Floor Statements

Will the gentleman yield?

I appreciate it, and I hope he would then join me in something really significant like getting our troops out of Iraq for a year and a half and save about a thousand times as much as this motion to recommit.

I thank the gentleman, and I commend him for paying attention to a very specific but very important point.

He is absolutely right. We have no intention here of disturbing the well-run State insurance regime. We respect and honor that form of the mutual insurance holding company. The gentleman's interpretation is entirely correct. They will remain subject to resolution under their existing State insurance liquidity and insolvency regimes.

If the gentleman would yield to me, I agree.

As the gentleman knows, our bill does give the SEC the power we expect them to use to impose greater fiduciary responsibilities on these people. The consumer protection bureau will be a very powerful one. It will be dealing with financial products in the lending area and elsewhere. It was not intended to duplicate existing regulation. So, in fact, as the gentleman knows, we enhance the regulatory authority of those entities he mentioned,

and there is no intention whatsoever, nor is there language, I believe, that would lead to duplicate supervision by the consumer protection bureau.

If the gentleman would yield to me, he has been a leader in this important area, and he is a careful lawyer and understands that just saving a principle isn't enough. You've got to make sure it is carried out. Dealing with a conflict of interest that he has been a leader in identifying is essential if this is going to work. So I completely agree with him. Yes, we mean both of those subsections, and it is a mandatory rulemaking.

I will say to my neighbor from Massachusetts that we will be monitoring this carefully. They can expect oversight hearings because, yes, this is definitely a mandate to them to adopt rules to deal with what would be a blatant conflict of interest in the efficacy rules, and we intend to follow that closely.

I just want to correct the wholly- inaccurate-because-of-being-incomplete history of the gentleman from California. He blames the Senate Democrats for not passing a bill. I didn't hear him infer, maybe I missed it, that the House was then in control of the Republicans, and the House didn't pass that bill either.

The gentleman from California had an amendment that he liked. He was repudiated by his own party, overwhelmingly. Now, I am sorry he wasn't more persuasive with the Republicans. I am sorry that the chairman of the committee and the current leadership of the House and the then leadership of the House voted against him, but you can't blame that on the Democrats. And, in fact, what the Senate Republicans offered was the House Republican bill.

If the gentleman will yield to me, yes, I absolutely can. Let me say this is consistent with the leadership the gentleman from Illinois has shown in dealing with risk factors. Up until now, and until this bill passes, we have been automatically assessing institutions solely on the basis of their assets or their amounts. We want to discourage excessive risk and make those who take the risk bear a fair share.

Here the gentleman is clearly correct that to the extent you have got a tax exemption because you engage in charitable activity, in effect you shouldn't get assessed on that basis.

The gentleman has gone further. Smaller banks in this country will be the beneficiaries of an important piece of this legislation, thanks to his leadership. The riskier the bank's activity, the higher their FDI assessment will be in general. That is an important piece of it, and this particular application of it for these charitable institutions is essential.

Madam Speaker, the gentleman from California still won't be forthright about this.

The Republican-controlled House, chaired by Mr. Oxley in the committee, passed the bill that he objected to. He said I was successful in defeating it. No, I played a fairly minor role under Mr. DeLay and the Republican leadership. Mr. DeLay did not take advice from me. If Mr. DeLay took advice from me, he wouldn't have gone on the dance show. I would have advised him against it.

The fact is that it was a Republican House that passed the bill the gentleman is denouncing, and I don't know why he keeps mentioning history and leaving that out until he has to be reminded.

He did offer an amendment. He was overwhelmingly defeated. More than two-thirds of the Republicans voted against him.

By the way, as to my own view, yes, in 2003 I said there was no problem. In 2004, after President Bush, while the Republicans controlled Congress and didn't hinder him, ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase their purchase of loans from people below the median, I changed my position. So I joined the Republican leadership of the House as a fairly minor player in supporting legislation.

He was against it, and I would just make that point again.

I don't understand the purpose of giving such a partial history. He neglects to mention in 2007 when the Democrats took the majority and I became chairman, we passed the bill that he couldn't get passed in 2005, because we worked with Secretary Paulson, who acknowledges this in his book.

So, yes, in 2003 I was not concerned, but by 2005 I was.

If the gentleman would yield, he's completely correct. The Federal Reserve has the mandate under this, which originated in the Senate, to write those rules. We intend to make sure those rules protect

a number of things: smaller financial institutions from being discriminated against since they're exempt from the regulation, State benefit programs, and these.

So the gentleman is absolutely correct, and I can assure him that I expect the Federal Reserve to honor that. And if there is any question about it, I am sure we will be able to make sure that it happens.

If the gentleman would yield, let me say, first, you know, there has been some mockery because this bill has a large number of pages, although our bills are smaller, especially on the page. We do that--by the way, there are also other people who complain sometimes that we've left too much discretion to the regulators. It's a complex bill dealing with a lot of subjects, and we want to make sure we get it right, and we want to make sure it's interpreted correctly.

The point the gentleman makes is absolutely correct. We do not want these overdone. We don't want there to be excessive regulation. And the distinction the gentleman draws is very much in this bill, and we are confident that the regulators will appreciate that distinction, maintain it, and we will be there to make sure that they do.

If the gentleman will yield again, yes, he is exactly right. And just to sum it up, we want regulated some activities and not regulated other activities when you have a hybrid kind of situation, and what the gentleman has described is how you accomplish that.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 1490, I call up the conference report on 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, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, at the outset I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on this matter.

Mr. Speaker, to begin, I want to yield for a colloquy 3 minutes to one of the leaders in the House and certainly in our committee in forging this particular legislation and in fighting to make sure that fairness is done throughout all of our efforts, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters).

If the gentlewoman would yield.

The answer is a resounding yes. And I certainly have been following her leadership in trying to make sure that these programs do more than many of them have done.

So the answer to her question is yes. Nothing new can be started after June 25, but it does not reach back and strangle in the cradle those programs that were under way. I confirm that the conference report would not prevent adjusting resources between already initiated programs based on their effectiveness.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to correct a very incomplete picture that was just given.

The gentleman keeps quoting that one section. I'm astonished-- astonished--that he quotes it so blatantly out of context. Yes, there are powers that are given. Clearly, in the bill, it is only once the entity has been put into receivership on its way to liquidation.

The gentleman from Alabama has several times today talked about the powers as if they were just randomly given. I will be distributing the entirety of this, and it is the most distorted picture of a bill I have seen. The title, by the way, is headed: Orderly Liquidation of Current Financial Companies. The purpose of this title is to provide the necessary authority to liquidate failing financial companies. Again, I am astonished that he would not give the Members the full picture that comes as part of a subtitle that reads: Funding for Orderly Liquidation.

Yes.

Reclaiming my time, Mr. Speaker, please, let's get this started on the right point. Instruct the gentleman as to the rules. I thought he was going to ask me about what I said.

He has consistently read a part of this section, leaving out the part that would help Members understand it. He didn't say what he just said. He said he read these as if they were there in general. The powers he talked about come in the subsets of the section: Funding for Orderly Liquidation.

Those powers are just upon the appointment of a receiver. So this is not to keep an institution going. This is not AIG. Yes, he can be critical about the Bush administration on its own, without Congress, with regard to AIG. We repeal in this bill the power under which they acted and with the Federal Reserve's concurrence. By the way, it also says in here that those powers are subject to section 206.

Again, I don't know why the gentleman--I guess I do know why they would want to read this, but let me read it because it corrects entirely the wholly inaccurate picture he gave people. The actions that he read can be taken if the corporation determines mandatory terms and conditions for all orderly liquidation actions.

AIG was kept alive. This cannot be kept alive. This happens only as the death of the institution comes. He may think the Bush administration picked its friends. I think he is being unfair to Mr. Bernanke. I think he is being unfair to Mr. Paulson and Mr. Geithner. Anyway, here are the rules they would have to follow:

First, they would have to determine that such action is necessary for purposes of the financial stability and not for the purpose of preserving the covered company.

Two, they would have to ensure that the shareholders do not receive payment until the claims are paid.

They would have to ensure that unsecured creditors bear losses in accordance with the priority of claims in section 210. That is the

Mr. Speaker, producing this legislation has been one of the most impressive team efforts in which I have ever participated, and an indispensable member of the team going back to the early part of this century and his concern for mortgage lending and fairness in the rules is the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt) to whom I yield 3 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds to correct the gentleman.

We have not created a consumer bureau under the Federal Reserve. It will be housed in the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve will have no ability to interfere. Some on the other side wish it would. But it will be a fully independent consumer bureau. It will get its mail at the Federal Reserve, but nobody there will be able to open it.

I now yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kanjorski), one of the leaders in putting together this bill in the area specifically of investor protection.

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

I now yield 3 minutes to one of the leaders in fashioning protection for consumers, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Barrow).

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks), a very important member of the committee who was helpful in forging some of the pieces of this.

I yield the gentleman an additional 15 seconds.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to my colleague from Massachusetts (Mr. Capuano), another member of the committee who has played a major role in this.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fattah), who gave us an inspiration for trying to help unemployed people with their mortgages.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters), one of the leaders in housing and matters of fairness in our committee, the chairman of the Housing Subcommittee.

I yield the gentlewoman 1 additional minute.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings).

If the gentleman would yield, first, let me say that anybody who asks has my permission to skip any statement. That is an example I am going to try to follow myself sometimes.

Beyond that, I completely agree with the gentleman.

I yield an additional 15 seconds to the gentleman.

We do want to make sure it's an informed choice, and we're going to work on financial literacy. But, no, it is not our intention to deny anybody that choice.

I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez), who's the chairman of the Financial Institution Subcommittee and has done a great deal of work to improve our financial situation through this bill.

I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to a very diligent member of our committee who has fought hard for the manufacturing interests of this country, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Peters).

If the gentleman would yield, the answer is absolutely. He has crafted this very well with our cooperation, and he has stated this completely accurately.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 13 minutes of my time to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Peterson), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, our co-conferee, and ask unanimous consent that he control that time.

I yield 1 minute to my colleague, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Peterson), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

I yield the gentleman 15 additional seconds.

And the gentleman is absolutely right. We do differentiate between end users and others. The marginal requirements are not on end users. They are only on the financial and major swap participants. And they are permissive. They are not mandatory, and they are going to be done, I think, with an appropriate touch.

U.S. Senate,

Washington, DC, June 30, 2010.

Hon. Chairman Barney Frank,

Financial Services Committee, House of Representatives,

Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Hon. Chairman Collin Peterson,

Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, Longworth

House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairmen Frank and Peterson: Whether swaps are used by

an airline hedging its fuel costs or a global manufacturing

company hedging interest rate risk, derivatives are an

important tool businesses use to manage costs and market

volatility. This legislation will preserve that tool.

Regulators, namely the Commodity Futures Trading Commission

(CFTC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the

prudential regulators, must not make hedging so costly it

becomes prohibitively expensive for end users to manage their

risk. This letter seeks to provide some additional background

on legislative intent on some, but not all, of the various

sections of Title VII of H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Act.

The legislation does not authorize the regulators to impose

margin on end users, those exempt entities that use swaps to

hedge or mitigate commercial risk. If regulators raise the

costs of end user transactions, they may create more risk. It

is imperative that the regulators do not unnecessarily divert

working capital from our economy into margin accounts, in a

way that would discourage hedging by end users or impair

economic growth.

Again, Congress clearly stated in this bill that the margin

and capital requirements are not to be imposed on end users,

nor can the regulators require clearing for end user trades.

Regulators are charged with establishing rules for the

capital requirements, as well as the margin requirements for

all uncleared trades, but rules may not be set in a way that

requires the imposition of margin requirements on the end

user side of a lawful transaction. In cases where a Swap

Dealer enters into an uncleared swap with an end user, margin

on the dealer side of the transaction should reflect the

counterparty risk of the transaction. Congress strongly

encourages regulators to establish margin requirements for

such swaps or security-based swaps in a manner that is

consistent with the Congressional intent to protect end users

from burdensome costs.

In harmonizing the different approaches taken by the House

and Senate in their respective derivatives titles, a number

of provisions were deleted by the Conference Committee to

avoid redundancy and to streamline the regulatory framework.

However, a consistent Congressional directive throughout all

drafts of this legislation, and in Congressional debate, has

been to protect end users from burdensome costs associated

with margin requirements and mandatory clearing. Accordingly,

changes made in Conference to the section of the bill

regulating capital and margin requirements for Swap Dealers

and Major Swap Participants should not be construed as

changing this important Congressional interest in protecting

end users. In fact, the House offer amending the capital and

margin provisions of Sections 731 and 764 expressly stated

that the strike to the base text was made ``to eliminate

redundancy.'' Capital and margin standards should be set to

mitigate risk in our financial system, not punish those who

are trying to hedge their own commercial risk.

Congress recognized that the individualized credit

arrangements worked out between counterparties in a bilateral

transaction can be important components of business risk

management. That is why Congress specifically mandates that

regulators permit the use of non-cash collateral for

counterparty arrangements with Swap Dealers and Major Swap

Participants to permit flexibility. Mitigating risk is one of

the most important reasons for passing this legislation.

Congress determined that clearing is at the heart of

reform--bringing transactions and counterparties into a

robust, conservative and transparent risk management

framework. Congress also acknowledged that clearing may not

be suitable for every transaction or every counterparty. End

users who hedge their risks may find it challenging to use a

standard derivative contracts to exactly match up their risks

with counterparties willing to purchase their specific

exposures. Standardized derivative contracts may not be

suitable for every transaction. Congress recognized that

imposing the clearing and exchange trading requirement on

commercial end-users could raise transaction costs where

there is a substantial public interest in keeping such costs

low (i.e., to provide consumers with stable, low prices,

promote investment, and create jobs.)

Congress recognized this concern and created a robust end

user clearing exemption for those entities that are using the

swaps market to hedge or mitigate commercial risk. These

entities could be anything ranging from car companies to

airlines or energy companies who produce and distribute power

to farm machinery manufacturers. They also include captive

finance affiliates, finance arms that are hedging in support

of manufacturing or other commercial companies. The end user

exemption also may apply to our smaller financial entities--

credit unions, community banks, and farm credit institutions.

These entities did not get us into this crisis and should not

be punished for Wall Street's excesses. They help to finance

jobs and provide lending for communities all across this

nation. That is why Congress provided regulators the

authority to exempt these institutions.

This is also why we narrowed the scope of the Swap Dealer

and Major Swap Participant definitions. We should not

inadvertently pull in entities that are appropriately

managing their risk. In implementing the Swap Dealer and

Major Swap Participant provisions, Congress expects the

regulators to maintain through rulemaking that the definition

of Major Swap Participant does not capture companies simply

because they use swaps to hedge risk in their ordinary course

of business. Congress does not intend to regulate end-users

as Major Swap Participants or Swap Dealers just because they

use swaps to hedge or manage the commercial risks associated

with their business. For example, the Major Swap Participant

and Swap Dealer definitions are not intended to include an

electric or gas utility that purchases commodities that are

used either as a source of fuel to produce electricity or to

supply gas to retail customers and that uses swaps to hedge

or manage the commercial risks associated with its business.

Congress incorporated a de minimis exception to the Swap

Dealer definition to ensure that smaller institutions that

are responsibly managing their commercial risk are not

inadvertently pulled into additional regulation.

Just as Congress has heard the end user community,

regulators must carefully take into consideration the impact

of regulation and capital and margin on these entities.

It is also imperative that regulators do not assume that

all over-the-counter transactions share the same risk

profile. While uncleared swaps should be looked at closely,

regulators must carefully analyze the risk associated with

cleared and uncleared swaps and apply that analysis when

setting capital standards for Swap Dealers and Major Swap

Participants. As regulators set capital and margin standards

on Swap Dealers or Major Swap Participants, they must set the

appropriate standards relative to the risks associated with

trading. Regulators must carefully consider the potential

burdens that Swap Dealers and Major Swap Participants may

impose on end user counterparties--especially if those

requirements will discourage the use of swaps by end users or

harm economic growth. Regulators should seek to impose

margins to the extent they are necessary to ensure the safety

and soundness of the Swap Dealers and Major Swap

Participants.

Congress determined that end users must be empowered in

their counterparty relationships, especially relationships

with swap dealers. This is why Congress explicitly gave to

end users the option to clear swaps contracts, the option to

choose their clearinghouse or clearing agency, and the option

to segregate margin with an independent 3rd party custodian.

In implementing the derivatives title, Congress encourages

the CFTC to clarify through rulemaking that the exclusion

from the definition of swap for ``any sale of a nonfinancial

commodity or security for deferred shipment or delivery, so

long as the transaction is intended to be physically

settled'' is intended to be consistent with the forward

contract exclusion that is currently in the Commodity

Exchange Act and the CFTC's established policy and orders on

this subject, including situations where commercial parties

agree to ``book-out'' their physical delivery obligations

under a forward contract.

Congress recognized that the capital and margin

requirements in this bill could have an impact on swaps

contracts currently in existence. For this reason, we

provided legal certainty to those contracts currently in

existence, providing that no contract could be terminated,

renegotiated, modified, amended, or supplemented (unless

otherwise specified in the contract) based on the

implementation of any requirement in this Act, including

requirements on Swap Dealers and Major Swap Participants. It

is imperative that we provide certainty to these existing

contracts for the sake of our economy and financial system.

Regulators must carefully follow Congressional intent in

implementing this bill. While Congress may not have the

expertise to set specific standards, we have laid out our

criteria and guidelines for implementing reform. It is

imperative that these standards are not punitive to the end

users, that we encourage the management of commercial risk,

and that we build a strong but responsive framework for

regulating the derivatives market.

Sincerely,

Chairman Christopher Dodd,

Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs,

U.S. Senate.

Chairman Blanche Lincoln,

Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry,

U.S. Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the majority leader.

I would just say to the gentleman from New Jersey, I can only judge by what I see. When the House voted on this bill last December, the minority had certain amendments made in order by the rules, not as many as they would have liked or as I would have liked, but in the end they had the motion to recommit, over which they had complete editorial control. The motion to recommit on this version of this bill that passed the House last December from the minority said no regulation, no reform of regulation.

It had one provision. It said kill everything in the bill. It didn't say do it differently. It didn't amend it. It didn't change it. It said do not change anything. Do not reform anything except end the TARP, which thanks to the Senate we are now doing in this bill.

So I can only judge by what I see. When the gentleman says that, when the minority had a chance to offer their own version of this, they offered a version that said no, no reform, no change, no regulation, leave the status quo.

I yield 1 minute to the Speaker of the House.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, to begin, I want to address the Members who are concerned that the interchange amendments will unduly affect smaller financial institutions. The interchange amendment wasn't part of the bill here. It was put in by a very heavy vote in the Senate, and the conference process means you compromise.

There is in that amendment, as Senator Durbin put it in, an exemption for any fee setting by the Federal Reserve for smaller institutions. They then feared that they would be discriminated against, so we amended the amendment with the participation of the Senate, obviously. There are three provisions that protect the smaller institutions, community banks and credit unions.

There is an antidiscrimination provision that says that merchants and retailers cannot refuse to accept a debit card. There can be no discrimination against small banks for their credit cards. The Federal Reserve, the instructions to the Federal Reserve, include making that antidiscrimination work, and we can guarantee people we will do it.

So, yes, as the amendment passed the Senate, it said that these smaller institutions were exempt but that they might have suffered discrimination. They are protected in this bill. That's why, for instance, the small banks in Illinois have endorsed this bill.

I also want to talk briefly about what has happened with the TARP. We had the two last Republican speakers. One hailed the CBO as an unassailable authority. Then the final speaker said it was hocus-pocus. It is apparently unassailable hocus-pocus, which I don't want to get into. It's too late at this time.

This is how the TARP thing works. There are two parts to the TARP. The bill does say that repayments go to debt relief. There have been substantial repayments from the banks, and those go to debt relief. They are unaffected by the amendment. What the amendment says is there are still tens of billions of dollars of TARP money that could be committed. The amendment we adopted in conference says no more, that they cannot do that. That's where the savings comes. So the savings comes from not allowing additional TARP spending.

You know about the Republicans with regard to cutting off TARP? They were for it before they were against it. They used to be all for cutting out the TARP until it came up here. Now, let me say I don't like that way to do it. I prefer what we had in our provision, which was to assess the Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Mr. Paulson's hedge fund. That's the way we wanted to do it, but we couldn't get it through the Republicans in the Senate. So, first, Republicans in the Senate tell us, Don't do it. Then other Republicans in the Senate say, Why didn't you do it?

So I'll make Members a pledge right now: The committee I chair will, I hope, bring out a bill that revives that assessment on the financial institutions above $50 billion and the hedge funds. So Members who missed it will get a chance to show us they really care. We will bring them there, and we will have that come forward.

Now, I do want to talk a little bit about subprime lending and about the partial history we get.

The fact is that the Republican Party controlled the House and the Senate from 1995 to 2006. During that period, they showed remarkable restraint. As eager as they were to restrain subprime lending and as passionate as they were to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they didn't do it. That's a degree of abstinence unparalleled in political history. They were in charge.

Whose fault was it? Apparently, it was our fault. It was my fault. As I said before, people have accused me of being this secret manipulator of Tom DeLay. Well, if that were the case, you wouldn't have cut taxes for very rich people. You wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq. As I said, if he were listening to me, he wouldn't have gotten on the dance show. So I don't take responsibility for Mr. DeLay. The Republican Party didn't do it.

Now, the gentleman from California (Mr. Royce) said he tried in 2005. He had an amendment to the bill of Mr. Oxley. Mr. Oxley, the Republican chairman of the committee, brought out a bill. Mr. Royce didn't like it. He brought up his amendments. If no Democrat had voted either in committee or on the floor of the House on that bill, it would have looked exactly as it looked. The majority was Republican. So, apparently, the gentleman from California (Mr. Royce) wasn't able to persuade even a third of his fellow Republicans to vote with him.

I'm sorry he wasn't able to do better. I'm not an expert in how to get Republicans to vote with you, so I can't offer him any help. Maybe he can find somebody who can teach him how to get better votes among Republicans, but it's not our fault that the Republican Party didn't do it.

By the way, in 2003, I did say I didn't see a problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then, in 2004, President Bush said to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I order you. He had the power and he used it. He used it to order them to increase their subprime lending purchases. By the way, he wasn't alone in that. A June 22 article from the Wall Street Journal quotes a Member of Congress, in 2005, at a hearing, saying, ``With the advent of subprime lending, countless families have now had their first opportunity to buy a home or perhaps be given a second chance.'' Fail once. Get it again.

The American Dream should never be limited to the well-offs or to those consumers fortunate enough to have access to prime rate loans. That is from the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling). So George Bush wasn't alone in that.

Then 2007 came, and the Democrats took power. We passed a bill, for the first time in this House, to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Secretary Paulson liked the bill. He said it didn't go as far as he would have liked, but it was a good bill. In 2008, it finally passed, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were put in a conservatorship. They were the first major institutions to be reformed.

By the way, in 2007, in this House, we also passed a bill to control subprime lending. Now, the gentleman from Alabama had been the chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over subprime lending during some of those Republican years, and he never produced a bill. He said it was our fault. He wrote us a letter--myself, Mr. Watt of North Carolina, and Mr. Miller of North Carolina--and we didn't tell him we'd vote for it.

You know, I wish I could have it back. I wish I knew I was secretly in charge of the Republican agenda. I wish I knew they wouldn't do anything unless I said they could and that they would do something if I said they should, but no one told me. Where were they when I needed them to be more powerful? He didn't bring it forward. It wasn't my fault. The Republicans never checked with me as to what they were supposed to do.

In 2007, we did pass such a bill to restrict subprime lending, and The Wall Street Journal attacked us. It said it was a ``Sarbanes- Oxley'' for housing. Sarbanes-Oxley is about as nasty as you can get in The Wall Street Journal, and here is what they said about subprime lending in 2007.

So maybe that is why George Bush expanded subprime lending.

The Wall Street Journal said in 2007, complaining about our bill, ``But for all the demonizing, about 80 percent of even subprime loans are being repaid on time and another 10 percent are only 30 days behind. Most of these new homeowners are low-income families, often minorities, who would otherwise not have qualified for a mortgage. In the name of consumer protection, Mr. Frank's legislation will ensure that far fewer of these loans are issued in the future.''

Yeah. Unfortunately, a couple of years too late, because we couldn't get that through. But the Wall Street

Journal was right, we would limit them, but wrong, along with the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling) about the subprime loans. And I also wanted to do affordable rental housing, which that administration opposed.

This bill has the biggest package of increased consumer protections in the history of America. And it doesn't ban products or ration products. It says there is going to have to be fair dealing. This bill says that there is a fiduciary responsibility on people selling products to individual investors for the first time. It gives the SEC the power to do it, and they are going to do it. This bill reforms the system, and I hope it is enacted.

This conference report would not have been possible without the hard work of staff on both sides of the Capitol. I thank them for their efforts and submit the following list:

Wall Street Reform--Staff

House Financial Services Committee

Jeanne Roslanowick

Michael Beresik

David Smith

Adrianne Threatt

Andrew Miller

Daniel Meade

Katheryn Rosen

Kate Marks

Kellie Larkin

Tom Glassic

Rick Maurano

Tom Duncan

Gail Laster

Scott Olson

Lawranne Stewart

Jeff Riley

Steve Hall

Erika Jeffers

Bill Zavarello

Steve Adamske

Elizabeth Esfahani

Daniel McGlinchey

Dennis Shaul

Jim Segal

Brendan Woodbury

Patty Lord

Lois Richerson

Jean Carroll

Kirk Schwarzbach

Marcos Manosalvas

Marcus Goodman

Garett Rose

Todd Harper

Kathleen Mellody

Jason Pitcock

Charla Ouertatani

Amanda Fischer

Keo Chea

Sanders Adu

Hilary West

Flavio Cumpiano

Karl Haddeland

Glen Sears

Stephane LeBouder

Office of Rep. Carolyn Maloney

Kristin Richardson

Office of Rep. Gregory Meeks

Milan Dalal

Office of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy

Noah Cuttler

Office of Rep. Gary Peters

Jonathan Smith

House Agriculture Committee

Clark Ogilvie

House Budget Committee

Greg Waring

House Energy and Commerce Committee

Phil Barnett

Michelle Ash

Anna Laitin

House Judiciary Committee

George Slover

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Mark Stephenson

Adam Miles

House Legislative Counsel

Jim Wert

Marshall Barksdale

Brady Young

Jim Grossman

Senate Banking Committee

Ed Silverman

Amy Friend

Jonathan Miller

Dean Shahinian

Julie Chon

Charles Yi

Marc Jarsulic

Lynsey Graham Rea

Catherine Galicia

Matthew Green

Deborah Katz

Mark Jickling

Donna Nordenberg

Levon Bagramian

Brian Filipowich

Drew Colbert

Misha Mintz-Roth

Lisa Frumin

William Fields

Beth Cooper

Colin McGinnis

Neal Orringer

Kirstin Brost

Peter Bondi

Sean Oblack

Steve Gerenscer

Dawn Ratliff

Erika Lee

Joslyn Hemler

Caroline Cook

Robert Courtney

Abigail Dosoretz

Senate Agriculture Committee

Robert Holifield

Brian Baenig

Julie Anna Potts

Pat McCarty

George Wilder

Matt Dunn

Elizabeth Ritter

Stephanie Mercier

Anna Taylor

Cory Claussen

Senate Legislative Counsel

Rob Grant

Alison Wright

Kim Albrecht-Taylor

Colin Campbell

Laura McNulty Ayoud

Congressional Research Service

Baird Webel

Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

This is a legitimate parliamentary inquiry, probably the first one I have ever made or heard. But there was a lot of confusion.

Is it the case apparently that there is no debate on a motion to recommit on a conference report?

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

Madam Speaker, I was very proud in the 70's to show my support for appropriate bipartisanship by supporting and working closely with Senator Ed Brooke, who was twice elected to the Senate as a Republican and was a staunch fighter against discrimination, for strong support for rental housing for low-income people, and in general for fiscal responsibility within the context of social concerns. I was therefore very pleased, but not at all surprised, to read in the Boston Globe on June 22, 2010 a strong expression of support for repeal of the ``don't ask, don't tell'' policy, which has discriminated against so many patriotic Americans seeking to serve their country. Senator Brooke notes that he himself was the victim of discriminatory policies when he served in a segregated U.S. Army in World War II, and as an African American, was treated unfairly. He does affirm that there are differences in the effect of the policies and the impact they have between racial segregation and ``don't ask, don't tell,'' but as he says after discussing the experience of racial segregation, ``The point is that the ban (on gay and lesbian members in the military) is a weapon and expression of prejudice--no more excusable than any other discriminatory law.''

Consistent with his lifelong record of fighting for fairness in America, Senator Brooke closes the article by saying, ``If I was still in the Senate, I would vote to show my respect for the sacrifices of all soldiers--gay and straight. Congress should repeal this legislation and score another victory of progress over prejudice.''

Madam Speaker, I was proud to stand with Ed Brooke in the 70's and I am very proud that he is standing with those of us who are fighting for fairness today.

Madam Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), pursuant to House Resolution 1484, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, June 30, 2010, at 10 a.m., as a further mark of respect to the memory of the late Honorable Robert C. Byrd.

I rise to oppose the motion.

Mr. Speaker, let's be very clear. This is just a preliminary chance to vote ``no.''

For reasons that I don't understand, my Republican colleagues are opposed to a program in which voluntarily the Federal Government makes funds available to community banks so that, if they want to participate, they can lend it to small businesses. Maybe it is the fear that it might succeed and diminish their issues that leads them to oppose it. They have been unable to oppose it outright on its merits, so here's what they want to do. They want to say it's really the TARP program, and

in fact, the gentleman from Texas said that. He said, if you're going to create a second TARP program, put the TARP inspector in charge. That's true. If you're going to fly to the Moon, pack a big lunch. If shmif.

The fact is that we don't create a TARP program. This is classic bootstrapping. It's not a TARP program. It's very different than the TARP program in a number of ways. The community banks want to participate in it. They don't want to participate in another TARP program. So, to kill it, they are inaccurately characterizing it TARP and then talking about another Inspector General from SIGTARP. This is not the problem of what the Secretary's being asked to say. It is to try desperately to get a little TARP rubbed off on it so they can defeat, by that way, something they can't defeat on the merits.

Let me now yield to the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Moore) who is the chair of the oversight subcommittee of our committee and a man with a great reputation for integrity in enforcing taxpayer rights.

I reclaim my time to say, the gentleman from Texas began with a great, surprising revelation. A bureaucrat, the Inspector General of TARP, wants to expand his authority. I'm surprised that there were not gasps of wonderment in the House. We have an Inspector General here. They can do it, and the SIGTARP Inspector General, because that program is about to go out of existence, decided to expand his authority. However, it goes beyond in one sense. It says that the Secretary must certify that he is acting solely on the basis of economic fundamentals and not because of any political consideration.

So here's the offer I make, with the support of the majority leader. Within a few days, we will bring a suspension to the floor that will require the Secretary to so certify under oath--we'll go you one better in this effort--and the Secretary will be required to certify under oath to the Inspector General of the Treasury, and if Members want, we can have them certify under oath to the Government Accountability Office, and if there are other people you want them to certify to, we'll be glad to do that.

But the sole purpose of invoking the Inspector General of TARP here, with his collaboration, so he will continue to have a job, is to discredit the program. If you want this program to go forward, you vote against this. We will come forward with further reinforcement of the oath taking--we'll even make it oath taking, but please, if you want to vote ``no,'' vote ``no'' I would say to the Members, Mr. Speaker, but don't fall for this name game. This is an effort to call it TARP. It's your TARP; no, it's not. It's the Peewee Herman school of legislating; let's call each other names without dealing with the substance. Let's not, when we're dealing with a serious issue of trying to get money to community banks to help our smaller businesses, fall for that nonsense.

I yield to the gentlewoman.

The gentlewoman is right.

What our friends on the other side have, for political reasons, is a severe case of TARP separation envy. It's going away. They haven't had their President tell us to do it. They are going to miss it, but we're not going to deal with that in this bill and kill the bill. I hope the recommittal is defeated.

Madam Speaker, the Mayor's Professional Mariners Award is sponsored by the City of New Bedford, Professional Mariner Magazine and Commercial Marine Expo. This award honors an individual or organization who has made a significant contribution to the marine industry. This year's award recipients are Harriet Didriksen, Martin S. Manley and Howard W. Nickerson.

Mayor's Professional Mariners Awards

Harriet Didriksen

Harriet Didriksen is constantly fighting for fishing

families, the fishing way of life, and the American dream.

She steadfastly attends New England Fisheries Management

Council meetings from Connecticut to Maine, and never misses

a gathering where she can help fishermen oppose government

bureaucrats' undue interference. She is a regular at hearings

in Washington--which she attends at her own expense--and is a

tireless advocate.

Harriet owns the F/V Settler. She owned the F/V Bagatell,

which is now an educational vessel at Stony Brook University.

She is owner and operator of New Bedford Ship Supply, one of

the oldest ship chandleries on the East Coast.

Mrs. Didriksen's father dragged in the winter and scalloped

in the summer. He emigrated from Norway to Brooklyn and moved

to New Bedford to be closer to George's Bank. Her uncles were

also fishermen. Her brother is a shore-side business and

vessel owner. She is the mother of two.

New England fishermen are fortunate to have her on their

side.

Martin S. Manley

The late Capt. Martin ``Marty'' Manley was a commercial

fisherman for 38 years, and at the age of just 19, was one of

the youngest skippers out of the Port of New Bedford.

Captain Manley was a tireless advocate for the commercial

scallop fishing industry. He was recognized as an industry

leader and received numerous awards and accolades, including

Helmsman of the Year from the Port of Gloucester. He was a

member and former

President of the Offshore Mariners Association.

During his career, he owned and operated several scallopers

along the eastern seaboard, the last being the F/V Mary Anne,

which he designed, built, and operated with great pride. He

served as the director of the City of New Bedford Harbor

Development Commission, and later served as manager of the

Popes Island Marina until his retirement in 2007. The

building of that marina was one of his life's

accomplishments.

He served as a member of the New Bedford Redevelopment

Authority and the Economic Development Commission.

Howard W. Nickerson

The late Howard Nickerson watched over the New Bedford

waterfront for 65 years. He began his career as a young man,

tub trawling in a sailing vessel, moving to commercial

fishing on George's Bank as vessel engineer. Through the

decades, Mr. Nickerson participated in the industry from

every angle, as a fisherman, representing fishermen, seafood

dealers, seafood workers, boat owners and directing state and

municipal agencies, always fighting for fairer regulations.

He served as head of the Harbor Development Commission, the

State Pier, the Seafood Dealers Association, the Seafood

Workers Health-Pension Fund, the New England Fisheries

Steering Committee and the Offshore Mariners Association.

A strong advocate of seafood marketing, Mr. Nickerson was

involved in organizing the New Bedford Seafood Council and

the New Bedford Scallop Festival in the 1950s and '60s, which

helped build the market demand that allowed the scallop to

become the port's cash leader.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition.

I yield myself 3 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, there were several aspects of the debate over housing during the period that led up to the crisis. Part of it was over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but an even bigger part--because it involved Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--was over sub-prime loans being made largely, although not entirely, on the unregulated banking system, and there were those who defended that. There were those who opposed efforts to rein it in.

In fact, with regard to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I changed my own position with regard to them when in 2004 the administration, without congressional input, ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy more loans from people below the median income. We tried, many of us, during the period of 2004, 2005, and 2006 to get legislation adopted to ban sub-prime loans being granted imprudently. We had, the Congress, given the Federal Reserve the authority to do that in 1994, but Mr. Greenspan refused to do that. He since has apologized for that error.

So the question was not whether or not there was a general lack of discipline but whether there was a particular lack of discipline in containing sub-prime mortgages. The relevance of that is that the FHA doesn't do that. In fact, at a time of general ideological opposition of regulation of the mortgage market outside the banking system, there was very little regulation of sub-prime mortgages being granted to people who couldn't afford them, who made no down payment, who didn't have to document their income. Because of all that, we ran into these problems, and the FHA's percentage went down. That's a major reason why the FHA went down. The FHA has never been guilty of that laxity of practice.

So, part of the reason for the increase in the FHA share is that we have been able finally to cut back on the sub-prime mortgages being granted imprudently, and the FHA has much stricter standards. Yet, I want to stress--and this is a major cause of the Fannie and Freddie problem is that they were pushed into buying sub-

prime mortgages that never should have been given in the first place. That's not the FHA.

It's also the case that the FHA has stepped up in recent years, probably at congressional urging. The down payment has gone up. The up- front fee has gone up. The FHA has power now to go up to a 10 percent and has done this, a 10 percent down payment for people with a weak credit score. That's already part of the FHA's proposal.

The gentlewoman from Illinois' amendment just adopted makes it clear they can do even more, but to go beyond that, to the degree the gentleman from New Jersey wants to do, would undercut the ability of people who are capable of paying their mortgages from getting mortgage loans. That's why we have an unusual coalition opposing this amendment. It actually included a majority of the Republicans on the Committee on Financial Services who voted against this amendment, but it includes people on all sides of the housing market.

I yield myself an additional 30 seconds.

We have the Consumer Federation, the Center for Responsible Lending, the people who have distinguished themselves by being opposed to sub- prime lending when others in this Chamber didn't want any restriction, and the Realtors and the home builders, those who are in the business of providing housing, those who are advocates for consumers come together to say this goes too far and would go beyond what is needed for responsible lending.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have the right to close.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire how much time remains?

First, Mr. Chairman, let me be clear, the FHA has gone beyond the gentleman from New Jersey with regard to borrowers who are risky. For borrowers with a 580 or below credit score, the FHA has already used the authority we have given them to raise the downpayment to 10 percent, so we are talking about people above the 580 credit score.

Secondly, there was a total misreading of history with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes, some of us thought earlier there wasn't a problem. After it was in order by the Bush administration in 2004 for them to get to more than 50 percent of purchases or mortgages for people below the median income, many of us changed our position and pushed for reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen, because of a dispute between the Republican House and the Republican Senate, until 2007, when this House took the lead and finally got it done in 2008. But the problem was that throughout that, we had ideological opposition from the deregulators against restricting subprime loans of the sort that led to trouble, and the FHA doesn't do that.

Mr. Speaker, I would submit for the Record letters from the Mortgage Bankers Association, National Association of Home Builders, National Association of REALTORS, Centers for Responsible Lending, the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Council of La Raza, Consumer Federation of America who point out not that we don't need restriction but that the FHA already has them. Again, to confuse this with the situation in which ideological opposition to sensible regulation allowed subprime loans to predominate outside the FHA is a confusion of the reality.

June 9, 2010.

Hon. Barney Frank,

Chair, House Committee on Financial Services, Rayburn House

Office Building, Washington, DC.

Dear Congressman Frank: The Federal Housing

Administration's mortgage insurance program has never been

more important to our housing markets than it is today.

During this period of prolonged stress in our markets,

Congress should avoid making any program changes that would

further harm consumers and stall our economic recovery. The

organizations listed below strongly oppose amendments to H.R.

5072, the FHA Reform Act, which would increase FHA's

downpayment requirement, decrease FHA's loan limits, or

otherwise limit FHA's ability to insure loans.

Raising FHA's downpayment requirement will do little to

strengthen FHA's capital reserve ratio. Rather, it will put

homeownership out of reach for many families and for others

could deplete their cash reserves for home and other

emergencies. Increasing FHA's downpayment could

disenfranchise more than 300,000 responsible homeowners. We

strongly oppose this amendment offered by Rep. Garrett (R-

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

First, I do note a certain irony. I am glad to see my colleagues, the gentleman from New Jersey, the gentleman from Georgia, praise the gentlewoman from West Virginia for a bill which they apparently found severely lacking.

I do note the gentlewoman from West Virginia voted against the prior amendment from the gentleman from New Jersey. I don't know where she is on this one, but it wasn't in the bill that I think she introduced, and for very good reason: A 10 percent cap is wholly arbitrary.

Now, the gentleman says it's going to crowd out the private market, but the leading participants in the private housing market oppose this amendment, including the Mortgage Bankers, as well as Realtors and Home Builders, as well as all consumer groups.

Beyond that, the reason the FHA went down so far from 2001 to 2007-- interesting group of years; guess what was happening during that time?--was that there was a resistance to regulation of the subprime market.

The Federal Reserve was ignoring legislation Congress gave it in 1994 to regulate subprime lending. The Bush administration, in 2004, ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase the subprime loans they bought, which is one reason why I changed my position on the need to be tougher in the regulatory field. And the FHA lost out because these imprudent mortgages were being given without regulation. The FHA doesn't do the kind of mortgages that led to problems.

Beyond that, in recent years, towards the end of the Bush administration and with even greater force during the Obama administration, the FHA has been improving. The FHA has on its own said, if you've got a 580 credit score or below, it's a 10 percent downpayment. We mandated that they go from 3 to 3.5 percent downpayment and increase the upfront fees.

In this bill--and the gentlewoman from West Virginia deserves a great deal of credit, along with our colleague, the gentlewoman from California--the FHA is given credit to require lenders who get loans placed with the FHA in violation of the guidelines to take back those loans. So it wouldn't be the taxpayer that would be on the hook for those loans that shouldn't have been granted and that violated the good guidelines of the FHA; it will be the lender.

It also gives them the power to debar people who have a bad record, which is something they haven't had before.

So we are not talking about the old FHA; we are talking about an improved one. And we are talking about an FHA that stands in great contrast to the unregulated subprime market.

Finally, the gentleman says, ``Well, it doesn't take effect until 2012.'' Neither he nor I knows what the housing market will look like in 2012. And if there's a reason not to do it now, that might also be there in 2012. No one can predict whether the housing--and maybe in 2015 it will be back again into trouble.

The housing market we don't believe is going to crash like it did before, but the basic point is this: The FHA has been the alternative to the kind of unregulated, irresponsible subprime mortgages that many of my friends on the other side protected, the kind of mortgages which they prevented us from regulating until 2007 when we were able to pass a bill in the House, over the objection of many of those who have spoken already, to regulate subprime mortgages. And because we did that, the Federal Reserve finally used its authority.

I hope the amendment is defeated.

I rise to speak on the motion.

I don't know yet.

Well, I was disappointed that my colleague on the Financial Services Committee wouldn't observe the tradition that we have of yielding to each other. If he had, I could have saved the Members a lot of time because I am going to urge people to vote for it.

I will say that it might need a word or two of improvement. If it had, in fact, been offered at the Financial Services Committee, either provision, we could have accepted it then, but then Members wouldn't have had a chance to make dramatic speeches on the floor, so I suppose that explains why we had to go through this.

I urge adoption of the amendment of the recommittal motion, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the instructions of the House in the motion to recommit, I report the bill, H.R. 5072, back to the House with an amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

First, I want to acknowledge the praise given to the gentlewoman from West Virginia (Mrs. Capito), and, I would add, I was thanked, but the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) worked closely with Mrs. Capito to bring this bill forward.

Secondly, on the deficit, this Friday morning I will be at a meeting. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) and I are beginning an enterprise to pull back the excessive overreach of America militarily. We are spending more money now defending Western Europe from an enemy unknown to anybody--including those in Western Europe--than we're spending on virtually any domestic program. So, yes, I welcome that, and I'll look to see where we are on that.

I support President Obama's efforts to save money in the space program. Frankly, when people tell me that we have got a serious debt crisis but they're willing to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to send a human being to Mars so he or she can be brought back--and the President is not, I think, correct on this--then I am also skeptical.

Some of my friends in the Agricultural Committee and in the South who support sending $147 million of American tax dollars to the Brazilian cotton farmers to offset the subsidy given to American cotton farmers, I doubt their true depth of their commitment to cutting the budget.

But let me talk about revisionist history.

The Republican Party controlled the Congress from 1995 to 2006. No legislation changing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went through. President Bush controlled the executive branch for 2000 to 2008. What he did--he said he wanted some reform. You've heard the former chairman, the former Republican chairman Mr. Oxley, denigrate Mr. Bush's cooperation there. But in 2004, the Bush administration ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase the number of mortgages they bought for people below the median income. And at the time I said I thought that was a mistake; wrong for the people who were being pushed into this, wrong for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and, in fact, it led me to change my opinion.

As Secretary Donovan testified, unchallenged by any of the Republicans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not now costing the taxpayers any money. The money that is owed is from the prior activity before Secretary Paulson put them into conservatorship with authority that he did not get from a Republican Congress but from a Democratic Congress, and Secretary Paulson said it wasn't a perfect bill but it was a bill that he could work with.

Since then, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been in conservatorship. They have already been drastically changed, and they are not costing the taxpayer moneys. Clearly, we have to take a next step, but we have consulted with the Realtors, with the home builders, with advocates for low-income housing, with virtually everyone concerned with housing, and their recommendation is, yes, keep them in conservatorship and replace them.

The Republican plan that you have heard, the plan of the minority of Republicans from 2005, abolishes them with no replacement, and so housing finance is left in a turmoil. We have Ginnie Mae, we have the FHA, we have the Federal home loan banks, we have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yes, we believe there should be a sorting out of these things, but let's again just summarize.

I have been told that it was my fault that during the Republican years in Congress we didn't pass a bill on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Well, Mr. DeLay of recent memory was in charge of the House agenda then, and I have to disclaim the notion that I was secretly advising Mr. DeLay, and I'll prove that to you, Madam Speaker. If I were giving Mr. DeLay advice, I would have told him not to go on the dance show. It wouldn't have just been Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would have benefited; a lot would have benefited.

But we were frustrated by him. He was in charge of the housing agenda. A few Republicans wanted to change it. They were outvoted by the Republican majority. When the Democrats took office--and you can read this in Secretary Paulson's book--we cooperated with the Paulson administration. We gave them the authority to put it into conservatorship. They are now both in conservatorship, and we await the next step.

First, to underline it, under authority that the Bush administration asked for and didn't get until the Democrats took over Congress, Fannie and Freddie were put into conservatorship. That's a very drastic reform of where they were.

The $145 billion that, regrettably, is being lost was lost before the conservatorship. We put an end to those losses. And that's the current testimony of Secretary Donovan.

And then as to compensation, I welcome my friend from West Virginia, belatedly, to the cause of limiting the compensation. Because the Committee on Financial Services put a bill out to specifically limit the compensation of the GSEs. We had general compensation limitations for TARP recipients, but we had one that would have limited GSE recipients, as well. And the gentlewoman from West Virginia voted against it, as did most of the Republicans.

So we had a general compensation restriction, and we had one for--I take it back. It was any recipients of government aid, including the GSEs and the TARP recipients. And the Republican Party voted ``no.'' So they are now opposed to raises which they refused to vote to block. That's the pattern.

And I stress again, Fannie and Freddie have already been drastically reformed. They are in conservatorship. That is a very significant form of limitation. They are not being run remotely the way they were in the past when the Bush administration and others pushed them into buying too many loans from low-income people. And we do believe they need to be replaced, but in a way that does not further destabilize housing finance.

That's why the realtors and the home builders and a number of groups concerned about the deficit oppose this Republican plan simply to abolish them without replacing housing finance mechanisms. But they are currently being run in conservatorship.

And, again, I repeat, as Secretary Donovan said, unchallenged by the Republicans when he was testifying, they are not now losing the money. The losses predated the conservatorship, and the responsible thing to do was to replace them responsibly.

But the fact is that it's not losing money--whether it's persuasive or not, the fact is uncontested that it's not losing money. The CBO talks about past debt.

I just want to talk about the past that the gentleman from Illinois is so desperate to cover up.

The House voted on a bill that would have limited compensation to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives a year ago. It was not on other corporations; it was on TARP recipients, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It came out of committee, it came to the floor of the House, and the gentleman voted against it. If he had helped us a year ago--it passed the House but it died in the Senate--if we had been able to get that bill through, we would have limited these.

So the gentleman over a year ago--and I know that's history and he doesn't like to talk about history, particularly when it doesn't reflect well on his argument--but he voted against that limitation.

The reason we talk about the history is very simple: Every dollar that is lost and is about to be lost was lost because there was a delay in reform.

The losses are not resulting from current operations. Secretary Donovan said that before the committee, and no Republican challenged him. We are stuck with losses that happened before we were able to put it into conservatorship by our votes and stop the bleeding.

I thank my friend for yielding.

I appreciate the revised view of history itself. For some time, my Republican colleagues have been trying to blame those of us who try to expand housing, decent housing for lower-income people, for the crisis, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I think the record is very clear. Twelve years of Republican rule, no bill became law to change Fannie and Freddie Mac's operation. George Bush in 2004--not ancient history--expands, by his mandate, the number of low-income loans that they have to purchase, loans from low-income people.

That is why we have the debt. That is why this is relevant. The Democrats take power in 2007 and, working with Secretary Paulson, as he documents in his book--and he notes, by the way, that some Republicans were mad at him for working with us. But the result was a good bill that allowed him to put Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship. And, post-conservatorship, we have not had the problems.

If you abolish Fannie and Freddie tomorrow, you wouldn't save a penny because we would still have the debts that accrued when it was run previously, an unreformed Fannie and Freddie--unreformed because the Republicans wouldn't touch it, unreformed probably because President Bush pushed them into more loans. To talk about what you do in the future you have to understand the source of the problem; that's what we get in history.

So Fannie and Freddie have been drastically changed and they are in conservatorship. The question is, what do you do next? They have played an important role in housing finance. They are playing a constructive role now as opposed to the destructive role they played before. And I was slow in recognizing that; it wasn't until 2004 that I did. But in 2005, I joined many Republicans in trying to support a bill until it was hijacked from any housing purposes. By the way, the fact that I voted against the bill finally had no impact. The bill passed the House. It died in the Senate because Senate Republicans didn't like it. Senate Democrats offered the House Republican bill; that caused the end of the war.

But let's talk about going forward. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are now run by a conservator. Unfortunately, their salaries aren't capped because the Republicans helped sabotage a bill which we supported to cap their salaries. But it is now being run in a way that helps promote financial--and does not have the mistakes of the past. There are not these problems. The money owed is money that results from past decisions that are no longer being taken because of the conservatorship.

The question is, what do you do going forward? The National Association of Realtors, the National Association of Home Builders, everybody involved in housing finance argues--very correctly, I think-- that simply having Fannie and Freddie disappear--again, not the old Fannie and Freddie, they have disappeared, the agencies that caused us the problems no longer exist. My colleague from Illinois, with a fresh figure of speech, said they were 800-pound gorillas. Well, if they are gorillas, they are deeply chained, they are in cages, and they are being fed and are quite docile. Yes, they need to be replaced, but you need to take all of the various aspects of housing finance and figure out how to do it going forward. The Republican bill doesn't do that; that's too hard.

Railing against the mistakes of the past--and they say they don't like history? But their bill is a firm statement against the operation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before it was put into conservatorship and deals, unfortunately, with debts that we are stuck with. Going forward, how do you untangle the private shareholder corporation and a public mandate to try and subsidize housing to some extent? What agency should you have? What's the role of the Federal Housing Administration and Ginnie Mae and the private sector and the secondary market entities? We need to think about that. They haven't done that. Their bill includes nothing to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So passing their bill tomorrow--or last week--wouldn't save us anything because their current operations aren't losing money, and it wouldn't discharge us from the debts that occurred when it was being run on their watch under their rules.

We do stop the bleeding by putting them into a tough conservatorship. You can read Hank Paulson's book, and he tells you how they were going to resist that. He insisted and fired the board of directors and shareholders were substantially diminished or wiped out. And new rules, new loans are going forward that aren't the kind of bad loans that were made, and now our job is, responsibly, to try and replace it. And what you get from the Republicans is confession. They are very angry at the fact that when they were running the place in the White House and here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to run up all those debts and they never were able to do anything to stop it. I didn't see that early on. I saw it--and in fact acted on it--quicker than many of them. We have now stopped the bad stuff and we are not incurring losses, and the question is, what do you do going forward? And that is a harder question than my Republican colleagues are prepared to grapple with.

I thank the gentleman from Colorado.

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 congratulate Speaker Pelosi and others in the leadership for successfully insisting that this House get a chance to vote on repealing the rule that says that patriotic, able-bodied gay and lesbian Americans cannot serve their country.

Mr. Speaker, it strikes me as odd. If there was a situation in which we were at war, as we are now sadly in two situations--sadly because no one likes war--if I had proposed that gay and lesbian Americans be exempted from any drafts and from any requirement to serve and put their lives in danger, I would have been accused of a ``special rights,'' and it would have been a correct accusation. Instead, gay and lesbian people are asking for the right to serve, and we're told that will undo military cohesion.

Mr. Speaker, the Israeli Defense Forces have understandably, given the history of the Jewish people and our aversion to bigotry, because we know what it does to us, they have been free of any such prejudice. Gay and lesbian Israelis have not just the right but the obligation to serve their country. And those who tell me that the presence of gay and lesbian members of the military undermine the effectiveness of a fighting force and undermine unit cohesion must have never heard of Israel. They must have never heard of as effective a fighting force as has existed in modern times.

So the notion that you must deny American gay and lesbian citizens their rights has no basis in reality.

Madam Chair, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Do the records of the House contain the length of time of the speech made by the minority leader on the health care bill under a 1-minute recognition?

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the prompt action of the committee in processing this bill. Michael Rothberg was one of the talented young Americans who was one of the victims of the mass murder by bloodthirsty terrorists on September 11th. Mr. Rothberg was one of those killed by these vicious thugs in their attack on the World Trade Center.

Understandably, his family, who is proud of him and of the high regard he was held in the town in which he had lived, asked that I act to have the town's post office named for him. It was a request that was enthusiastically supported by the government of the town, not surprisingly, because it is a community that takes its civic responsibilities seriously and elects and appoints people to town offices who are thoughtful, compassionate, and effective.

Mr. Rothberg was born in Sharon and graduated from Sharon High School. He then went on to earn his Bachelors and Masters degrees in math and computer science from McGill University in Montreal. He went to work for Kanter Fitzgerald whose offices were on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center, and on September 11th, he was tragically killed in his office.

Michael Rothberg was both a very successful professional and a man of great generosity, and while he was working in New York, he remembered his Massachusetts roots in his generous support of important medically- related charities, for example the Dana Farber Cancer Institute's Jimmy Fund. He was also a strong supporter of the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation and Mutual Funds against Cancer.

His family has established the Michael C. Rothberg Memorial Scholarship, and his fellow Sharonites have generously contributed to it in his memory in a number of ways.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the chance to join Michael Rothberg's family and the town of Sharon in memorializing an able, generous man who is sorely missed, and we all take this occasion of course to reaffirm our resolve to do everything that we can to protect all of us against a repeat of this tragedy.

Madam Speaker, I recently was informed by a group of citizens who live in my district of a remarkable story about one of their neighbors. I admire their spirit in making sure that the inspiring story of their friend and neighbor, Nicholas H. Burlak, is more widely known. And I ask that my remarks here be printed to call attention to Mr. Burlak's remarkable achievements, so that they may serve as an example to others.

Nicholas Burlak was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1924, and when the Depression came, his father moved the family to Ukraine in search of work. When World War II broke out in 1941, when the Hitler- Stalin pact fell apart and Germany then attacked its erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, Nicholas Burlak tried to return to the United States, the home of his birth, to enlist in the Marine Corps. But this was physically impossible. He then did the next-best thing--determined to fight the Nazis, and to defend his country of birth as best he could, Mr. Burlak became an American volunteer in the Soviet Army. Subsequently he was wounded four times in battle, twice suffered shell shock and received several medals for bravery as he participated in the terrible battles between the Soviet and Nazi armies, ultimately fighting his way with other Russians to Berlin. Among the signatures left by Russian soldiers on the walls of the Reichstag in 1945 was one in English--``Bethlehem, PA, USA-Donbass, Ukraine, Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan, Berlin, Germany May 1945--Nicholas.'' That was the heroic and patriotic American, Nicholas Burlak, who did not allow his separation from our country to prevent his allegiance to it.

With the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II, the Russian government awarded Mr. Burlak a medal. I believe it is appropriate for his fellow countrymen in the United States, now that he has returned to live among us as he always wanted to do, to join in commemorating the extraordinary dedication of this brave young man who has become a very valued member of our country today.

Madam Speaker, Nicholas Burlak's commitment to his fellow and sister citizens did not end with his joining in the war against the Nazis. In 2007, for example, he received the Eloise K. Houghton Award in recognition of community spirit and outstanding volunteer service from the Newton Community Development Foundation, a very important organization in my hometown, which provides help to others.

Madam Speaker, Nicholas Burlak understood how important his story was and how many people could learn from and be inspired by it, so he wrote a book--under the pseudonym of the time of M.J. Nicholas, entitled ``Love and War: An American Volunteer in the Soviet Red Army.'' It is not just an inspiring book, but a gripping one, and I welcome the chance, Madam Speaker, to mention it here, as part of the tribute that our country should be paying to Mr. Burlak. It is a tribute to him and to his neighbors that they are so inspired by his story that they took the initiative in writing to me and calling this to my attention, and I am very pleased to have the chance to express my admiration of Mr. Burlak and my appreciation to his neighbors for giving me the chance to do this.