To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 331 1st Street in Carlstadt, New Jersey, as the "Staff Sergeant Frank T. Carvill and Lance Corporal Michael A. Schwarz Post Office Building".

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 1 of rule XXII and by direction of the Committee on Financial Services, I move to take from the Speaker's table the bill (H.R. 4173) to provide for financial regulatory reform, to protect consumers and investors, to enhance Federal understanding of insurance issues, to regulate the over-the-counter derivatives markets, and for other purposes, with the Senate amendments thereto, disagree to the Senate amendments, and agree to the conference asked by the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we have just seen an elephant stick wielded on the floor of the House. The elephant stick refers to the man who's walking around the Mall here in Washington carrying a big stick, and people say, Why do you have that big stick. He said, Well, I've got to keep away all the elephants, and the people say to him, Well, there aren't any elephants here, and he said, Right, my stick works.

My friend from Alabama is determined to prevent from happening what's not going to happen, what's not authorized in the bill. It is true that we had bailouts, and of course, what we also have here is the latest in a series of stunning repudiations of the Bush administration by its former loyal followers. All the bailouts the gentleman mentioned, of course, happened under the administration of President Bush, and I believe President Bush's administration did the best they could with weak tools at the time to deal with the problem.

What we have are ways to avoid that from happening. There is reference to too big to fail. No institution will be too big to fail under this bill. They will fail. The question is, will their failure lead to consequences that you should have some ability to deal with.

We do model some of this after the FDIC. The FDIC, run by a very able appointee, Sheila Bair, a former aid to Senator Dole and a Republican appointed to the job by President Bush, had a major role in helping us decide how to do this, and it is to say, first of all, the institutions that get too far into debt will die.

My Republican colleagues were actually right in the wrong place earlier this year, which is better than their usual average, when they talked about death panels. We are legislating death panels this year but for financial institutions, not elderly women. We don't have them in the health care bill. We have them in the financial bill. There is no too big to fail institution.

I will say in the instruction motion some things that were done were not done as well as they should have been--that's why we go to a final conference--and to the extent that there are suggestions that some of these institutions might survive, we will clean them out. The Senate bill has some provisions I don't like, and section 202 of the Senate bill I hope to change.

On the other hand, the notion that in this very complex system that we have, with the debts that are out there, to only do bankruptcy is simplistic. By the way, if my Republican colleagues really believe that bankruptcy was the only way to deal with these institutions, they would have an amendment or would have had an amendment to do away with the dissolution authority in the FDIC. The major exception of bankruptcy right now is in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. We don't have simple bankruptcy for banks. We have a method given that particular relevance in the society on how you wind them down.

So, there are many things in here that I agree with. As to the conference report being open, again here I welcome my Republican colleagues as converts to the cause of openness and interbranch negotiations. When the Republicans controlled this institution for 12 years and had the Senate for most of that time, conferences were so rare that I've had to explain to Members who came during the years of Republicans how a conference works. Now they have become great advocates of an openness they never implemented themselves.

We will have a conference, which I announced was my intention last year, last fall. It will be open. Things will be presented. They will be debated. They will be subject to amendment. They will be voted on. I was asked if they were going to be televised. Now, I am not the editorial director of C-SPAN. I hope it will be covered. I hope TV will be there. I hope it will be widely covered, and I think it probably will be given the interest.

So, when they talk about a 72-hour requirement, I expect that we will beat that. The timetable I am hoping for will have this bill done in a couple of weeks, and it should be reported out, if we can work this out by a Thursday, and not come to the House until Tuesday which is more than 72 hours. One never knows whether there is going to be some emergency, what might happen. This will be a fully debated bill.

So there are aspects of the instruction report that I agree with. There are aspects with which I disagree. Of course, we have to go to the Senate. That's why instruction motions are not binding. But I do disagree with two points.

First of all, the entirely enacted allegation that this perpetuates bailouts, they have us confused with the situation that occurred in 2008. I don't blame the Bush administration for these bailouts in part because I think some of them could have been conducted more sensibly and better and with more concern for the impact on the average citizen, but they didn't have the tools. This gives them tools that first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration has asked for, not to keep institutions alive but to put them to death in a way that does not cause great perturbation in the rest of the economy. There will be no taxpayer money expended under here. That's already done. I do not doubt that years from now they will take credit for what we had already decided to do.

The instruction motion, in other words, is a mixed bag. Some parts of it I hope we will act on. The ex-ante fund we talk about of $150 billion, recommended to us again by Chairwoman Bair of the FDIC, many of us thought that made sense. The Senate and the administration were opposed to it. It will not survive the conference. People know that. So, to that extent, that's going to disappear anyway.

But saying that you only have bankruptcy and nothing else that helps you buffer the consequences of the failure of these institutions--and failures they will be, they will be hard to fail and will be dissolved--I think is reckless.

So I plan to vote against the motion to instruct, and given that it is such a mixed bag of things and given that it's not binding, I will predict that the outcome is likely to be very similar no matter how this goes. That is, there are some things we are going to do, some things we have to negotiate with the Senate. We haven't got the power to order. So I think this will be a useful discussion, but I will go back to just the last central point.

There will be no taxpayer funds, and there will be no institutions that are not allowed to fail. There will be an effort--and this has to be negotiated--to work with the Senate so that we do not simply say that the consequences are of no interest, and I would repeat again. Those who genuinely believe that only bankruptcy should be used have made a major concession by not applying those rules to the banking system. If only bankruptcy should be used, then where was the amendment during the process to convert the FDIC dissolution process on which this is modelled to a bankruptcy model?

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to yield to any of my Republican colleagues who will tell me why during this process they never moved to require bankruptcy as the way of dealing with failing banks. If bankruptcy is the only way to do it, why have the Republicans never proposed that we substitute for the current FDIC proposal bankruptcy? Well, I'm used to being unanswered when I ask hard questions. I think that proves the point.

I will yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Well, the gentleman is wrong about that because, yes, depositors are different than investors and depositors are insured, but we have deposit insurance. If you on the other side generally believe this, Mr. Speaker, they would provide deposit insurance and then bankruptcy. The gentleman's incorrectly answered the question. Deposit insurance takes care of the depositors, but there are other things that are done to try and reduce the cost to the government. So bankruptcy and deposit insurance has not been the method.

Yes.

I would take back my time to say that's even by the standards of this debate wholly illogical. No, I'm not remotely suggesting that. What I'm suggesting is the glaring inconsistency between saying bankruptcy is the only way you put an institution out of business and the failure to apply that to the banking business.

By the way, I don't mean to be rude but the gentleman mentioned Citicorp. There's a bank there that has deposit insurance. So maybe the gentleman wasn't aware that the bank there has deposit insurance.

Mr. Speaker, there is another error in the comments. This is that the bill designates institutions too big to fail as systemically important. That is misleading as stated.

In fact, the bill in the House does not designate any institution as being systemically important. The only way an institution would be designated as systemically important is if it was found to be troubled. So there would be no situation in which an institution would have that label and go out and be able to do things with it.

Under the bill that we have, only a finding that the institution is in difficulty triggers a systemic importance designation, and it is accompanied with restrictions on that institution. It is exactly the opposite of this being a badge to get more loans. It is publicly identified as a troubled institution.

The last point I would make is this. Yes, there was flood insurance, Medicare, a number of things. None of them have the language we have in this bill. This bill has very specific language banning those things because we have learned from experience.

We have learned from the experience of 2008, with all those bailouts. And, again, remember, every single bailout activity was initiated by the Bush administration. And I say that not for political purposes but to indicate the inherent difficulties here.

And it was the people in the Bush administration who first said to us, ``Give us different tools. We have to be able to deal with putting these institutions out of business, but not ignore the consequences.''

So, with that, Mr. Speaker, I reiterate: This bill very explicitly prevents bailouts. It designates no institution as systemically important. It says that regulators may step in when they find an institution to be troubled. And if they think that that troubled institution could cause damage, they don't just designate it, they put severe restrictions on it.

So it is exactly the opposite suggestion that some will be too big to fail. They will be on notice that they have to increase their capital, decrease their activity. And people will be told that if that institution does fail under this bill, those who have invested, et cetera, will be wiped out.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

If the gentleman would yield, as you know, I was for some form of that. And I guarantee, because the Senate has acted, we will have tough auditing provisions of the Federal Reserve in the final bill.

And I do want to note to my friend from Texas that, when the Republicans offered a motion to recommit to the bill, they would have wiped out a number of things, including his audit provision. So despite the fact that my friend

from Texas temporarily abandoned his audit provision to the perils of a recommittal provision, I will join with him in reviving it.

And, as he knows, we have in our bill a severe limitation on this power under section 13(3) for making these loans. What they did with AIG will no longer be possible. There will be no more loans to individual institutions.

But he has been the leader on the audit situation, and I intend to continue to work with him to make sure it is well done.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the chairman of the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kanjorski), who had a major and constructive role in this bill and was pushing for things like reform of the Volcker rule before it was popular in other quarters.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to say that I'm intrigued. We were talking about bankruptcy, now we have a new concept--enhanced bankruptcy. We were told earlier that it should just be plain bankruptcy like everybody else. Now, apparently, there is something special so we get enhanced bankruptcy. Maybe we will have enhanced bankruptcy explained to us. And if bankruptcy is good for everybody, why does enhanced bankruptcy need to be done here, and what is it? Is it another name for doing more than bankruptcy?

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield 3 minutes to the chairman of the Oversight Committee of the Financial Services Committee who has been a major force for stability in this system, the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moore).

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I remember when the gentleman from Texas was a little less harsh on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when an important amendment that he offered was adopted over the objection of the Secretary of the Treasury, but we've all tended to evolve some on some of these issues.

I want to repeat the central theme here: History is one of bailouts initiated by the prior administration. Some have been supported by this Congress. Some have died by the administration on its own. This bill prevents that legally.

The gentleman from Texas who just spoke referred to the AIG bailout by the Federal Reserve or the Federal Reserve's picking one company or another. The power that the Federal Reserve has had for over 75 years to do that is repealed in this bill. The Federal Reserve is allowed, if there are solvent institutions that are liquid and have a 99 percent chance of repayment at least, to advance money based on their paper, but there can be no more AIGs under the Federal Reserve's authority.

The gentleman said, Well, they can get on the list of too big to fail. There is no such list. There is literally no such list. This is a hard-held myth by the Republicans. What there is is this: If the regulators have been given more power to watch you and if you say the regulators have failed, well, they were a different set of regulators. The SEC today is not the SEC under the prior administration, which looked the other way at Madoff. This is a different and tougher SEC. What they do is say to an institution that's now being much more carefully monitored, You need to be reformed. You need to be restrained. You must have higher capital requirements. You must reduce the amount you are doing.

So there is a tight limitation on what these entities can do. So the privilege of being named important is--and it's not called ``important.'' It says you're going to be subject to stricter standards. People are on notice that the authorities are worried about you, and then it says explicitly in the bill there can be no bailouts. There have been prior cases of bailouts on all sides--the Congress, the President, both parties--but they never had this language. There is no example of this explicit antibailout language being flouted, because it never existed before, so there are no too-big-to-fail institutions.

The question between us is this: When an institution that has gotten overly indebted is put out of business, as this bill requires it to be, do you simply do that and ignore the consequences or should there be some capacity in the Federal Government to look at the consequences?

Now, again, my colleagues have not applied their own logic to the FDIC, and I hope that the final speaker will explain what ``enhanced bankruptcy'' is. Remember, we started out being told that bankruptcy was the answer. Bankruptcy got enhanced somewhere, and we still haven't heard what that ``enhanced bankruptcy'' is. We insure the depositors, but that's not all. The depositors are taken care of, but then there are costs outside of the deposit, and the FDIC is told to follow the least cost method, and that will sometimes mean spending some money to wind it down in a way that diminishes the impact.

So, apparently, even my colleagues on the other side aren't quite as devoted to bankruptcy as they think. They are not prepared to put it into the FDIC proposal. It's a form of enhanced bankruptcy, and I hope, in their remaining time, they will explain it. When they offered a recommittal motion on this bill, Mr. Speaker, they didn't say, Let's fix bankruptcy or let's do this. They said, Let's kill every single form of consumer and financial reform.

The gentleman from Texas was alluding to the consumer agency. They wanted to kill an independent consumer agency. They wanted to kill a fiduciary responsibility for broker-dealers. They wanted to kill a requirement that leverage can never go more than 15-1. This is a little piece of what they are trying to do. They remain opposed. Their view is that the regulators in prior years didn't do a good job--regulators, yes, who followed the nonregulatory philosophy of the prior administration--and they have been opposed to any single form of reform. They are cloaking that in an argument that they are stopping bailouts which are already made illegal by this bill.

Now, the instruction motion has some things in it that Members should support, and it has some things that Members should not support. It is obviously done in a way that, I think, will have an ambiguous impact, and it isn't binding in any case. So what the vote is is less important than what the message is, and let's be very clear about the message: There are no bailouts allowed under this bill.

Will the gentleman yield?

The statement that the Senate bill includes Elizabeth Warren is breathtaking. I do not believe the Senate bill refers to Elizabeth Warren.

Mr. Speaker, I rise maybe to make a suggestion. I know it may drop on deaf ears, but, you know, we are about to undertake an historic event, both in this institution, the Congress of the United States, and in the United States of America, and that is to enact laws by a democratic society through their elected representatives that will cause occasions to happen that may actually save the economy of this Nation or the economy of the world.

It seems to me at this first preparation date we are awaiting the appointment of our conferees here on the House side, that we are already indicating that there will be a political flavor to this conference as opposed to an attempt by both sides of the aisle to find what is best for America and what is best for the economy of this country.

Now, I suggest, and I will concede, having worked with the chairman and Members on the other side, the ranking members and others, for these last 15 or 16 months, that this is not a perfect bill or a perfect solution. I wish it were. But I think we will all have to wait until another day of a higher order to get to perfection.

All we are trying to do here is to work in the regular order of the legal process to see if we can make certain that we don't bring down our economy or our government or the world's economy or the world governments. And that's what we are attempting to do.

Now, you know, we have all these titles, and I am probably as guilty as others, ``too big to fail.'' And we talk about that like that's an easily definable entity. Well, in reality, it isn't.

The fact of the matter is, some things are so interconnected and intertwined and involved in our economic system that, for all intents and purposes, they would appear not to be a risky organization, but that when you examine them and you see the tentacles that they send out through our society and other organizations throughout the world, that their failure can precipitate a failure of the economic system of the world.

That's what we experienced in an organization known as AIG. You know, an organization in excess of 100,000 people, working in tens of countries around the world, had a little organization in London, England, called AIG Financial Products. Those 400 people were able to take a name, AIG, American International Insurance Group, and utilize that to get into the derivative business to the tune of $2.8 trillion without the support of adequate assets to meet their counterparty positions.

And what happened? It started to fail to meet its counterparty positions and immediately would have put at risk most of the major banks of not only the United States but of the world.

Now, when that was happening--and that occurred after other failures in the United States had occurred--we had several choices. We could have sat by and said, ``Well, the market will cure all things.'' And I guess if you are a purist, that's not a bad position philosophically to take, because it is correct. I will concede to that.

But I am one of those people that favor affecting the market and taking the actions that will, in some instances, short-circuit the effects of the market when the effects of the market will be so severe on our population that it warrants such action. And that's exactly what happened at AIG.

If we had sat back and allowed that to occur and the ripple effect around the world, we would have collapsed the economy of the United States and the world, probably, some of our best economists in the world indicated, within 72 hours. We would have been in a position of no one knowing what the world's economy would have looked like.

We were called upon to take certain actions, and that was way back in September or October of 2008. And many of us came back to Washington just before our vital elections that year, and we went to work and we created something.

Can I reconstruct for you gentlemen what it was about? We didn't come back to the Obama administration. We didn't come back to a situation-- --

Parliamentary Inquiry

It is certainly a pleasure to address the Speaker, and I will. I am sure we should adhere to the decorum of the House and the rules of the House, and I will definitely do that.

I wouldn't think of calling the attention of my observations to my colleagues on the other side. That could be frightful if we did that because they may have to respond to those observations. So we won't call those observations.

I was going through how we got here and why we are here. And how we got here was we met in rooms around this Capitol for a number of weeks, 2 or 3 weeks, as I recall. And the President of the United States, George W. Bush, in his last year of presidency, or in the last several years of his presidency, indicated that his Secretary of Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve were his designees to work with Congress to see what we could do to prevent the potential meltdown or catastrophe to the world's economy. And we went to work to do that.

Now, as I recall--and I sat in some of those meetings, not all of those meetings--we would periodically tune the conference telephone to economists, Nobel Prize-winning economists around the world, of all political persuasions and philosophical positions. And, to my best recollection, there were several dozen. And to a man, or woman, not one of them disagreed that what we were facing was total meltdown and that precipitous action had to be taken.

And the precipitous action that was taken was to provide a rescue package, giving unusual, incredible authority to the executive branch of government, to

be utilized by the Secretary of the Treasury, to do what we could to prevent a meltdown in the United States.

Now, at all times, as I recall, those eminent economists were telling us that it was their opinion that even if we did these strange and unusual activities of empowering the President and the Secretary of the Treasury to borrow monies, use monies, buy assets, do all kinds of things, the chance of success was rated at about 50/50.

As I recall, we worked for about 2 or 3 weeks crafting what originally was a three-page bill that ultimately became a 400-page bill and became known as the ``rescue'' bill. We brought it to the House floor, if all of you will recall, and it failed. And the day that it failed, the hour that it failed, the half hour that it failed, the New York Stock Exchange dropped 900 points. And finally, there was a realization across the country and across the world that if this rescue package was not passed, we probably were looking at the beginning of the failure of the American economic system, and we went to work to see if we could put a coalition together to get it passed, and that took another week, if I recall.

Now, we did those things in the midst of an election. We did those things with a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, and it seems we did it pretty successfully. And we didn't call it a ``bailout'' bill. That became a political terminology so that people could be misinformed, misdirected, and have a visceral reaction to what the Congress has done when they really didn't understand it. And what occurred? Well, that prevailed. Rather than calling it a ``rescue'' bill anymore, it became known as the ``bailout.''

I want to correct that because I've heard that term used here at least a dozen or two dozen times. I asked the question, what did we bail out? We made extensive commitments to banks in the United States. To the best of my knowledge, all those banks have now repaid those commitments to the Treasury or to the Federal Reserve. What was the success of that? Most of them did not fail and our economic system did not fail, in totality, so it was pretty good, but we were losing employment and falling like a rock, the economy, to the tune of, in January, when the new President of the United States was sworn into office, this Nation lost 750,000 jobs and had been losing jobs at that rate for several months before and it continued several months after. And we started to get into, as opposed to discussing economics, free market situations and legalities of how we handle this problem. We got into a political ramble that has continued to this day. I think that's what I got up to address.

If we stay on this course and this direction, the only thing that's going to happen at this conference committee--and ultimately the bills that are enacted into law and signed by the President--will be very limited-capacity pieces of legislation that will not nearly accomplish what could happen. On the other hand, I say to my friends on the other side and the Members and colleagues of this Congress, if we can put our personal prejudices, our political advantages to the side and spend the next 2\1/2\ or 3 weeks in an honest effort to get the best bill possible to reform the financial markets of the United States, and indeed the world, we can do something that is so historic in nature that we place the stability of our economy for the next 75 years as it was ably put together in the 1930s.

If we don't accomplish that, what we're going to end up with is a temporary solution to a disastrous problem, fighting a lot of silly political questions which will long disappear before most of us do from the face of the Earth, but not accomplishing anything for the American people.

So I just end this dialogue with saying this--to the gentlemen on both sides of the aisle, so I'm not charged with directing it towards one side--let's put our disagreements aside for the next 2 or 3 weeks. Let's listen to the chairman of the House committee and the ranking member. Let's listen to the chairman of the Senate committee and ranking member and the other 30 participants of this conference committee, with the commitment of doing the best we can within our powers to prevent this from happening, certainly in the near future, or potentially ever again. If we fail to do that, we will have failed our job.

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion at the desk.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This motion to instruct directs the conferees to insist that this legislation end the possibility of taxpayer-funded bailouts once and for all by stipulating that bankruptcy is the only available option for liquidating a failed financial firm. The motion also requires that the conferees and the public, by extension, have at least 72 hours to review the contents of the conference report before its final approval.

We've heard time and time again that the Democrats ``resolution authority'' to wind down systemically significant financial institutions ends the too-big-to-fail doctrine and protects taxpayers. That's an outrageous and false claim. Read the bills. Both the House and the Senate let the FDIC do the following: lend to a failing firm, purchase the assets of a failing firm, guarantee its obligations to creditors, take a security interest in its assets, and even sell or transfer assets that the FDIC acquired from it.

And while the House establishes a $150 billion bailout fund to pay for the resolution of a failing firm, with an extra $50 billion line of credit with the Treasury if the original $150 billion is exhausted and cannot fully fund the bailout, the Senate approach is no better. The Senate would allow the FDIC to potentially provide trillions of dollars from the Treasury in order to pay off a failed firm's creditors and counterparties in the aftermath of its failure with the hopes that the funds can be recouped at some later date. But only a hope.

The Senate bill institutionalizes backdoor bailouts that have so infuriated the American people by conferring on the FDIC the exact same tools that were used to rescue the creditors of Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac with the taxpayer price tag today of over a trillion dollars. This would continue the misguided too-big-to-fail bailouts that allowed U.S. regulators to pay Goldman Sachs and other large European banks 100 cents on the dollar at the expense of hundreds of smaller institutions and companies which were considered too insignificant or small to save or to pay.

The Democrats like to call their plan a ``death panel'' for large financial firms, but if you read the bill, in reality, it is nothing less than the taxpayer-funded life support to pay off the creditors of the failed institutions but not necessarily all of the creditors. They could pay some of the creditors and let others hang out to dry. We saw that with AIG and other bailouts.

And don't forget the so-called too-big-to-fail institutions have only grown larger and more dominant through the regulator-directed but taxpayer-funded bailout process, a process this legislation institutionalizes.

The better, more equitable approach to dealing with failed nonbank financial institutions--the only way to make sure taxpayers are protected from paying for Wall Street mistakes--is bankruptcy, first proposed by House Republicans. Unlike the FDIC, which can funnel unlimited amounts of taxpayer cash to a failing firm's creditors as part of a so-called resolution, a bankruptcy court has neither the authority nor the funds to make creditors whole. Bankruptcy is an open, transparent process administered according to clear rules and settled precedent and preferences, preferences that, in this bill, could be disregarded.

By contrast, the resolution authority proposed by the Democrats would be carried out entirely behind closed doors with no guarantee of adequate stakeholder participation and protection and without a bankruptcy judge to ensure a fair and equitable outcome. The Democrats have been careful to include in their bill a provision that explicitly states that taxpayers will bear no losses from the government's exercise of resolution authority. But that promise, like the promise we heard in Fannie and Freddie, is an empty one, not worth the paper it is printed on.

You will remember, on this floor we heard the Secretary of the Treasury say, $300 billion that will never be used. It was used, and almost another trillion dollars more was guaranteed.

The only way to ensure that the pockets of taxpayers will not again be picked by Wall Street and government bureaucrats with the help of this Congress--a coalition which sometimes I refer to as the reckless and the clueless--is to insist that failing firms be resolved through bankruptcy.

In conclusion, let me remind my colleagues that for 99.9 percent of core companies and all individuals who find themselves unable to meet their obligations or their creditors, bankruptcy--not a government bailout--is the only alternative. It ought to be the alternative for failing too-big-to-save corporations as well.

This motion to instruct would eliminate the two big to fail/too small to save double standard in the Democrat bill that has so infuriated the American people and makes bankruptcy the only option for the systemically significant firms, many of which created the crisis our economy and the American people face today. I urge my colleagues to support it.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, at this time I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to another gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul).

(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

May I inquire of the Speaker as to how much time is remaining on each side.

Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the very able ranking member of the Oversight Committee, Mrs. Judy Biggert.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the ranking member of the Government Oversight Committee from California (Mr. Issa).

At this time, Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the vice ranking member of the Financial Services Committee, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Neugebauer).

Mr. Speaker, at this time I yield 3 minutes to the ranking member of the Capital Markets Subcommittee, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time left on both sides, knowing that I have the right to close.

Mr. Speaker, we heard the gentleman from Pennsylvania say that there were really no bailouts. I think, if you submit that statement to the American people, they would tell you that there were bailouts because, in fact, there were bailouts.

The majority has made a statement on the floor of the House in defense of this bill that it has all been paid back. Well, in fact, it has not all been paid back, and I think, on further examination, Mr. Speaker, we would all have to remember the inconvenient fact that AIG still owes the American people about $150 billion and that Freddie and Fannie not only owe hundreds of billions of dollars but that the President, back on December 25, guaranteed their obligations, which could run in the trillions.

Now, in addition to all of that, a few statements by the chairman, Mr. Speaker.

The chairman says that they have to be troubled, that instead of going through bankruptcy, they will go through this thing where you can guarantee their obligations, where you can take a security interest in them, where you can purchase their assets, where you can lend money to them. They have to be troubled.

Well, who decides that?

Well, according to the bill, the Secretary of the Treasury sits at the head of a small group. I think the Senate bill includes Ms. Elizabeth Warren, but it includes the OCC.

Yes, I will yield.

Well, I will withdraw that statement. I am glad to hear that it does not.

Now, let me ask you this. This bill, and I'm going to quote from section 210, it says that the FDIC is authorized to borrow up to 90 percent of the fair value of the failed firm's total consolidated assets. Ninety percent of the total consolidated assets.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I would ask the chairman, maybe he can give us this figure or review my figures. But the largest corporation in America, Bank of America, which would qualify under this program has total assets of $2.34 trillion. That means that the FDIC could borrow $2 trillion.

Now, I would ask this: Where do they borrow it from? But, more importantly, if they borrow $2 trillion to allow Bank of America to go into this process, if they are not paid back, who pays it? And the answer is: the taxpayers, a $2 trillion investment right there.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, would that it be true that there are no more bailouts in this 1,400- or 1,500-page bill that Congress is about to be considering in conference. Would that it be true that the American taxpayer is potentially no longer on the hook, as it has been over the last year and a half under this administration and past, as far as the bailouts that are costing the taxpayers literally tens of billions of dollars. Would that it be true that we pass a piece of legislation and be able to keep in place the laws of this country for the last 200-plus years to protect private property rights and to protect the rights under the Bankruptcy Code so that investors and institutions know exactly what they are going to get when they invest in a company, more importantly, when you are a secured creditor, that that name would actually mean what it says: You are secured by the assets of the company.

We certainly saw that that was not the case in the Chrysler situation. You had a situation where the administration basically stepped in, using taxpayer dollars, and used the system of saying, We're not going to go through bankruptcy court--as Members of this side of the aisle would suggest should have occurred--but we are going to act in an extracurricular manner and allow the secured creditors to be tossed aside and the assets of the company to be divvied up willy-nilly as the administration and others decided they would have.

Now, that's, in essence, what we will be perpetuating with this piece of legislation that's before us. What happened in that situation?

Well, in that situation, you had the unions, which basically had no interest in that company whatsoever, end up with basically a 55 percent interest in the company at the end of the day, basically a gift valued at $4.5 billion, and Fiat was given a 20 percent stake for free to take it over. At the end of the day, the secured creditors who thought that they should have been at the front of the line, well, ended up at the end of the line. Instead of getting, maybe, 43 cents on the dollar, they ended up getting some 29 cents on the dollar and said, You should be happy about it.

Why do I bring up that case? Because, basically, at the end of the day, Mr. Speaker, we're going to be perpetuating that same sort of ability for regulators to be making those same decisions going forward. Yes, maybe they won't be able to give it to their friends again at the unions like they did in this case. Maybe they will. We're really not sure.

Yet, at the end of the day, we'll be perpetuating the ability to say to secured creditors, secured creditors, you want to make an investment in a company, thinking that you are secured and that if the company were to fail and to go into bankruptcy that you would be first in line. Guess what? That is not going to be the case.

We are going to put into statute a system to say that an unelected bureaucratic regulator is going to say,

Maybe not. Not so fast, secured creditor. Not so fast, investor. We're going to put someone else ahead of you.

You know, that actually happened to real-life people in the case of the Chrysler situation where three Indiana pension funds--representing who?--policemen, firemen, what have you, thought they were secured creditors. At the end of the day, they said that they were stripped of their rights by a system that this bill will perpetuate. This is what we were trying to do.

I appreciate the gentleman's yielding.

We have the idea that the ``rule of law'' should mean something in this country, and it has meant something for the last 200-plus years, and the Bankruptcy Code is part of that law.

You know, an article published in the UCLA Law School said, ``What happened'' over this last year and a half ``was so outrageous and illegal that, until March of this year, 2009, nobody even conceptualized it.''

The judge in that case that I was referring to commented from the bench that the poor pension manager from Indiana, who was representing the teachers and the firemen and the like, was kind of like the gentleman in Tiananmen Square when the tanks came rolling over.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I do not want the investors in this country, whether they be firemen or policemen or other senior citizens down in Florida or in other places around the country, to feel like they did in that case. I want them to know that their rights are protected by the rule of law through the bankruptcy process and not by some politically appointed bureaucrats or regulators who can strip them of their rights. That is what Republicans stand for, and that is why we are opposed to this language in the majority's bill.

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5133) to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 331 1st Street in Carlstadt, New Jersey, as the ``Staff Sergeant Frank T. Carvill and Lance Corporal Michael A. Schwarz Post Office Building''.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, on behalf of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it is my honor to rise in support of H.R. 5133. This measure designates the United States Postal Building located at 331 1st Street in Carlstadt, New Jersey, as the Staff Sergeant Frank T. Carvill and Lance Corporal Michael A. Schwarz Post Office Building.

Staff Sergeant Frank T. Carvill of Carlstadt, New Jersey, was killed on June 4, 2004, when his convoy was attacked by improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades in Baghdad. At 51, Carvill, an Army sergeant with the New Jersey National Guard, was among the oldest soldiers to die in Iraq. He was killed when his Humvee was ambushed in the Sadr City district of Baghdad in an attack that also claimed the lives of four other Guard members.

Carvill had escaped both terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center where he worked as a paralegal. In 1993, he

helped a co-worker down 54 floors to safety. On September 11, 2001, he left the north tower moments before one of the hijacked planes plowed into the building.

Carvill was a voracious reader who loved politics, an outdoorsman who enjoyed kayaking, and a trusted friend who had the same buddies for 30 years.

Marine Lance Corporal Michael A. Schwarz was killed in action on November 27, 2006, from wounds suffered while conducting combat operations in al Anbar Province in Iraq. The son and brother of auto mechanics, Schwarz graduated from Becton Regional High School in 2004. Along with his brother, Frank, Michael Schwarz served in the local volunteer fire department. Their father, Kenneth, headed the department for years.

Friends and relatives remembered Michael Schwarz as fun-loving and outgoing. Friends recalled off-road outings in Schwarz's customized Jeep. Most of all, there was Schwarz's love of the military and his desire to enlist in the Marines, a wish he expressed even when he was a young child.

H.R. 5133 was introduced by our colleague, the gentleman from New Jersey, Representative Rothman, on April 22, 2010. The measure was referred to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which ordered it reported favorably by unanimous consent on May 6, 2010. The measure has the support of the entire New Jersey delegation.

I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for introducing this measure, and I would also like to thank Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa for their support for the bill.

Madam Speaker, the lives of Staff Sergeant Frank T. Carvill and Lance Corporal Michael A. Schwarz stand as a testament to the courage and dedication of all our brave servicemen and -women who have made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our Nation. Let us pay tribute to their lives through the passage of this legislation, H.R. 5133, to designate the Carlstadt, New Jersey, postal facility in their honor.

I urge all of my colleagues to join us in supporting H.R. 5133.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the author of this resolution, the gentleman from New Jersey, Representative Rothman.

Madam Speaker, I again urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this measure, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present.