Mr. Speaker, pursuant to section 2 of House Resolution 62 and as the designee of the majority leader, I have a motion at the desk. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I will be…
Mr. Speaker, pursuant to section 2 of House Resolution 62 and as the designee of the majority leader, I have a motion at the desk.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I will be discussing the substance of this later, but I want to explain what is a somewhat complicated legal and parliamentary situation. First, I do want to note that it is a refutation of the skeptics that this process is going forward.
In September, we were asked by the Bush administration's top economic appointees to pass a bill giving them the authority to deploy $700 billion to repair the credit markets, without any hindrance. I agreed with them that action had to be taken, and, in fact, even if you did not think the action was necessary, when at a time of economic trouble the two chief economic advisers to the President of the United States tell us that if you don't do something there will be problems, there are going to be problems. I don't think they self-created this. I don't think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it was a self-reinforcing one. So we felt we had to act.
But we were able in the negotiations to get one major concession, namely, to say that we would vote the ultimate authority for $700 billion but that after the first $350 billion had been deployed, and I don't want to say ``spent'' because most of it has been lent or invested in ways that it will come back, but we said that at that point if the administration wanted to spend the second 350, and I just misspoke when I said ``spent''--deploy it--they would have to notify Congress. Fifteen days would then be a waiting period during which the money was not available and during which time Congress would get to vote on resolutions to cancel the program. And to reassure Members that they would have a chance for those votes, procedures were drafted by the appropriate Rules Committees in both branches so that neither the House Rules Committee nor the Senate-extended debate could have interfered with this.
Now, we did have one drafting error because for this to work, it would have had to have been passed by both Houses and either signed by the President or have a veto overridden.
The two Chambers that drafted this, the leadership, the rules groups, did a very good job of protecting Members to make sure the bills could come to the floor. That's why we're here. But they did them in isolation. So there's a certain futility to what we are doing today because the Senate has already defeated the Senate version of this; so no matter what happens in the House today, the program goes forward.
People should understand President Bush, at the request of President Obama, asked for the second $350 billion a week ago Monday. That means, I believe, next Tuesday this will be available to the Obama administration because the Senate voted down the resolution of disapproval. The House will still vote, and there will be some indication of what Members think about going forward, but it will not have binding effect. And I think that was a drafting error. It should have been that if one House defeated it, it didn't come up in the other House. But here we are.
There is one other distinction to be drawn. Yesterday, the House passed a bill by a fairly large vote that said that if the second $350 billion is deployed, it should be done with the following conditions: significant money for foreclosure relief; restrictions on the money being used for acquisitions by a receiving bank of another bank; a requirement that there would be an agreement in which banks would specify what they were going to do with the money before they got it; greater restrictions on compensation; a request that the administration do some things to come to the relief of cities, other entities, small businesses; a requirement that this funding be distributed in a way that was equitable to smaller banks. We voted on that yesterday.
Now, my Republican colleagues in particular had a dilemma there. A number of the things that we had in the bill yesterday are popular and indeed many of them agree with. They, I think, were reluctant to have to vote on this because on the other side, you had some of the leading conservative journals of opinion, the Wall Street Journal editorialist, a major paper from the Heritage Foundation, denouncing the notion of helping reduce foreclosures, criticizing the effort to put in community banks. And so my Republican colleagues offered a recommittal motion yesterday which would have, if it had succeeded, in essence wiped out the conditions we are seeking to impose and made yesterday's
vote simply on whether or not to repeal the 350. The problem with that is that they did it in a way that really meant to avoid taking a stand on these conditions.
Now, the recommittal motion was defeated. And my conviction that the recommittal motion had, as one of its goals, avoiding a vote on whether or not to be for foreclosure relief and community banks is reinforcement of the fact that unusually in a bill that many of them had criticized, when the voice vote was called in favor, they did not ask for a roll call. We had a roll call yesterday because I asked for one because I wanted to have a large majority of Members on record so that when we talk to the Obama administration, we have a large majority of Members saying do foreclosure relief, lend to community banks, go to the aid of municipalities. The Republicans wanted to avoid that vote. They didn't want to take it because they didn't want to choose between foreclosure and the Wall Street Journal or foreclosure mitigation and the Heritage Foundation.
That's why they offered the recommit. I say that for this reason. There were people who voted against the recommittal motion yesterday because they did not want to dilute the impact of our insistence that this be used for foreclosure relief, for aid for smaller banks and for other important purposes, and that there be a restriction on the ability of banks to take the money and then do whatever they wanted with it.
That recommittal motion was defeated, so the House did go on record by a large majority in favor of those conditions, and that will be very important as we make the Obama administration understand that. Today is a separate vote. Today we have a vote in which Members will express their opinion on whether or not the $350 billion should go forward. It is simply an expression of opinion. It's kind of a big public opinion poll for the House, because the Senate has already defeated the bill.
But they are two separate issues. The vote on yesterday's recommittal motion was, in my judgment, a rejection of an effort to keep the House from speaking out strongly on the question of foreclosure relief and smaller banks. We have now spoken, as the House of Representatives, by a significant majority and said to this administration, since this is going forward now that the Senate has voted against a disapproval motion, here is what we want. Today Members simply express their opinion on whether or not they want to disapprove it.
I will close by saying for me, the argument that because the Bush administration misused this means that the Obama administration should not be given the chance to do it better, proves too much. If I believed that every instrumentality of government misused by the Bush administration should be denied to the Obama administration, we would have a lot of empty, vacant office space in Washington. We could rent out the Justice Department, the State Department, EPA, HUD and a number of other agencies, because I believe that they misused many of them.
TARP has no independent will. It is a set of policy choices. George Bush used them, in my judgment unwisely, although I think we were better off having even that than nothing, but that has zero to do with whether or not the Obama administration ought to have the right to do it going forward.
I reserve the balance of my time.
Well, I yield myself 30 seconds to say I agree with the gentlewoman that this was appropriate to restrain the Bush administration. My objection is visiting the sins of the Bush administration, or the errors, on the Obama administration.
I now yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland, the majority leader.
If the gentleman would yield, the question that the majority leader asked was, if you take the position that unless we know the Senate is going to do something, we shouldn't do it, then we wouldn't be debating this.
Now, I agree with him, it's important for us to have a chance to express our opinion. In this case, though, unlike yesterday, we passed a bill yesterday that is still pending in the Senate and, if events change, could be brought up. Under the procedures, this bill is dead. It cannot be reconsidered because the Senate killed it.
The gentlewoman points out that it is the law we passed last year that allows us to do it, but it permits us to do it. It doesn't mandate it. What we are trying to do is say to the gentlewoman we agree that it's reasonable to have this on the floor, but the logic that says we shouldn't have acted yesterday because the Senate said they're not going to do it would apply with even greater force when you're talking about doing something the Senate has already killed.
I would just say this. I certainly want them to take it up. Realistically, I don't think they will, unless the Obama administration fails to live up to the things in the bill. I believe that if the Obama administration surprises me, because I don't expect this, it doesn't go ahead with foreclosure diminution, it doesn't lend to community banks, it doesn't do better restrictions on compensation, then you will see pressure in the Senate to take it up.
So there is one difference with regard to Senate action between the resolution the gentlewoman offers, as authorized, although not mandated by the bill, and where we are today. The bill we passed yesterday is pending in the Senate. They don't now intend to take it up. But, if things change, pressure would build to do it.
The resolution we will be voting on today is already dead, the Senate has already killed it, and it does not allow for reconsideration. In both cases, I think it's reasonable for us to go forward. But to argue that it makes sense for us to pass a bill the Senate has already killed but not to pass a bill that will be pending in the Senate, subject to pressure, baffles me.
I yield myself 3 minutes.
First, I want to respond to the gentlewoman from North Carolina's estimate of the Senate parliamentary situation. She is wrong. If this resolution passes, it will not be pending in the Senate. The Senate will always have the right to bring up a new and different bill to repeal the $350 billion. But this resolution is dead, not on arrival, but before arrival. And the difference is this:
This resolution comes to the House floor, as its counterpart came to the Senate floor, under expedited procedures; that is, the filibuster extended debate was not available. The Rules Committee was not available to stop this. The Senate, having defeated the one resolution that they were allowed under expedited procedures, cannot revive it. In fact, it said in the bill as a protection, frankly, for those who are likely to be opposed to the TARP, that it couldn't be reconsidered; that is, it was a protection against pressures being applied by a combination of leaderships on either or both sides and the administration. So this bill is dead. The Senate killed it. This is an exercise.
It is true that the Senate could start all over again with a new bill subject to extended debate, et cetera; and that, of course, nobody could take away from them. But to be very specific, this resolution's counterpart cannot come up in the Senate under the rules, and the Senate Parliamentarian has so ruled, appropriately, if you read the legislation.
So what is available now here is exactly what we have with the bill we passed yesterday, if the Senate wants to take it up under nonexpedited procedures. And when it comes to nonexpedited procedures, the United States Senate has no equal. Nobody can nonexpedite procedures like the Senate. So both of these bills could come up in the Senate under those rules.
Now, the other thing I would say is this, and to the gentleman from California, yeah, there is a philosophical difference here. I do think the gentleman from California was a little harsh in his criticism of the Bush administration in denouncing this, because this is, after all, the Bush administration's creation.
We also have, by the way, and let me address this, under the appointees of President Bush at the Federal Reserve a massive expansion of authority that was granted during the Depression and has rarely been used since for the Federal Reserve to make loans. And I want to be clear, Mr. Speaker, to people that much of what they have read about, for instance, the intervention with AIG primarily and some others, did not come under the TARP primarily; they came from the Federal Reserve using a statutory power from the thirties. It had not been used very much. The Federal Reserve used it somewhat earlier in 2008, and then in September of 2008 began to use it in large numbers. People are understandably concerned about this and what is being done. The Financial Services Committee will be having a hearing within a couple of weeks in which we will begin examining what the Federal Reserve is doing.
I yield myself an additional 1 minute.
I do want to make clear the policies that the gentleman from California describes as failed and as doomed are George Bush's. Now you may think that Obama will do no better. But I do want to be clear. It was the Bush administration officials that asked us to do this. We did modify it some.
The only other point I would make is this about oversight. We did write
oversight into the bill. The gentlewoman says, well, oversight was after the fact. But oversight is always after the fact. The oversight function is to see what has been done and report on it. That is what the Oversight Committee does.
In this case, we put in good oversight. The Government Accountability Office reported early on that they weren't monitoring how the loan money was being spent. And we had a hearing to talk about that. And then the Elizabeth Warren panel talked about it. So our decision to tell the Bush administration to stop and not even ask for the $350 billion until we got a new shot at it came based on information we got from the oversight panels that we put into the bill.
I reserve the balance of my time.
Will the gentlewoman yield on my time?
On my time.
I yield myself 30 seconds.
Will the gentlewoman let me yield 30 seconds?
I will yield myself 30 seconds to point out that the gentlewoman from North Carolina was incorrect. She said this bill would be alive in the Senate. That is wrong. This bill is the expedited procedures proposal. Its Senate counterpart has been killed. If this bill passes or fails, it makes no difference. Now it is true, the Senate has the right under the Constitution to pass a brand new bill. But if it did, it would have to come over here to be passed. This expedited procedure resolution would not meet the bicameral test. So the point is that when she talks about this bill, it has no effect. If the Senate passes a bill, as they would have a right to do under the normal rules subject to filibuster, it would then come over here and be subject to normal rules----
I yield myself 15 seconds to say to the gentlewoman, just as she wouldn't yield to me, I will now yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois. The gentlewoman from Illinois is recognized for 2 minutes.
I yield the gentlewoman 1 additional minute.
Mr. Speaker, how much time remains on each side?
Mr. Speaker, I now yield 3 minutes to the gentlelady from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).
(Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas asked and was given permission to revise and extend her remarks.)
I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes to respond, in part.
One, I got more credit than I deserve for writing the legislation; we had the Senate participating. I did succeed in getting some constraints written in. The problem, however, was not with the legislation, it was the way in which it was administered.
By the way, I do want to make one point. There were complaints yesterday--and I have heard complaints from the Republicans--that they had no chance for input into this legislation. That is, of course, patently untrue. If Members will remember, a large number of Republicans voted against this Bush request the first time. A number switched, still less than a majority, but a large number of Republicans switched because they achieved a major amendment.
The fact is that there was added to the President's proposal a plan for an insurance operation which was written by the Republican leadership and put into the bill at the request of the Republicans. Now, the problem was that the Secretary of the Treasury under George Bush thought it was silly and had no intention of using it. And I think the Republicans knew that, and maybe there was a little self-delusion there, but the fact is that there was a major amendment of that bill entirely generated in the Republican Party. They had a chance to put other things in there.
Now, I will concede I was disappointed. The gentleman said we wrote the bill. I tell you what I take some pride in; we wrote in there specific instructions to them to use some of the money to reduce foreclosure. They refused to use it. And under the American system of government, it is virtually impossible to force an executive branch to carry out the legal authority they are given, just as Alan Greenspan refused years ago, until fairly recently, to use the authority Congress had given him to stop bad subprime mortgages.
So, yes, there was that flaw. And if, in fact, we still had the Bush administration, no legislation, in my judgment, would succeed. But given the commitment of the Obama administration--the gentleman said there is no plan. In fact, there are very specific plans, including some from Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC, and some approved by the outgoing Secretary of HUD, Mr. Preston, to reduce foreclosure.
Now, the gentleman has said leave it to the Fed.
I yield myself an additional minute.
I understand that was the argument I read also arrived at by the Heritage Foundation. The notion that we should leave it to the Federal Reserve to do it and not try to do it here means that any effort by us to put some conditions on there, we should give up. And, in fact, the difference between simply allowing the Federal Reserve to do these things and having this is--and this is a certainty, given the Obama administration's commitment--we will get, under this $350 billion, a substantial amount of money for diminishing foreclosures. There are Members who don't think we should try to do that, I understand that philosophical difference, but it's a factual difference. Under the Federal Reserve authority, which we have to examine, nothing is done to deal with foreclosures. This specific instruction here is to use a substantial part of the money--$100 billion, we hope, of the $350--for foreclosure diminution that will not happen if the $350 billion is not released.
Speaking of foreclosure, there are two Members of this House who have done the most to keep before us the need to diminish foreclosures, one of them is the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur). I yield the gentlewoman 4 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, I think I may be my final speaker, so I will reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes to respond to the very disappointing remarks from the gentlewoman from Illinois.
In fact, we have had several oversight hearings on this issue. We called Mr. Kashkari before us when the Government Accountability Office reported that they had not done the lending. The gentlewoman talked about Mr. Kashkari. We had a hearing last fall on specifically that subject. We had Mr. Paulson before us on the question of oversight. We have had Ms. Warren. So we have had a number of oversight hearings.
The gentlewoman then specifically, I believe, may have forgotten something. She said that we haven't yet had a hearing with the executives. She knows that it's scheduled. I am disappointed that she would do that without referring to the fact that it's scheduled. And, in fact, it would have been this week. We decided after the election that we would do this in the new Congress. That's what I was asked for by the ranking member: Let's do this in the new Congress.
We had a hearing set when it was pointed out to us by the chief executives that they were in a quiet period under SEC rules because they were about to report profits, and they pointed out that if we were to ask them publicly some of these questions, they would be in conflict with SEC rules. So we postponed the hearing and set a date. So we were asked by the minority to have this hearing with the executives, and we had several other oversight hearings. Maybe the gentlewoman couldn't make them. Maybe she forgot we had them. But we had several oversight hearings. In fact, what people know about the failures of this program came from the oversight we wrote into the bill and the hearings we then had with the overseers.
Then we were asked, let's in the new Congress schedule a hearing with the chief executives. We said yes. We had it scheduled when it was called to our attention that there would be a conflict with SEC rules; so we postponed it.
And I'm glad to be able to give a fuller picture of what has happened here than the gentlewoman from Illinois unfortunately gave.
I would yield myself 30 seconds to say that the decision that triggered TARP came from the Bush administration at the request of the Obama administration. So that was simply not something within our control.
And I would point out the gentlewoman had said that we hadn't had the oversight hearings, that we've had them. It's true. The Bush administration in those hearings didn't give us the answers we wanted. But oversight doesn't mean you can make people say things they don't want to say. You can expose their failure to say them and act accordingly.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
I am sure, to the approbation of Members, I am prepared to announce that I am our last speaker. So I will withhold, and when the other side is through, we can get out of here.
How much time do I have remaining?
I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, first, I want to address this basic issue again about what the Senate is likely to do. Technically, there is no likelihood that this bill will be taken up in the Senate because it is the expedited procedure of resolution that has been killed in the Senate.
The Senate could pass a bill rescinding the TARP. Having voted by 52- 42 not to pass the disapproval resolution, it seems unlikely that 42 will become 60 in the near term, but there is that possibility.
But I would say this to the gentlewoman. When she said that both bills, the one we passed yesterday and this one, are as likely to be taken up, in some sense, that is true. But that makes our point. I didn't say don't do the bill yesterday. When I talked about this bill being already killed in the Senate, I wasn't saying don't do it. I welcome this debate. I was refuting the arguments from my Republican colleagues that yesterday was a waste of time. I agree that it is a good thing for us to give our views today and yesterday.
I did notice in today's Washington Post that they note that the passage by a large majority in the House yesterday, we got a larger majority for this bill than the partisan breakdown. It was largely a partisan vote, but not entirely. And more Republicans supported the bill than Democrats opposed it, I think because of the power of the desire to help minimize foreclosure and get money to community banks. But my argument, she's now embracing. The fact that the Senate may or may not be able to pass a bill is no reason for us not to do something.
Now I want to address an important aspect of this, and I am talking now to people in the Obama administration, to the people in the Bush administration, to the people in the financial community. We have in this country, obviously, as you have in any country, a certain degree of stratification along various lines. There are people who are at the top of the ladder in terms of economic power, in terms of influence.
There's an element that would think of themselves as elite opinion. It's not a value term here, but opinion of a fairly small number of people with a great deal of power. Then there is the opinion of the great majority of Americans.
I want to address now the people at the top of the economic ladder, the people in the financial institutions, and I think here I am speaking, to some extent, for almost every Member of this House. There is a dangerous and deeper split between the views of the economic elite on what should be done in the current crisis and those of the average American than I have ever seen.
We heard some Members there say--the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Barrett) say, and I appreciated his saying it--that the passage of the TARP last fall helped. The Republican leader said that. I think it did. My criticism is that I don't think it helped nearly as much.
But I have two criticisms. I think it helped avoid something worse. And one of the things we know as elected officials is this. Some of the hardest jobs we do are to prevent bad things from happening, and we can expect to get no credit for it. Disaster averted is nobody's political platform. That helps in economic analysis, but you can't go before your voters with what economists call the counterfactual and explain to them how things would have been worse if you hadn't acted and expect cheers if they're still pretty bad. And that is appropriate. The public should have that high demand to make of us.
But while I and, I think, most people who are at that higher level of the economic ladder, economists, while most of them think it was a good thing that we passed the bill last year and that $350 billion was deployed, the American people overwhelmingly think it wasn't. And that is one of my criticisms of the Bush administration and of Secretary Paulson, a man whom I admire, with whom I am proud to have worked, with whom we accomplished a great deal in the areas of financial regulation and housing, et cetera. But here was the mistake:
By not listening to public concern about the $350 billion, by refusing to follow the congressional mandate to do something about foreclosures, by indulging the arrogance of some of the banks who said, ``We will take that money and we won't tell you what we do,'' they have discredited the notion of intervention of that sort. And I think that is a mistake, because I think we are at a point where some of that intervention is still needed.
Now, there are philosophical views that say the other, but there is a division. And, again, the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Barrett) very thoughtfully said, ``We averted a greater disaster by passing this.'' The Republican leader said he is glad he voted for it. I think they are both right, and I think it is important that we acknowledge that.
I have two criticisms to make of the way in which the administration carried it out. One, they didn't do some of the good they could have done. And I do think they made a fundamental macro-economic mistake by not diminishing foreclosure. I believe, until you begin to diminish foreclosure, you not only deny some people some relief, but probably, more importantly, you don't get the country out of the bind that it is in, because the continued rapid deterioration in those assets is at the root of a large part of the problem.
But what we also had was a degree of alienation on the part of the average American who saw banks getting money, in one case apparently using them for an acquisition of a smaller bank that was very important to the community where it existed, in Ohio. We saw bankers saying, ``I got the money. It's none of your business what we do with it.'' We saw bonuses given that shouldn't be given. I am confident that the Obama administration has learned from that. But I go beyond that.
There is in this country today a very sharp divide on a number of issues, not just whether or not you intervene. Here
is the problem with intervention. When you have a financial system that is in such difficulty, I think it is important to try to keep these institutions from collapsing en masse, not that we are at that point, but from not collapsing. But remember, as an institution's assets deteriorate, its capacity legally to lend, if it is a bank, deteriorates. We want to reverse that cycle. Let's not overstate it. But I think we need to intervene in this way. The public says no, because the immediate beneficiary of these interventions are people they don't like, are people who in fact made some mistakes.
Now, it turns out that you can't help the whole economy in some cases without some help--you know, we talk about sort of incidental victims. These are incidental beneficiaries. This is kind of, not casualties, civilian casualties, but civilian beneficiaries. You can't get from here to there without helping some of these people. But it ought to be done in a way that reassures the average American. Part of it has to do, I believe, with the weakness of the social safety net. People who lose their health care because they lose their jobs will react particularly angrily when a financial institution is benefited.
So I make this plea now to the people in the financial institutions, to people at the upper levels of economic decision-making, and they should understand that this Congress representing the people is under enormous pressure to deny them some of the things they think are necessary. By the way, not just here; in trade, in international trade. This is not a Congress that is ready to go forward with that.
We had an amendment yesterday offered by the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Myrick) that said none of the recipients of TARP funds can do customer service outsourcing. I believe that most people who are CEOs of corporations, most economists, or many economists, many of the people at the top levels of the administrations, Bush and Obama, and go on back now, probably think that is unwise economic policy, but we didn't have a roll call on it, because that is a totally irresistible impulse here. It may put us in some trouble with the WTO. We will have to deal with that.
People who don't like the Myrick amendment--and I supported it. People who don't like the Myrick amendment had better understand that amendments like that will proliferate until they join us in giving the average American a better sense that he or she will benefit from this prosperity. Now, that is part of where we are today.
Look, the Senate has already killed this resolution. Why are we still voting on it? Because there is a degree of anger in the American public at what they think is a very unfair system that gives benefits, unduly and disproportionately, to some of those who caused the problem, while denying health care and unemployment compensation and decent higher education for working class people.
I mean, Mr. Speaker, to caution the people who are deeply involved in running this financial system in this country, work with us to alleviate this. As long as the average American thinks that a small group is getting help when they are not getting anything, then that small group pretty soon won't be getting the help. And there may be some cases when, as I said, benefiting that group is the only way to get broader benefits. That is why we did the bill yesterday, because we think it is a very important way of getting the Obama administration-- and I believe, by the way, many in the Obama administration do agree with that understanding. They will be running into pressures from the other side of the people they are dealing with in the financial community. But it is a broader political point.
For those of us who think, and there are some who philosophically don't want any government intervention in the market whatsoever. They don't want a minimum wage and they don't want an injection of capital to a failing financial institution. I disagree with that as a matter of economic philosophy. I respect its intellectual integrity. That makes sense. What I disagree with is the view that says it is okay to help AIG and not worry about their wages, but criticize the wages of auto workers. It is the view of too many in the financial community that they need some direct help because that is the only way to help the economy, and I think that is often the case, but, no, you don't have unions; no, you don't have health care. As I said, there is a consistent and honorable philosophical view that says ``no'' to all of that.
What I am addressing now are those in the sector that would be designated as the elite, who understand the need for an intervention of which they are the direct beneficiaries because that is the only way to help the whole economy, but then resist some of these other things.
One of the things that gives me optimism about the next 2 years, Mr. Speaker, is that I believe we have in place a President and majorities in the House and the Senate who understand that there has got to be some consistency in this approach. And let me just say in closing, and I hope this resolution is defeated, because I do not think that the Obama administration should be denied the right to use tools simply because the Bush administration misused them. And that is the only issue here today, if this were to have binding effect. But we are here today because of that anger that must be alleviated, because it must be recognized as based in reality.
