 organizations, and maybe now it is over 100--the National Bankers Association, the American Bankers Association, the Independent Bankers of America. So for those who say banks are not supportive, that they think it is like another program that is not popular, I don't believe the bankers would be supportive of this if they weren't for it. We have received very strong letters from America's Community Bankers and then the individual chapters, such as the chapter from Alabama, which has written us; the chapter from Georgia; the chapters from Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, and Iowa, as well as the Financial Services Roundtable, which is made up of some of the larger businesses. But their letter was very telling. In it they say to me: Senator, even though a lot of our specific members may not benefit directly from this bill, we will all benefit indirectly because when small business is stronger in America, big business is stronger in America. I am very happy to have received that letter. The Maine Association of Community Banks, Marine Retailers Association of America, Maryland Bankers Association--and I might say that Senator Cardin particularly, as a member of the Small Business Committee, has been very helpful to us in crafting this bill--the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Automobile Dealers, the National Council of Textile Organizations, and the National Restaurant Association, just to name a few. So from Tennessee to New York, from California to South Dakota, all the way down to New Mexico and Arizona, the support is very widespread, and let me just read a few things in closing that some of the national organizations have sent. This is from the National Small Business Association: Unlike last year's TARP program, the SBLF would only advantage banks actually making small business loans. The National Small Business Association has advocated for the creation of such a fund to improve small business owners' access to capital since 2009. [We] urge quick action on the proposal, as America's small business owners can afford [no] further delay. Again, from the Independent Community Bankers: The Nation's 8,000-strong community banks are well positioned to leverage the fund and have established relationships with small businesses in their communities to get credit flowing. The $30 billion in capital provided by the fund could be leveraged by community banks to support as much as $300 billion in additional small business lending. We applaud the new program focused on getting funds to Main Street small businesses using Main Street community banks. So whether it is from the Small Business Majority, the National Small Business Association, or the bankers that know our small businesses best, the word is, pass the bill and get Main Street moving again. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. LANDRIEU

Ms. LANDRIEU. That seems to be where we are. That is why I said I feel like I am ``Alice in Wonderland,'' because it is topsy-turvy.

Ms. LANDRIEU. You are absolutely correct.

Ms. LANDRIEU. Absolutely.

Ms. LANDRIEU. Madam President, I wish to begin by thanking Leader Reid for his very kind comments regarding the work that is going into this bill. It has been my pleasure and honor to help lead a team, actually, which the Presiding Officer has been a part of, as well as Ms. Cantwell, the Senator from Washington; Senator Murray; Senator LeMieux from Florida; and many others. Senator Cardin, who I know is on the floor, is an outstanding member of the Small Business Committee and a long-time advocate of small business, serving many years in the House of Representatives, and now brings his expertise to the floor of the Senate. I like having bulldogs on my committee and he is one of them and I greatly appreciate his support. Let me be very clear that in 1 hour, we will come to the end of a very long, important public and open debate on the best way we can help Main Street. This bill is not about Wall Street. We have had enough of those. This bill is not about big corporations; they take up 80 percent of the agenda in this place on any given day. This bill is about the 27 million small businesses that need the Members of the Senate to stand up for them today. If we can stand up for small businesses today, they will stand up for us and lift this country out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. I want to repeat that. It will not be the big banks that do this. It will not be the big international firms that do this. As it always has been since the beginning of America, since the first small business, the first enterprise, it will be small businesses that create jobs. For 1\1/2\ years, this debate has been going on--not 1\1/2\ weeks, not last month, but for 1\1/2\ years we have been debating, as we should as Senators, about the best way to do that. There have been differences of opinion. There have been two primary committees focused on building this package, including the Finance Committee, which has put forward in a completely bipartisan fashion a $12 billion tax cut package for small business. The leader just spoke about some of those provisions this morning. The chairman of that committee, Max Baucus, has been to the floor on several occasions to explain the extraordinarily significant tax cuts I will mention. I will mention only one. For a decade, Members on both sides of the aisle have been trying to get the self-employed in America to have parity with other businesses when it comes to health care. Madam President, the Chair knows that her State of New York is full of self-employed people. Do they get the same tax break as General Electric? No. Do they get the same tax break as General Motors? No. These individuals who are self-employed pay more for their health care than big corporations. Is that right? No. We tried to help them in the health care bill, and we could not. We didn't give up the fight. They are in this bill--a $2 billion tax cut for the self-employed. That is just one of the good tax provisions. Senator Reid read off the list, and I will share it with you because I know there are going to be critics coming to the floor, and unfortunately some people will vote against cloture. I hope most people are smart enough not to. If some of them do, I want them to know we have widely distributed this red line document to every news outlet in the country. We have distributed it to many, many organizations. There are over 70 organizations supporting this. This is what we call our red line document. So there is no confusion, the most wonderful thing about this document is that it is just four pages. It is very easy to read. There are not 40 pages. It is not 4,000 pages. There are no special deals. It is all here, and it is all bipartisan. I am going to read some of the names associated with the bill: Kerry- Snowe-Menendez; Snowe; Merkley-Alexander; Snowe; Bingaman-Hatch- Landrieu; Grassley; Baucus-Grassley-Brownback-Inhofe-Johanns-Menendez; Baucus-Grassley-Crapo; Kerry-Ensign and 72 bipartisan cosponsors equally divided between Democrats and Republicans; Snowe; Grassley; Grassley. If somebody comes to the floor and says this bill doesn't have bipartisan support, they might want to answer why their names are here: Landrieu-Snowe; Snowe; Snowe-Landrieu; Snowe-Merkley; Landrieu-Snowe; Landrieu-Crapo-Risch; Snowe; Landrieu-Nelson; Snowe-Pryor; Snowe. I don't know how many more items a Senator can have in a bill. Senator Snowe wrote lots of pieces of this bill. LeMieux-Landrieu; LeMieux; LeMieux-Landrieu; Klobuchar-LeMieux; LeMieux-Landrieu; Cantwell-Boxer-Murray. That lists just a few. So we bring a bipartisan bill to the floor, and then we have a 12- hour debate on one amendment, the first amendment, which is a Republican amendment by Senator LeMieux and myself--it is LeMieux- Landrieu-Nelson. Both Senators from Florida have been extraordinary in their advocacy for this. We had a public, open vote, and we got 60 votes. So now the small business lending provision is in this bill, which makes it even better, even greater, and equally bipartisan. If some people aren't happy with that--I don't write the rules of the Senate. I showed up, and that is what the rules were. If you got 60 votes, you got your amendment on the bill. There are other Members who are coming to speak. I want to just say this has been a very vital debate. This is the time for us to say yes to Main Street. There are literally millions of business owners who not only want this package to pass, they need it to pass. If it passes now, they might be able to hold on. They might be able to create the jobs that are necessary. It is now our chance to deliver a bipartisan bill that will help 27 million small businesses on Main Street. In conclusion, we have spent a lot of time helping big auto manufacturers from Detroit. Today, we can help that repair shop in our neighborhood. This is about corner stores. This is about small banks. Are we going to vote for them or are we going to leave them high and dry? I see the chairman from the Finance Committee, who I think is scheduled to speak. I also see the Senator from Maryland. I will soon yield to the Senator from Maryland, a member of the Small Business Committee, to say a word, and then we have the time under our control. I am sorry, the Senator from Washington is here. I didn't see the Senator. I was blocked. I apologize. I see the Senator from Washington and the Senator from Montana and the Senator from Maryland.

Ms. LANDRIEU. I thought we had the first half hour and the Senator's side had the second, but I understand now that it is back and forth.

Ms. LANDRIEU. Madam President, could I ask the minority leader a question, please. Will he yield? Would the minority leader be willing to say how many amendments might be enough? The Senator from Maine, the ranking member, said a few. The Senator from Florida--if I could finish--the Senator from Florida, Mr. LeMieux, said he thought it would be fair if there were four or five. We have offered three. Is there any sort of possibility--because that would help us get even further.