Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, few people in this House apparently recognize, or in the country, the enormous significance of January 21, 2009. That is apparently the day in which a number of extraordinary things happened. It's the day on which bailouts began. According to my Republican colleagues, there weren't any before. Bailouts, you may think they started under George Bush, the bailout of General Motors, of AIG, of Chrysler, and the TARP bill. Some people may think they happened in 2008. No. Apparently, they started on January 21, 2009. That's also the day, of course, that the war in Afghanistan, which was going wonderfully, began to go bad. It's the day in which a surplus magically became an enormous deficit. It's also the day in which we had a recession.

My Republican colleagues talk about job loss. Job loss was, of course, I thought, begun with a recession that started in 2007 and got worse and worse during 2008 and is only now beginning to moderate.

And not only did all those bad things happen on January 21, 2009--the bailout began, the TARP sprang full-blown, the deficits came, the war in Afghanistan turned south, but it was also the day in

which we had one of the worst outbreaks of illness in American history, mass amnesia on the part of the Republican Party, who forgot everything that had happened before.

Every single bailout now going on in America started under the Bush administration. In some cases, some of us thought we had to cooperate because the lack of regulation, the ideologically driven opposition to any regulation of derivatives, of subprime mortgages, of excessive leverage by banks; all of those things were Republican policy. And now, Members have said, that's their answer.

Leave it to the market, because if you try to regulate, you will kill the economy.

Well, Members who are impressed by that don't have to wait and listen to my Republican colleagues say it. Go back and read the Congressional Record from 1900 when they were saying that about Theodore Roosevelt and the antitrust, actually 1902, 1903.

Read what they said when Franklin Roosevelt set up the SEC during the 1930s. Yes, we believe that there should be some regulation. We are told, leave it to the markets.

Leave it to AIG to sell as many credit default swaps as they want to without any ability to pay them back; leave it to people unregulated to sell subprime mortgages to people who shouldn't have them. Leave it to the rating agencies to then say to AIG, Hey, those are a great deals, buy them, or insure them, rather, through the people who bought them.

Do nothing about executive compensation. Do nothing about a salary structure that incentivizes excessive risk. Don't let the shareholders have a say. Now, one of my colleagues said, I guess the gentleman from Texas, that it is a bailout fund. No, there is not.

He talks about a bailout fund as if it were a reality. Here is the deal: we did have bailout starting with the TARP bill in September, which I voted for when the Bush administration, I think, said, look, as a result, not--they didn't say this--but as a result of lack of regulation, we were in a terrible crisis.

We, in this bill, end those. The authority that the Federal Reserve, George Bush's appointees to the Federal Reserve, they were all his, used to give money to AIG, that's abolished in our bill. Section 13.3 will no longer allow them to do what they did with Bear Stearns or do with AIG.

It will allow a facility to be set up, and here we agree--the Republicans said the same thing in their bill--to provide for some liquidity for solvent institutions, but there is no more of the Federal Reserve doing what they did with AIG and Bear Stearns.

We do take a fund, not from the taxpayers, as we were asked to do by the Bush administration, and as I went along with, along with the Republican leadership of the House and the Senate--because I didn't think we had an option at that time to avert disaster--but we now with some time will assess the financial institutions for that fund. The fund is not used to bail out any failing institution.

The bill specifically says the money only comes to put that institution to death. There is nothing in here that allows a failing institution to be continued with Federal money. There is a dissolution fund, not a bailout fund; and it does say that it may be that to dissolve this in an orderly way, as opposed to Lehman Brothers, where you just had a flat bankruptcy, that you need to put some money into it, maybe pay off some of the States that would otherwise be hurt because they got into investments they shouldn't have gotten into. That's the only fund, so there is no bailout. The institution has died.

Here is another difference, though. The Republican bill does zero, proudly, does zero to prevent those institutions from getting to that point. The bill that we are putting forward says the regulators, as a systemic risk council, will monitor institutions and will monitor activity. If we see an institution getting to that point, we step in and say, raise your capital, stop selling CDSs, stop selling mortgages, giving mortgages to people who shouldn't get them, divest yourself of this or that.

Mr. Speaker, I know that some of my conservative colleagues who have aligned themselves with people who came to be the new American patriots want to emulate the people who revolted against George III, but there is another monarch who comes to mind when I come to think of them. When in the 19th century the Bourbons were restored after the French Revolution, it was said of them that they had forgotten nothing because they learned nothing.

That's my Republican colleagues. They have learned absolutely nothing from the fact that a total absence of regulation caused this enormous financial crisis.

Do we care about jobs, yes. We don't want, as their bill would do, their substitute to allow an AIG to continue to do what it did to allow subprime mortgages to continue, to allow executive pay to have that perverse incentive. Yes, we are trying to prevent another job loss like the one President Obama inherited from President Bush.

Will the gentleman yield?

I didn't offer it. It was offered by President Bush. I did vote for it, but it was President Bush's offer. I give credit where credit is due.

Mr. Chairman, I begin by yielding 4 minutes to one of the Members of the House who has a very significant imprint in this bill, all to the protection of investors and the integrity of our markets, the chairman of the Capital Markets Subcommittee, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kanjorski).

I yield an additional 1 minute.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, my Republican colleagues are in the throes of regret that things that they would like to have denounced are not in this bill. There will

be a certain amount of fantasy tonight on the floor of the House as they lament the existence of things that are not here.

One of the major bailout instruments, section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act, was used during the Bush years to bail out not the institution, but the creditors of Bear Stearns, but then it was used by a unilateral decision by the Federal Reserve with no congressional input in September during the Bush year of 2008 to provide substantial amounts of money to AIG. The bill before us today wipes that power out. There will be no more use of section 13.3 to provide funds to any existing institution.

There will be, as the Republican bill also said, instead, the ability to fund an instrument to which companies can apply if they are solvent in the midst of a national liquidity crisis. But there will be nothing like AIG.

There is a fund in here for the FDIC to use if a financial institution has to be put out of existence because it had become too indebted and unable to meet its debts, and it was big enough so that its failure would cause the kind of systemic negative consequences that we saw from Lehman Brothers.

Last year, the problem was Lehman Brothers went under, and the Bush administration felt they couldn't pay anybody, and there was a crisis. So then AIG went under, and the Bush administration said, well, we better pay everybody because we don't have the legal authority to pick and choose. We now end that dilemma. We say, and this is absolutely crystal clear in the bill, it says if an institution gets to the point where it cannot pay its debts, and it is of such size that those debts threaten systemic negative consequences reverberating throughout the economy, it dies. There is no bailout. There is no continuation of that entity. It's a dissolution fund. It is put into receivership.

There is a fund raised, it is true, by assessments on the financial institutions, and my Republican colleagues are far more solicitous than I of those institutions. They don't want to restrain their compensation, and they don't want them to have to contribute to expenses that may be incurred by their own irresponsibility. That is clearly a difference between us.

We say that if the Federal agency that is putting this out of business and takes it over, and, yeah, there's a takeover of failing institutions who threaten, by the size and complexity of their indebtedness, to threaten the stability of the country, we take them over to put them out of business. The shareholders are wiped out, the boards of directors. These are all absolute conditions that have to be met.

And it may be that in winding them down, some money has to be spent. You don't just walk in the next day and say, okay, the door is closed. That is irresponsible. We say it may take some money to wind them down. So we assess the business community that caused these problems in the whole for that. And we do say if there is a need and there's a shortfall before, if one of these things happens before the fund is built up, money will be borrowed from the Treasury with an absolute requirement of repayment in this fund. There are no taxpayer dollars that will be used. They will be lent, in some cases, as has been lent in other cases, but they must be repaid, and there must be a repayment schedule.

The assessments will continue until they are repaid.

Now, one of the odd things is, and I apologize to my colleagues, the bill is too big. I don't know whether that means it was too much to read or too heavy to carry, or some really short ones can't see over it when they are sitting down. I don't know what the problem was. This notion that the value of a piece of legislation is inversely related to its size is rather odd.

But let me tell you how they managed to slim down--which I would like to do, now that I am through with all of that, but I will have to start my diet next week. How do they slim it down? They don't do anything in their bill about executive compensation.

I agree, we spent some pages saying that the kind of bonuses and large payments to take risks and not be penalized if they fail, we have language in here to stop that. They don't. Save some pages.

We say, let's ban the kind of subprime loans that got this country into so much trouble. We have a lot of language in here to ban subprime loans. They don't. Save some more pages.

We do regulation in other ways that they don't do. They don't have registration of hedge funds. They don't have requirements on private advisers. They don't have anything about a whole lot of things. It is true if you avoid subjects, you shrink the size of the bill.

By the way, as to the size of the bill, this didn't come--one of the things, you know, sometimes it's what's not said that you open--you haven't heard any complaints today, and I appreciate that, about the process. We began marking up the elements of this bill before the summer recess. We have had a large number of hearings. We have spent over 50 hours in actual markup debate on this bill.

There have been hundreds of amendments offered, dozens of amendments accepted from both the Republican and Democratic sides in many days of markups. It has been very thoroughly vetted. It was made public and available.

I am sorry that they had to read a lot of pages about things they didn't want to read about. They don't like to be reminded of compensation abuses. They don't want to hear about subprime, but we do. We want to stop it.

There is no bailout fund. The bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns, not possible, illegal under this bill. If a company fails, it will be put to death. Yes, we have death panels, but they got the death panels in the wrong bill. The death panels are in this bill. We will spend money to get rid of them in ways that will minimize damage, money that will come from the financial community.

Now, we heard that it's going to have a restriction on credit. Well, it's true, many of them were opposed to the credit card bill. Many voted for it. The National Federation of Independent Business supported the credit card bill. They say there is a credit czar. That one is too odd to put any meaning behind. I would like them to point to the sections that do it. Maybe, if it's too much to read all at once, they could divide it up. Like there are 177, if they each read 8 pages, I think they could get the whole bill done. Maybe they could then find a credit czar in there. I can't.

We do say that if you are identified by the systemic risk council as overleveraged, and you are big, we will step in and tell you, as the gentleman from Pennsylvania's amendment said, you are too big, raise your capital. Maybe that's a credit czar.

Maybe when someone would have told AIG a couple of years ago, stop selling those credit default swaps that you can't back up, because mortgages that you are ensuring against loss can lose money, maybe they think that's a credit czar if you tell AIG don't do it, because nothing in that bill, nothing, zero in that bill would have interfered with AIG's recklessness. There's not a word in here that would have done that in terms of the overleveraging of AIG, nor of the subprime loans that were there.

Yes, the lack of regulation over many years allowed big problems to grow up. It takes a fairly comprehensive bill to do it. We have been working on this bill for literally months. We have had days and days of hearings. We have voted on it; we have amended it. It's been available.

I would hope they would stop complaining about the size. I would hope they would deal with the substance. But the real substance of this bill, not a bailout that does not exist, I want someone to read me the sections that show there is taxpayer money that can go to keep a failing institution going. There absolutely is not. I would like them to tell me, do they think we should ever do anything about subprime loans, anything about executive compensation, anything about subprime hedge funds, about any of these other things?

Yes, here is the situation. Years of an absence of regulation, both an absence of war and an absence of will to regulate--mostly under Republican rule but some with Democratic complicity--led to the largest crisis in recent memory since the Depression.

They talk about job loss. As I said before, what a terrible day January 21 was. Apparently, we had a wonderful economy up until January 20. Barack Obama took power and millions of jobs disappeared retroactively. A deficit sprung up that had not been there. Bailouts were retroactively pushed back to September.

The major factor in jobs loss was this terrible crisis. What we do for jobs is to say you will not be allowed, once again, the financial irresponsibility of some in that community to get us into trouble.

The Republican proposal is very clear. Do not interfere with the ability of an AIG, Lehman Brothers, Citicorp, Countrywide or any of those other financial entities. Do not prevent them from doing again what they did before. If and when they have done such a bad job that they are collapsing, then let them go bankrupt and don't do anything to deal with the consequences. Let's have another Lehman Brothers.

We say ``no.'' Let's try to stop them from getting there. If they do get there, yes, we will put them out of business, but in a more orderly way.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds to note that with all these assertions that this is going to hurt credit and small banks, the Independent Community Bankers Association, a great representative of small banks, supports this bill. Now, they'll be upset if we do bankruptcy. But as far as the bill is concerned and the provisions we have been talking about now, the Independent Community Bankers Association supports this bill. They believe exactly the opposite about credit.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.

If the gentleman would yield, the answer is yes, I agree completely, as they have operated, as they are almost certainly going to operate, as they are intended to function as marketplaces rather than themselves, it is inconceivable to me that they could be designated in that way.

First, I yield myself 15 seconds to invite Members to show me the part of the bill where there is a bailout that goes to failed institutions and keeps them going. I will read the parts that make it very clear that that's not the case, but maybe there is something I didn't read. So anybody who tells me there is a bailout that goes to continuing business institutions----

I yield myself 2 more minutes and yield to the gentleman.

What page? Give me the page or we can't have a serious discussion, obviously.

I take back my time. If the gentleman will point to the page. I'm not interested in their misconceptions; I'm interested in actual language. The gentleman rose voluntarily, I would assume he would have the language.

And it says what?

I will take back my time.

I yielded to you--and I want to respond to the response.

I took 2 minutes for myself, and then yielded to the gentleman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds just to explain to the gentleman from New Jersey, who misunderstands the rules, I yielded myself 2 minutes so we could have a conversation. He then used up the 2 minutes. So it was not within my power to continue it.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the Committee do now rise.

I will yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions, who's done a great deal to help small banks in this bill.

I yield the gentleman another minute.

Mr. Chairman, I would yield myself 15 seconds to say I wish we had the Consumer Financial Protection Agency already in place, because then the gentleman could get a refund on his dictionary because someone sold him a bum dictionary.

I now yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

I believe there is an imbalance of time, so I will reserve.

I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kilroy), who I understand wants to engage in a colloquy.

The gentlewoman is correct. She has been very diligent in trying to protect this very important type of financing. Financing companies are not depository institutions. They provide financing for the sale of that particular product in that company.

It is again inconceivable to me that somehow they would rise to the level of risk that would justify the Systemic Risk Council stepping in.

Madam Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Speier).

Madam Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Wilson).

I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Al Green).

I yield the gentleman an additional minute.

I will give him a minute because they're listening in Norton.

I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Foster).

Will the gentleman yield?

The gentleman stated the exact opposite of what I said. He's quoting another Member.

I said, in fact, that on 13(3) our bills are very similar. So the gentleman has just put words in my mouth that was the exact opposite of what I said. It was another Member who talked about 13(3). I talked about the similarity of our approach as you had offered it in committee and ours on 13(3).

Another Member said that, yes.

I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Watt), a leading member of the committee who has done a great deal on this bill.

I have only one speaker left.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

May I inquire as to the time remaining?

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

First, I have to deal with some of the misstatements that we've heard. There is nothing in here that rations credit. There isn't even anything to refute because there is nothing here they could even misinterpret, Madam Chair, about the rationing of credit. Now, some are particularly upset because we establish a Consumer Protection Agency. In the first place, as far as the banks are concerned, that entity gets no new powers; it takes powers that are already there in the bank's regulators that haven't been used very well.

If my friends on the other side want to go to the American people and say, oh, great, here's one of the differences between the parties, we think you consumers have been very adequately protected, and you don't need to improve that manner of administration, then I will take that debate to the American public.

They tell us that this is bad for small business. The Independent Community Bankers Association supports this bill.

They will be unhappy if bankruptcy is added, I understand that, but as far as the bill now stands, before we get to the bankruptcy clause of the Judiciary Committee amendment--which I'm going to vote for, but insofar as the accusation that it restricts credit, the Independent Community Bankers don't think so, just as when we did the credit card bill and the Republicans said--some of them, some of them voted for it--this is bad for small business and the National Federation of Independent Business said no.

What we say here is--and this is a big difference--we do say that we want to prevent the granting of those kinds of mortgages that get people in trouble because it's not just the individual who gets in trouble; the whole economy suffers. And we do want to ban the kind of practices in the mortgage area--so it's true, it's an expansion of government power. I will say, by the way, that was a constant debate. For much of the past, oh, 15 years, until recently, many Democrats tried to get restrictions on irresponsible subprime mortgages. The Republicans resisted them.

From 1995 to 2007, my Republican friends controlled this House; not a piece of legislation passed to stop mortgages, not a piece of legislation passed to deal with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We did, in 2007, pass such legislation, but the damage had been done.

So, yeah, there is a difference. We want to expand the regulatory power to stop the kind of mortgages from being granted that were a major problem in the crisis. One Member said, Well, we would do nothing to stop the AIG crisis. No, we do many things to stop the AIG crisis. First of all, we do not allow, under the legislation we are putting forward, an entity like AIG to get so overextended by issuing credit default swaps that they can't pay off. They would be restricted because derivatives would be better regulated. They would be restricted because they would not be allowed to be so leveraged because we would give regulators the power to hold them in.

The notion that it's socialism when you have bank regulation is quite odd. We heard Members say this is socialism. There is nothing in here about the ownership of the means of production. There is nothing in here about the government taking over any ongoing institution. Yes, we have bank regulation, and that's the deal. These are people who think that regulation is socialism. We are for regulation. We do believe that the absence of regulation over the last 20 years contributed greatly to this problem.

Now, I know there are people who say, when you start regulating the innovation aspects of the economy, you get into trouble. They said it about Franklin Roosevelt and the Securities Exchange Commission, they said it about Theodore Roosevelt and antitrust. I urge people to go back and read the same old arguments.

Now, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Neugebauer) said the Federal Reserve will decide that you are too big to fail and you will be advantaged; wrong, wrong, wrong. In the first place, the designation that an entity, a financial entity--by the way, we heard some comments about Dell and American Airlines, which are not covered under this bill. They are not financial holding companies and could not be made financial holding companies. So Dell and American Airlines are total red herrings.

What we have here is the ability of a group of the existing regulators--not the Federal Reserve--to decide that a particular institution is so big and so overleveraged that it's a danger. But they don't get designated and then carried around; coordinated with that is a restriction on what they do. They are not told you're too big to fail, go out and make more money. They are told, you are so big that if you fail because of problems, raise your capital, cut back on your activity, and if you're AIG, stop selling the credit default swaps.

There is this very real difference between the bills. Their bill is very small because it does nothing to retard the kind of activity that got us in trouble. It does not stop over-leveraging, it does not stop unregulated derivative trading, it does not stop credit default swaps without anything to back them up, it does not stop any subprime lending abuses. So yes, that's their view, and they're very clear: Leave it to the private market. We say the private market always does better with sensible regulation.

When Roosevelt and Wilson put antitrust into place, I think they did a good thing. When Franklin Roosevelt did the SEC and the Investment Company Act, those were good things. So, yes, a lack of regulation we believe did cause this great problem.

Now, we get into the bailout issue because the Judiciary Committee, frankly, copied the Republican bill by saying you should use chapter 11. The Republican bill talks about chapter 14--the equivalent of chapter 11 here. Here's what, however, the Judiciary language is subject to. It is subject to--we are talking about now the fund. Yes, somebody could be put into chapter 11, but none of the money could be spent that's in the fund. It's raised not by taxpayers, but by an assessment.

On page 399, ``The Fund shall be available to the corporation for use with respect to the dissolution of a covered financial company to cover the costs incurred by the corporation. The Fund shall not be used in any manner to benefit any officer or director of such company.''

It also then says, on page 397, here is the fund, this is the purpose of the fund, ``to facilitate and provide for the orderly and complete dissolution of any failed financial company or companies that pose a systemic threat to the financial markets or economy as determined under 1603(b).'' The language about Judiciary does not alter that in any respect. It says that the Fund can only be used for dissolution.

Now, it is true, they said, well, what about AIG when they paid off all these people? This is precisely to prevent the repetition. That was done, by the way, as Members will know, under section 13(3). It can no longer be done. We have changed section 13(3), so that should not happen again.

What they did was to say--and this was in the Bush administration-- they said, look, we don't have the discretion to pick and choose, so we are doing exactly the opposite of AIG. With AIG, it was the ruling of the Bush administration's top officials, concurred in by President Bush without any congressional input, that they had to pay off every creditor of AIG because they got the legal authority to pick and choose. They said, we can put them all into bankruptcy, we have Lehman Brothers, and the markets will end--Secretary Paulsen said--or we can pay everybody.

We give them the authority precisely to avoid that dilemma. And by the way, AIG was not being put out of business. It is not AIG. AIG was not put under dissolution; they are being kept going. That could not happen. What we say is, in the future, if you think an entity like AIG has gotten too big and owes too many people too much money, you take it over and you spend money only to wind it down and to dissolve it. If there was some notion that it could be kept going, then none of these monies could be used for it.

Let me read it again: ``To facilitate and provide for the orderly and complete dissolution of any failed financial company.'' That is a restriction on the use of the fund--it's not a taxpayer fund, but even of the other funds.

And then on page 288 it says, ``The Corporation is authorized to take the stabilization actions''--including the bankruptcy--``only if the Secretary and the Corporation determine that it is necessary for the purpose of financial stability and not for the purpose of preserving the covered financial company.'' And it then says, ``The Corporation ensures that any funds from taxpayers shall be repaid as part of the resolution process before payments are made to creditors.'' Funds will be repaid if there is a borrowing. Funds go to the taxpayer before a nickel goes to the creditors.

These are the inaccuracies that we have heard. There is no Dell or American Airlines in here. Oh, by the way, there is no permanent bailout fund either because that fund and the borrowing authority the gentleman from New Jersey talks about sunsets in 2013. The borrowing authority is sunsetted at 2013. So permanent is true if you believe that the world is ending on January 1, 2014. Now, I know the Republicans believe the world began on January 21, 2009, and all the bad things that happened never happened under Bush--they didn't fail to vote for them. They all happened in 2009.

Again, as my partner said to me, that was also the day of a terrible, terrible disease outbreak, mass Republican amnesia on January 21, 2009, when they forgot what all these--We've heard talk about job losses. Isn't it interesting that the gentleman from Texas cannot remember that a single job was lost before January 20. He talks about the job losses since the stimulus bill was passed. In fact, this recession, the worst since the Depression, began in 2007, in December; and there was enormous job loss under President Bush. Job loss has diminished recently.

So, yes, I will acknowledge that the Obama recovery from the Bush recession has been slower than we would have liked. But every sensible economist understands that the question is not whether there were any job losses at all, or whether you have affected the rate. And clearly the economic recovery plan has affected the rate. And further things will affect it further.

I yield to my friend from North Carolina.

No, I did not, and I did read the whole bill. And by the way, I also would object, there was some reference to steamroll, or not having the opportunity to read it. We have had complaints from the minority about too many markups and too many hearings and people on the staffs of both sides, and there was a magnificent group of staffers on both sides who have given the American people the best bargain they've ever gotten with the amount of work both sides have done on this. So, yeah, this has been very thoroughly vetted and discussed and debated and all the deadlines have been met.

But here's the fundamental difference: we do not have a bailout fund. We have a fund that will come from the financial institutions that can only be used, as I said, for dissolution, that will sunset in terms of borrowing authority in 2013, in terms of borrowing authority. It is used so you don't just say, okay, you're out of business; we end you tomorrow. It is to avoid what Secretary Paulsen and Ben Bernanke and George Bush told us was the dilemma of a year and half ago, all or nothing. We've got to use these funds to wind it down in an orderly way.

But here's the bigger difference: the Republican bill doesn't even try to stop the situation from arising. That's the difference. We analyzed the various things, too much leverage, unregulated derivatives, subprime loans, executive bonuses that encourage people to take too many risks. Their bill says, no, they're none of the government's business. It is true, every time you try to prevent a bad practice by regulation, you're expanding government power. That's true. An unregulated derivative market versus a regulated derivative market, that's more government power.

Restrictions on irresponsible subprime loans, that's government power. Telling an institution they can't be overleveraged, that's government power. In terms of breaking up companies, no one's breaking up Dell or American Airlines. That is fantasy. What we say is we first try to stop an institution from being so overleveraged and so big that it causes a problem. So, yes, we do say that the regulators should be able to step in if the Systemic Risk Council says so and restrain them from doing things. And, yes, the Federal Reserve is the agent, so the Federal Reserve gets more powers under the Systemic Risk Council.

We, by the way, take away more power in our bill with the Consumer Protection Agency from the Federal Reserve than any other agency. We limit section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve very severely. We do empower them as the agent of the Systemic Risk Council to do what the Republicans say you should never do: tell a company you've gotten too big and owe too much money and need to slow down. Break them up because their parts have begun to pull apart.

AIG should not have been allowed to be an insurance company and a credit default swap handler. And, yes, under the amendments we've adopted someone could have come in and said, okay guys, stay in the insurance business, but don't put us all at risk by doing all of these other things.

So that's the fundamental difference. The Republican position is, business knows best. Do not have any rules, do not prevent--and literally, nothing in their bill would retard any of the irresponsible, reckless, overleveraging that happened and led to the crisis.

And then they said, if there is a crisis, just let them go bankrupt. We say, first of all, let's try to prevent the crisis. Let's try to step in and slow it down.

And if that's socialism, I guess the antitrust laws are socialism by that definition, and the Republican equivalents of today's Republicans called Theodore Roosevelt a socialist. They turned against him. They called Franklin Roosevelt a socialist because he created the Securities and Exchange Commission. They call people socialists when they want to do regulation. The Independent Community Bankers don't think so. And the consumers of America do not believe that being protected from abuses is socialism. I look forward to tomorrow when we debate the amendments.

House of Representatives,

Committee on Ways and Means,

Washington, DC, December 2, 2009.

Hon. Barney Frank,

Chairman, Financial Services Committee, 2129 Rayburn House

Office Building, Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Chairman: I am writing regarding H.R. 2609, the

``Federal Insurance Office Act of 2009.'' As you know, the

Committee on Ways and Means had jurisdictional and other

concerns with provisions of this bill. I note that in 2008,

we exchanged letters on similar legislation (H.R. 5840)

introduced in the 110th Congress.

Earlier today, the bill was amended during markup by your

Committee to address the concerns my staff and I have raised.

For example, the bill was amended: to preserve USTR's

authorities, including over development and coordination of

U.S. international trade policy and the administration of the

U.S. trade agreements program; to modify the types of

agreements that are covered by the bill and to provide for

their joint negotiation by USTR and the U.S. Department of

the Treasury; to require that annual reports by the Federal

Insurance Office be provided to the Committee on Ways and

Means; and to modify the standards and process for preempting

State law. I appreciate your willingness, and the willingness

of your staff, to work with me and my staff on this important

legislation.

To expedite this legislation for Floor consideration, the

Committee on Ways and Means will forgo action on this bill.

This is being done with the understanding that it does not in

any way prejudice the Committee with respect to the

appointment of conferees or its jurisdictional prerogatives

on this bill or similar legislation in the future.

I would appreciate your response to this letter, confirming

this understanding with respect to H.R. 2609, and would ask

that a copy of our exchange of letters on this matter be

included in the committee report on the bill and in the

Congressional Record during House Floor consideration of this

bill.

Once again, thank you for your work and cooperation on this

legislation.

Sincerely,

Charles B. Rangel,

Chairman.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the chairman, and I congratulate him for the excellent work he and others have done on this bill.

I want to discuss the importance of the bill in addressing hard-to- reach communities, including commercial fishermen, who are a very important part of my constituency, but also farmers and ranchers. Ranchers tend to be a less important part of my constituency.

We are creating a new health insurance marketplace and requiring everyone to have coverage, which I support. This makes it particularly important to educate those that haven't had reliable, continuous access to quality, affordable health care.

Under the bill, will the commissioner be able to contract with entities such as commercial fishing organizations or others to facilitate the dissemination of information?

I thank the gentleman. I assume this means also the commissioner can work with the Small Business Administration on this sort of outreach and education?

I thank the chairman for clarifying these points.

Section 2229 of the Senate bill recognizes the unique health care educational outreach needs of commercial fishermen, farmers and ranchers, and I hope that that will be accepted in the final bill.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H.R. 3639 and insert extraneous material thereon.

Mr. Chairman, I recognize for 4 minutes the prime mover of this bill, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

Mr. Chairman, demonstrating that we bear no ill will to those who have deserted us, I yield 2 minutes to a former member of the committee, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee).

I yield the gentlewoman 1 additional minute.

I yield 3 minutes to an active Member, who also filed a very good piece of legislation to this bill, the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey).

Mr. Chairman, I intend to close and I have no further speakers, so I reserve my time.

If the gentleman would yield, someone on our side who said she wanted to speak has since come on the floor. I just wanted to alert the gentleman that I will not be the final speaker. I will be yielding one more time before I close.

How much time remains on the other side?

Well, that is nice.

As I told the gentleman, the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) is recognized for 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to a very important member of our committee, the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to close.

I want to begin by addressing the role of small business. The gentleman from Texas said this would be unfair to small business. The gentleman from Alabama said this credit card bill, the underlying bill and the speedup, would be a problem for small business.

On April 30 of this year when we voted on the underlying bill, we received the following letter from the National Federation of Independent Business, generally considered to be the most representative and forceful advocate for small businesses:

``On behalf of the NFIB, the Nation's leading small business advocacy organization, I urge you to support H.R. 627, the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights. While credit cards provide an important source of credit for many small business owners, our members are troubled by some of the business practices utilized by card companies.''

``H.R. 627 ends unfair penalties on cardholders who pay on time, requires 45 days' notice of interest rate increases, prohibits arbitrary interest rate increases, and establishes industrywide definitions for common terms to deter deceptive marketing advertising. These provisions can protect small business owners' credit by giving them enough notice to pay off debt and shop for competitive credit.''

``While our members favor the credit card reforms in H.R. 627, we are mindful that credit cards pay for approximately $1 of every $6 of sales small businesses make. We believe this legislation does not unduly punish credit card companies in these tough economic times but limits business practices that harm small business credit cardholders.''

I wonder how we could be told how bad this is for small business when the National Federation for Independent Business says it would, in fact, do exactly the opposite and protect credit cardholders.

We also heard, of course, some debate on other issues such as health care, and the gentleman from Alabama in particular blamed the Obama administration for bailouts. I don't want to dwell too much on things not before this bill, but let me reiterate a point that I do not think can be even debated, certainly not refuted. Every single activity of the Federal Government now being carried on that some people have characterized as a bailout was initiated by the administration of President George Bush. President Bush's Secretary of the Treasury and his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, his appointees, and the President himself were the ones who initiated the funding of AIG by the Federal Reserve. They came to us and asked for the TARP program. They were the ones who first gave money to General Motors and to Chrysler. There is literally nothing now going on called a bailout that the Obama administration did not inherit from George Bush.

Now, I suppose the Obama administration could have just pulled the plug on all these ongoing operations and caused chaos and blamed the previous administration. It did not do that. But literally everything going on now that is called a bailout is an inheritance from the Bush administration.

Now, the gentleman from Alabama also quoted the Federal Reserve in saying don't speed it up. And he said, well, people sometimes quote Mr. Bernanke one way or another. Well, he just did it. In the first place, the gentleman from Alabama and the gentleman from Texas have their major quarrel with the Federal Reserve because the Federal Reserve, on its own, under its regulatory power, promulgated regulations very similar to this bill. The sequence is interesting. The gentlewoman from New York, as she often is, was the first one out of the box on the consumer protection here, but after the gentlewoman from New York began discussions on this bill in our committee, the Federal Reserve moved.

So it seems odd to cite the Federal Reserve and say you believe them when they say there are difficulties in speeding it up when you are fundamentally opposed to the Federal Reserve's basic action here. The Federal Reserve agreed with this House that regulations were needed to protect consumers. It is a set of regulations promulgated by the Federal Reserve that are as strongly opposed by the other side as are our regulations.

By the way, in quoting the Federal Reserve even on the speedup, they did express some concerns. They also said, however, the board cannot predict how an effective date of December 1 would affect credit card interest rates and credit availability. However, moving the CARD Act's effective date to December 1, 2009, would mean that consumers would receive important benefits and protections earlier. So they invoke the Federal Reserve and they invoke small business despite the protestations of both of these organizations that they disagree fundamentally with the Republican position.

Now let's talk about substance. The single biggest piece of this--and they say it prevents the poor credit card companies, the poor beleaguered banks. They warned us that if we tried to stop them from behaving irresponsibly, they would speed irresponsible behavior. Yes, they did. But that should not be allowed to be a deterrent against stopping them from doing things.

And what this fundamentally does, the single best, biggest thing, is it says this: If you have used your credit card to buy things at a rate that you were told was binding and you have made all your payments on time for years and you have been running a credit card balance, as the credit card companies want you to do--I know if you have a credit card and you pay it off every month, they don't like that because they're not getting the interest. But at any rate, if you have fully complied with all the terms of the credit card and you have made purchases and incurred debt at a given interest rate and you have made every payment you were supposed to make on time, they have retained the right unilaterally and retroactively to raise the interest rate on what you already owe them. It is the single unfairest economic transaction I can think of that doesn't involve a pistol. The fact is that they decide they can make more money that way.

We're told they have to deal with risk management. What's the risk on debt already incurred on the part of someone who's always made the payments? This isn't risk management. This is hostage taking. This is raising money after the fact.

Now, it's true they told you that when they sent you the contract. It is true that if you have very good vision and a very high boredom threshold and nothing else to do but read pages and pages of small print, you might have figured that out if you spoke lawyerese. But for most people, the notion that you take your credit, you were told that this is the interest rate, you buy things at that interest rate, you incur debt, and they then say, oh, by the way, you know that rate that was at 8 percent, retroactively it's now 12 percent.

This bill doesn't prevent them from going forward with appropriate notice for raising rates. It absolutely does not. It says they can't do it retroactively and they have to give you some notice so they cannot trap you.

It also says that if you mail the bill at a certain time, you are not subject to their saying, oh, by the way, something happened to your payment, we don't know what, and you're going to have to pay extra. All the burden of any misplaced bill falls on you, the payer, not them, the payee.

Let me last say here's a problem. We have had a pattern of abuse. The National Federation of Independent Business and the Federal Reserve agreed with us that there was a pattern of abuse. Members on the other side said, oh, no, these credit card companies, wonderful people. They're just trying to help you out and they are simply trying to give you credit, and if they raise your rates retroactively, that's in your own best interest. Trust us. That's so you don't have to pay higher rates down the road.

So we said we're going to stop these practices. They then said you can't do it right away, it's very complicated, give us some time. So we gave them time, more than I wanted to at the time. They then used that time not to calibrate so they would be ready for the effective date but to start to jack up the rates.

But I reject the notion, first of all, that people who are engaging in abusive practices, as the credit card companies were, according to us, according to the National Federal of Independent Business, according to Federal Reserve, hardly radical Obamaistic organizations, they should not be allowed to stop it by saying but if you try to make things better, we're going to blow things up in advance. We should not give into those kinds of facts. In fact, I reject the notion that we caused any of this. Nothing they have done couldn't have been done without the bill, and they were doing it. All they did was to use this bill as an excuse for doing what they were trying to do anyway.

So we have here a reasonable bill that will prevent them from imposing things retroactively, that will require some notice going forward, that will fairly allocate the risk of a late payment, and that's what we are talking about. And we are talking about speeding up the date. They have many months to get ready for this.

And let me say this: They tell us, oh, my goodness, it's so hard to recalibrate. But you know what? They have very odd computers over there. Maybe they've got great software. They've got software that works perfectly when they want to raise rates, but if they want to hold rates constant, the software goes berserk. Maybe we can implore the software makers to give them some software that works both ways, because they are able to raise people's rates retroactively in violation of what people thought were their contractual rights, very quickly, but they aren't able to get ready to be giving people a 45-day notice before they raise their rates going forward. And the 45-day notice is so that you can say, okay, I will go through one more billing cycle and I don't want them anymore. I will go to shop. What we have here is what we had in April.

By the way, I don't want to be unfair to the entire Republican Party. Individual Members--it's okay, but not to the entire party. Many Republicans voted for this bill. Those who were speaking in opposition to it clearly were not representative of their whole party last time. And what we have, though, is the leadership from the Financial Services Committee of the Republican Party coming firmly to the defense of the credit card firms, telling us that what they were doing was out of economic necessity. They really don't want to raise these rates but they are just forced to do it by sound risk management.

We believe, along with the National Federation of Independent Business and the Federal Reserve and every consumer group that's looked at it, that exactly the opposite is the case. They have abused the time that they asked for because they said it was for getting ready and they used it to do precisely the things the bill will stop them from doing. I, therefore, very much hope that this bill is adopted.

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

Mr. Chairman, if there is anybody opposed to this amendment, I would yield. But in the absence of anybody who is opposed, I will take the time.

I support the amendment. The gentleman from Texas is a very careful legislator. We disagree a lot. And there were times when I had wished he wasn't as careful as he is, but he is absolutely right in this case. Let me go a step further: this may get entangled, this bill and broader things. If that should happen, I would be prepared, if nothing else worked, to break out this particular amendment at a later date and do it by suspension and hopefully do it unanimously because it, clearly, shouldn't be that way.

So I thank him for calling it to our attention, and I hope the amendment is

adopted. Let me just say that I will be asking for a roll call. Mr. Chairman, I am intending to vote for it; but as you know, one doesn't always ask for roll calls simply because one has an issue on that amendment.

I will yield to the gentlewoman from New York.

I take back my time. In fact, in the spirit of conciliation, let me extend to my friends, if I have any left in that industry, a willingness to even allow them to decrease it retroactively for 45 days, not just waive it prospectively.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Would the gentlewoman yield?

I very much appreciate the gentlewoman's amendment. The notion that people should be penalized for being prudent is outrageous. What this says is if you close out a credit card account, which is an act of prudence, you shouldn't be penalized for it. It is one of these things that I am embarrassed that we ever had to deal with in the first place because that situation should have never been allowed to have existed. The gentlewoman has a very good amendment.

Would the gentleman yield?

The bill does not impose any restrictions other than those in the underlying bill. What it says is, section 4(a) in general, during this period and ending 9 months after the date, it says no creditor may increase any annual percentage rate fee or finance charge except as permitted under subsection 171(b) of the Truth in Lending Act, the CARD Act. So it does have restrictions, but it only reaffirms those that were already in there with the 9-month date. It does not do any new restriction on the ability to raise rates.

Would the gentleman yield?

He stops reading inexplicably. He's got to work on his attention span because it goes on to say, Except----

I apologize, because the part that we were probably both going to read--and we will work on doing it in unison--says, Except as permitted under subsection 171(b). That is, it imposes no new restrictions. It does revert back to those that are already enacted into law.

Would the gentleman yield? That's not a bad question. I don't have as good an answer to that question as I had to the one before.

Would the gentleman yield?

The point is this: Given the context of all these amendments, this one doesn't have great effect. But as Members filed amendments, it wasn't clear all the amendments that were there. I think if the gentleman knew everything else that was going to be done, it might not have appeared.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to the recommit motion.

Yes, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, first, I will acknowledge--and the gentleman from Delaware was quite civil--I will acknowledge that this is a moderate approach. I only hope, given the current situation, he is not in political trouble for taking a moderate approach in his party, but that's a matter for another day.

The issue for me here is the extent to which many of my colleagues on the other side are engaged in an on-again/off-again love affair with the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has often been the object of their scorn, but when it comes to consumer protection, the Federal Reserve is sometimes a convenient bulwark against that. For example, when the committee passed the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act, which transfers more power from the Federal Reserve than any other group of Federal entities, many of my Republican colleagues ran to the defense of the Federal Reserve by quoting the Chairman of the Federal Reserve as saying, Don't take this away from us. We have this on-again/ off-again.

What this bill does is really quite remarkable. It empowers the Federal Reserve to cancel an act of Congress. We are hoping to get this bill passed, and there was some concern in the Senate from the Senate chairman. And thanks to the amendment that was offered by the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. McCarthy) and the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. Markey), we have accommodated his concerns. We think we have a workable proposal here.

What the recommit says is, if the bill passes the House and passes the Senate and is signed by the President, we will then wait for the permission of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to implement it; and if they say it's not feasible, then the bill dies. In fact, they did write us, however, and say that if they had to do it by December 1--we wrote to them a couple of weeks ago--here is this problem that they wouldn't be able to get full comments in.

But they also note the Administrative Procedures Act does provide a good clause exception when the notice and comment period would be impractical, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.

So what they say is, if the effective date for these provisions were moved to December 1, the board would have to issue final regulations without waiting for comments. But the point is that they've had a lot of time for comments. The Federal Reserve proposed this earlier after the gentlewoman from New York initiated it. The President signed the bill, the underlying bill, the effective date of what we're trying to do in advance, on May 22. They've had--what is that, 5\1/2\ months to study it. This is not the most complicated thing in the world.

And by the way, if this was so complicated to figure out, how did the banks manage to be able to increase so quickly? Apparently, the banks have this problem: when it comes to implementing the law, they're working with typewriters. When it comes to raising your rates retroactively--remember, the biggest single part of this bill is that it says, if you've got a credit card and are abiding by the terms of that credit card, you bought things and you are charging them at the interest rate you were told would apply, and you make every payment you were obligated to make, they can retroactively raise your rates.

That is the biggest single thing we stopped. I don't see why it is going to take them 8 or 9 or 10 months or a year to figure it out. I thought February was too much time in the first place.

But here is the basic point: several of us said, okay, we will reluctantly agree to February for a bill that is passed in May, to do something that's not that complicated. But if you abuse it, if you use the time to raise rates and then blame us for it, adding insult to injury, then we are going to speed it up. So I think our credibility is at issue here. We in good faith said, take some time to implement it. May 22 until February. Many of you have heard what they did was to speed this up. There is an element of fairness here. And, yes, the Federal Reserve will have to forgo some public comments. I think I would say to people, You know, we have until December 1. If you are out there and you think the Federal Reserve is going to listen to you-- Madam Speaker, let me violate the rule, please, and address people who aren't here. If you're listening, and you really need to talk to the Federal Reserve, write them a letter, send them an email, call them up. You don't have to wait. So we can get your comments in now, and we can go into effect by December 1.

We should certainly never set the precedent that any agency, and certainly not the Federal Reserve, which has become so controversial, should be given the power to suspend an act of Congress before it goes into effect. That is what this does. It says that we will pass this law; but unless it is certified as feasible by the Federal Reserve, it doesn't go into effect. I have a lot of respect for the Federal Reserve, but they're not in charge of what we think is feasible. They're not in charge of telling us that we have to wait more for public comments when our constituents, we believe, are being mistreated.

So I hope the motion to recommit is defeated.

Madam Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, this is a sad day for me because it is close to the anniversary of the death in Iraq of a very brave young man, Corey Shea, whose picture is here.

He was killed in Iraq just the day after Veterans Day of last year, and I went to the funeral, along with my colleague Senator Kerry, to the town of Mansfield, Massachusetts. Like I think most Members, I try very hard to attend the funeral of every young man and woman who is killed in the service of the country. It's the least we can do. It's not a great deal, but it's the least we can do to show a small piece of the gratitude we feel to those people and our obligation to their families.

Also, it seems to me, anybody in our position who has to vote on going to war needs to fully understand the consequences of those votes, and going to the funerals of the young people killed in those wars ought to be mandatory for any of us who vote. That doesn't mean you don't vote for the war. I voted for the war in Afghanistan. I've been to funerals of people killed there. But it is an important thing to hammer home.

In this case at the funeral I met an extraordinary woman, Denise Anderson, the mother of Corey Shea, who was, in her grief at the loss of her wonderful young son, further concerned because he would be buried alone.

His country took him when he was too young to have married or raised a family. So under the rules of eligibility for burial at a veterans cemetery, he was to be buried alone. His mother said as bad as it was for her to lose her son, the thought that he would be alone forever added greatly to her pain. So she had asked if she could be buried with him, and she was turned down.

Now, under the rules a member of the military eligible to be buried in a national cemetery who has a spouse with children can have up to three parts used. So we're not taking anything away from someone. In Corey Shea's case, this wonderful young man who lost his life has three parts available, and his mother simply asked to be allowed to use one of them. She was turned down.

At that point Senator Kerry and I decided to see what we could do. So we filed legislation to alleviate that, and I am enormously grateful to all members from both parties in the Committee on Veterans' Affairs for the speed with which they acted and the grace they showed to this brave, grieving mother. And I am very pleased that the bill which we would dare concur in, called the Corey Shea Act, is going to be included in this package.

Mr. Speaker, rather than go further myself, I'm going to read the testimony that Denise Anderson, the mother of Corey Shea, presented to the Committee on Veterans' Affairs. We obviously exhausted our remedies, I should say. She applied. Only after it was clear that only legislation would work did we file a bill.

And, of course, I should point out, as a tribute to Denise Anderson, this isn't a bill just for her and her son who lost his life. It's a bill for any parent of any young member of the military who will know at least that that's available to him or to her.

So nearly a year after her son was killed in Iraq, she had the opportunity to address the committee, and here's what she said:

``I stand before you humbly asking you to pass or amend this bill number H.R. 761. This would allow me to be interred with my son, who was killed in action in Mosul, Iraq on November 12, 2008. He sacrificed his life for his country, and I sacrifice every day being without him.

``My son, Corey, had a heart as big as the world. He would be the first one to volunteer or help someone in need. But he would always hesitate to ask for help. He was a lot like me in that way, but today I show my passion for this bill by standing in front of you asking for your help. If you knew my son, you would understand what kind of person he was. He was a very respectful young man who would do anything for anybody. He was my heart and soul, and I cannot express the bond between us. If you have children, you might understand, but losing a child is against nature and he should be burying me.

``I was a single parent until Corey was about 8 years old. His biological father was not around. In fact, he was in prison. He never paid child support, and I worked over 60 hours a week just to support him and make sure he had everything he needed. Jeff took over the job of stepfather and Corey gladly accepted him. When he came home on leave, we would stay up until the sun came up. I did not want to miss a minute with him.

``My son was killed by an Iraqi soldier. These soldiers are supposed to be working with our troops over in Iraq. He was an Iraqi soldier for 4 years before turning on our soldiers. On that terrible day, he killed two soldiers, including my son, and wounded six other American soldiers.

``I was not home when the Army came to my door, but my 18-year-old

daughter was there. She is a very intelligent person and knew why they were there. She called me, not telling me what was going on, which was probably a good thing. But when I arrived home, the Mansfield police and the Army vehicle were parked in front of my home. My son had only a month left on his first tour, and he would have been home. After passing out, the police called the paramedics, who took me to the hospital.

``The whole town came together for Corey. They were so involved with his funeral, and it was very heartfelt. My son was the only and hopefully the only soldier who passed away during this war in Mansfield. He is a Mansfield hero. I belong to the VFW in Mansfield, Massachusetts, and I have spoken to many veterans that are members there, and they don't have a problem with me being interred with my son. In fact, everyone I spoke with doesn't haven't a problem.

``This amendment would not be taking up any other deserving space for other veterans. My son has three extra plots, but he was not married nor did he have any dependents. He did not have time, since, like I said, he was a child himself.

``I could speak all day regarding my son and what a wonderful and respectful young man he was. But I am here to ask you to amend the bill number H.R. 761. If you decide to pass this, it would give me some peace in my life to which I can pay more attention to my husband and daughter, whom I feel I have been neglecting. I could finally be able to move forward in my life just knowing I can spend eternity with my son.

``Please listen with your hearts and amend this bill. I appreciate your time listening to me today. This may be a minimal issue with you, but it means everything to me.

``Thank you for your attention in this matter.

``Denise Anderson, proud mother of Specialist Corey Shea, my warrior hero and wonderful son.''

I would only say the one difference I would have with Mrs. Anderson is no one here takes this as a minimal issue. We are grateful to her for giving us one more chance to show in a small way how much we honor those who have lost their lives.

I will just repeat one thing I said, Mr. Speaker, in the testimony. I cannot think of a greater disproportion than what Denise Anderson gave to us, her son, and what she has asked us to give in return. I am pleased that at least the House will be doing that today.

Madam Speaker, on October 9th of this year, one of the leaders in increasing the supply of affordable housing in the State of Massachusetts, Tom Connelly, marked his 30th anniversary as the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Association of Housing & Redevelopment Officials (MassNAHRO). I have benefitted enormously in my work on housing in the Committee on Financial Services from Mr. Connelly's good judgment, his broad and deep knowledge of all aspects of housing matters, and his passion for helping this become a fairer society.

NAHRO nationally has been a great partner for those of us trying to improve the housing situation for many in this country. One of the strong aspects of NAHRO's work is their continued recognition that for many low-income people, the answer for their housing needs is not homeownership but decent rental housing, and a failure to understand this is one of the contributing factors to the housing crisis that led to our current recession. NAHRO, MassNAHRO and Tom Connelly in particular have been supportive of appropriate efforts to promote homeownership, but they have also understood the importance for a very large number of low-income people of affordable rental housing, so they are not pushed into inappropriate home mortgages.

Madam Speaker, in his thirty years as Executive Director, Tom Connelly has set a high standard for organizational leadership and for housing policy. And I should add that among the contributions he has made to the field of housing is his daughter, Meredith, who works on housing matters for the Committee on Financial Services and carries on her father's tradition of doing excellent work for the housing needs of low-income people.

Madam Speaker, I submit this statement for the Record because I hope that people will look at the work that Tom Connelly has done and that it will serve as a model for those interested in helping with housing issues.

Madam Speaker, I have never learned more in my life than I have learned since 1992 when at the vote of the Massachusetts Legislature, the city of New Bedford and the town of Fairhaven were included in the congressional district I represent. These two communities together form the most successful fishing port in the U.S., and that industry enriches New Bedford and the surrounding areas not just economically but culturally and socially as well.

One of the leaders in that industry is Jim Kendall, a fisherman himself who has served in a number of important posts in helping preserve that industry and protect it against adversity.

He recently wrote an eloquent introduction to the announcement of the Friend of the Fishing Industry Award, which was presented to two men to whom the Greater New Bedford Area is greatly indebted: Raymond and Richard Canastra.

These two brothers have, as Jim Kendall's statement points out, been extremely creative in providing support for this industry. The work they have done for the open display auction confounded many skeptics who thought that it would never work, but their success in New Bedford has in fact been so widely hailed that it's led to the recent opening of a similar facility in Boston, helping revive a fishing port that had been declining to some extent.

Madam Speaker, I join Jim Kendall and others in the fishing industry and subsidies in Massachusetts in thanking Ray and Richie Canastra for their work and I ask that Jim Kendall's statement be printed here as an example of the kind of economic leadership individuals can provide to their community.

Offshore Mariners

Wives' Association,

September 27, 2009.

Introduction of 2009's ``Friends of the Fishing Industry''

This year's award to the Friend of the Fishing Industry is

a bit different as we are proud to announce that the award is

going to not just one, but two individuals. Not only have

they contributed to the fishing industry here in New Bedford,

but their efforts have extended throughout New England.

It's not often that you find two people who have come so

far in a relatively short period of time, and who have

returned so much to the industry that they obviously care so

much about. Their innovation and foresight has not only

proven to be a sound business venture for them, but a boon

and stabilizing factor for the Greater New Bedford fishing

fleet. It hasn't stop there either, their fortitude and

determination now has extended to the ports of Gloucester and

Boston.

They pioneered the concept of the open display auction here

in New Bedford at a time and place when many of us doubted it

could succeed. In 1985 through 1986 the industry had gone

through a traumatic strike that changed the way business had

been done for many years. The New Bedford seafood auction

ceased to exist, and a buyers auction that replaced it, had

also closed its doors. The industry was in turmoil, with

little or no sense of balance that had existed for years

before. The sale of a trip was as hard and as uncertain, as

was the fishing trip itself.

They felt that an open display auction could work and

benefit the fishermen, and the port of New Bedford, and they

set about to prove it. It wasn't easy, it never is trying to

convince people that there is a better way to do their

business, business that they had been doing in basically the

same way for years. They have proven that they were right,

and the New Bedford fishing industry has benefited greatly

because of it. The auction has provided stability to the sale

of fresh fish and scallops, along with the recognition that

New Bedford is still the port to go to for your best seafood.

Their efforts in beginning the auction and the continued

developments, have helped the port of New Bedford regain the

title of the richest fishing port in the country, and

continues to help us maintain that distinction.

Recently they opened another display auction in the port of

Boston, that is attracting fishing vessels to a port that was

all but abandoned by the fishing industry. This is in direct

contradiction to what has been occurring elsewhere, with the

devastating changes for other ports that have lost not only

their auctions, but their fishing industries and communities.

Their involvement has deepened over the years with them

becoming deeply involved with the management process and

fishery science. Working with, most notably, Drs. Brian

Rothschild and Kevin Stokesbury from the School for Marine

Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts,

Dartmouth. They have also helped to organize the fishermen

not only here in New Bedford, but in Gloucester as well.

What may turn out to be one of their most important

innovations is the Project to Save Seafood and Ocean

Resources, along with its associated website,

Savingseafood.org.

At a time when information is king, providing factual and

unadulterated information to the American public is crucial.

There is a desperate need to show the American consumer the

value of New Bedford seafood, and the efforts that the New

Bedford and New England fishermen have taken in order to

provide them with healthy seafood. There is also a need to

inform the consumer how we are striving to provide them their

healthy seafood in a safe and sustainable manner. The

American consumer and public also needs to know what the

fishermen and their industry has gone through in order to

bring this to them. I encourage you to visit the website at

www.savingseafood.org. Richie lives in North Dartmouth, with his wife Roberta, and

their two lovely daughters, Sophia, and Noella. Raymond lives

in Rochester with his wife Debbie and their two children

Cassie and Kyler.

It gives me great pleasure to present ``The Friend of the

Fishing Industry Award'' to two men whom I'm proud to have

worked with over the years, my friends; Raymond and Richard

Canastra.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1327) to authorize State and local governments to direct divestiture from, and prevent investment in, companies with investments of $20,000,000 or more in Iran's energy sector, and for other purposes, as amended.

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

I am somewhat encouraged by what appears to be some progress in negotiations between the United States and

many other nations and Iran. I believe, as do I think, almost everybody in the House, perhaps not everybody, but almost everybody, that nuclear weapons in the hands of the Iranian regime would be a terrible thing for the world to have to deal with, and I am very supportive of our efforts to mobilize the necessary multinational coalition to impose the kind of sanctions that will stop this.

In that context, I have worked closely with the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the gentleman from California, Mr. Berman, on sanctions legislation, and I believe that he is correctly coordinating closely with the administration on the timing of broader sanctions legislation.

The bill we are discussing right now is one that has previously been passed by this House. It was blocked in the Senate in the previous administration because the State Department argued against it, and I think the time has come for us to do it.

It does not in itself impose any sanctions. What it does is to make it very clear that Americans who are deeply concerned about the prospect of Iranian nuclear power and other aspects of Iranian governance, that they are able to act on those. In particular, this bill says that no one in this country ought involuntarily to have his or her money put to the support of the Iranian economy.

It has two provisions. First, it would protect States which have decided to divest from companies that are invested in Iranian energy operations from being preempted by the Federal Government.

The State of Massachusetts, my home State, some years ago passed a bill saying not that no one in Massachusetts could do business with Myanmar, as the dictatorial rulers of that country now call what was once Burma; they said that they did not want State money, money from the State of Massachusetts, to be involved in ways that would be supportive of that regime. The State Department challenged that on the grounds of Federal supremacy in foreign policy, and the Supreme Court upheld it.

What we do today is to say not that States can make foreign policy, but that States have the right to control their own funds. The staff has given me a list of about 20 States that have enacted legislation to divest from Iran and several other States that have adopted policies of divesting from Iran.

Part of this bill today protects those States which have made the decisions by their own democratic processes from having the Federal Government come in and say, no, we are the Federal Government, we are in charge of foreign policy, and you must continue to invest in Iran.

Secondly, we have had a movement of citizens that say to various investment vehicles, we do not want our money invested in Iran. What this says is that if people who are contributors to an investment fund go to that investment fund, whatever it is, and say, we don't want our money helping to bolster the economy of that regime in Iran, withdraw our funds from those companies, that the company can't be sued.

What we have had is the investment vehicles have often said, I think sometimes frankly not entirely meaning that this is the real reason, oh, well, we can't do that, because we are mandated to get you the best possible dollar return, and if we withdraw here, we will be accused of having used other criteria.

Now, in fact it has been, I think, fairly clear that when you have a very large entity investing broadly, withdrawal from no one cause is going to cause a problem. But that is still the fear that was cited. So what this bill does is to give a very narrowly drafted protection to the investment managers against being sued because they respond to a claim from their own contributors to that fund who don't want to be supporting Iran.

As I said, it does not mandate any divestiture. It does protect State governments from having their money put where they don't want it to be, and it protects entities that do investments from being sued if they were to give in to the moral argument that their funds should not go for this or that country.

There are a couple of technical changes to the bill as introduced which provide that the exceptions are very narrowly drafted just to this. It is, in fact, about the Iranian energy section, and I believe those in America who want to make these decisions should be protected in doing so.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to an active supporter of this administration and a strong approach towards Iran, the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume to make one final point.

It is the fantasy of the President of Iran, among many fantasies, most of them malign, that somehow it's the American Government that's been opposed to them and that the broad reach of the American people would be more sympathetic. The important point to stress here is that this bill does not do anything at the Federal level. This bill empowers State governments and private citizens to give vent to their own understandable extreme dislike and fear of the Iranian Government.

So let's be very clear. This is a bill that will have effect to the extent that the activities of the Iranian Government increase the revulsion many Americans feel at those actions; not at the people of Iran, but at the Government of Iran. If, in fact, some of the hopeful signs were to look better, then this bill will not have much of an impact.

So, to the great extent, whether or not this bill has a real impact will depend very much on what the Iranians do. And so I appreciate the cooperation we've gotten on both sides. And I stress again, this is a bill that empowers American citizens, American local and State governments, and whether or not this leads to action will depend very much on future actions by the Government of Iran.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 3606) to amend the Truth in Lending Act to make a technical correction to an amendment made by the Credit CARD Act of 2009.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We made an error, Congress did, when we passed the credit card bill, not in passing the bill. The only error we made there was we didn't make it go into effect immediately because the abusive behavior by the credit card companies has been even worse than some people have feared, and I hope we will soon be trying to move up that effective date. But there was a drafting error in which the restrictions applied not just to credit cards if you read the bill literally, as you have to, with the bill, but all open-end credit agreements. Credit unions in America, which have not been any part of a pattern of abuse of credit cards, were inadvertently swept into this.

The gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Welch) and the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) called this to the attention of the committee, as did the National Credit Union Administration and the Credit Union National Association; the latter, of course, being the private association of credit unions, the former being the administrative agency. They asked us to fix it. They were quite correct.

Credit unions are a very important part of the structure of this country and it serves our consumers. And so this bill would correct that error and allow the credit unions to continue to perform their function.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Vermont, the lead author of this bill, Mr. Welch.

Mr. Speaker, first I would ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and submit extraneous material both on this bill, H.R. 3606, and the preceding bill, H.R. 1327.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, this has been well- covered by the two Members, the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Welch) and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Lee), who have been major movers in it. I would just ask, although we have general leave, I would note that I am inserting in the Record a letter from the National Credit Union Administration, a letter from the Credit Union National Association, both asking for this, and then two documents which I hope will give people some sense of how this institution works at its best.

Credit Union National Association,

Washington, DC, October 7, 2009.

Hon. Barney Frank,

Chairman, Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of

Representatives, Washington, DC.

Hon. Spencer Bachus,

Ranking Member, Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House

of Representatives, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman Frank and Ranking Member Bachus: On behalf of

the Credit Union National Association (CUNA), I am writing

regarding a specific issue that credit unions are

experiencing with respect to the recently-enacted Credit Card

Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act.

CUNA is the nation's largest credit union advocacy

organization, representing approximately 90% of America's

8,000 state and federal credit unions and their 92 million

members.

Credit unions are currently reeling from an unintended

consequence of the CARD Act. Section 106 of the CARD Act

prohibits creditors from treating payments as being late

unless the creditor adopts reasonable procedures to ensure

that periodic statements are mailed or delivered to the

consumer no later than 21 days before the payment due date.

We believe this provision was intended to cover only credit

card accounts; however, the provision, as enacted, applies to

all open-end loans, including general lines of credit, lines

of credit associated with share draft and checking accounts,

signature loans, and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) as

well as multi-featured, open-end lending programs.

Consolidated Billing May Cease, Increasing Costs for Credit Unions

Members

Most credit unions provide monthly consolidated membership

statements that combine information on a member's savings,

checking, and loan accounts, other than for credit cards.

Since these statements may include a number of open-end

credit plans with different due dates, changing these due

dates to comply with the 21-day requirement may lead credit

unions to discontinue the use of consolidated statements or

send statements for each loan in addition to the consolidated

one.

The alternative is to send separate statements for each

loan. This will greatly increase both processing and mailing

costs (in addition to the environmental impact), which credit

unions have estimated will be $1-$2.25 per month per loan.

Notwithstanding the additional costs, we are also very

concerned that some credit unions currently do not have the

capacity to print and mail these increased number of

statements in order to meet the rule's timing requirements.

Not only will credit unions need to pass on these costs to

their members in the form of higher loan rates, lower deposit

rates, or higher fees elsewhere, but credit union members

will be very confused and concerned when they receive

multiple statements from their credit union, depending on how

many loans they have outstanding. Credit union relationships

with their members will suffer, all in an effort to comply

with an unintended application of a law that is intended to

benefit consumers.

Credit Union Members May No Longer Be Able to Choose Their Payment Date

For certain loans, particularly vehicle loans, credit union

members are often permitted to choose the due date to best

suit their financial needs; for example, members may choose

due dates that coincide with pay days or to avoid other

payment due dates. This practice will have to be discontinued

if the member-chosen date no longer complies with the new 21-

day requirement. Changing the express choice by members would

not be consumer-friendly, and members will not understand

that a Federal law requires this action.

Additionally, many credit unions provide their members with

the convenience of automated payments, in which payments are

automatically withdrawn from the credit union account on a

certain date. Again, this may often be chosen by the member,

who may choose a date that is related to when he or she

receives a paycheck. This may now need to be changed based on

the new 21-day requirement, imposing hardship and

inconvenience if the new date no longer coincides with the

receipt of a paycheck.

Bi-Weekly Payments Are No Longer Permitted

Many loans are structured so that payments are made bi-

weekly, which serve to minimize the amount of interest that

is charged, as compared to loans in which payments are made

monthly. These loans are often repaid through payroll

deduction. If bi-weekly programs are no longer permitted

under the new 21-day requirement, the result will be that

these members will pay additional interest and may no longer

have the benefit and convenience of payroll deduction.

HELOC Terms and Conditions Must Be Changed

The 21-day requirement will also apply to HELOCs, the terms

of which cannot be easily changed. Regulation Z lists

exceptions for changing terms of HELOCs and although the

Regulation Z commentary permits changing the due date, we

note that the due date is often a contractual term, which

adds to the difficulty of complying with these new

requirements.

A Technical Correction is Necessary and Appropriate

To address these concerns, Representative Peter Welch (D-

VT) has introduced legislation, H.R. 3606, the CARD Act

Technical Corrections Act. This legislation very simply

inserts the words, ``a credit card account under'' to Section

106 of the CARD Act. These words were included in the House-

passed version of the CARD Act, and we believe the effect of

their omission in the enacted version of the legislation was

unintended. We hope the Committee will agree that a technical

correction is appropriate and will support passage of

technical corrections legislation as quickly as possibly.

On behalf of America's credit unions, thank you very much

for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Daniel A. Mica,

President & CEO.

Mr. Speaker, I agree: it makes no more logical sense to add a hate crimes bill to the Defense bill than it would to take a bill requiring people to be allowed to use their guns in the national parks to a credit card bill. But that's what the Senate did. The Senate added a bill dealing with the rights of gun owners in the national parks to the credit card bill with which there was no logical connection.

Now, I wish the Senate wouldn't do things like that. I wish a lot of things. But when we are confronted with the reality of the Senate, we have to act.

Now, it is conceivable that you would have people who are so devoted to the principle of having no illogical attachment that they would oppose it in every case. I must have been in the Cloakroom when Republicans rose to denounce the Senate for adding the bill allowing the use of guns in parks to the credit card bill. That was done. Not a single Republican, to my recollection, objected. Indeed, quite to the contrary, they all voted for it, which makes it very clear: the objection here is not to the Senate adding an unrelated bill, because the Republicans in this House have voted for that time and time and time again. It is an objection to protecting against hate crimes people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

Now, some say we shouldn't have these hate crimes laws. But their inconsistency is I don't remember them trying to repeal the hate crimes laws that are on the books. There is nothing new about hate crimes here. There is nothing new about its constitutionality. By the way, if you say violence should be violence, how about somebody having the intellectual integrity to get up and repeal that statute that says, if someone assaults someone standing next to me, it might be a misdemeanor, but if somebody assaults me, a Member of Congress, it's a Federal felony. We have a major distinction. We are protected by special laws, older people, people who are religious. Then they say, it's a matter of choice. The level of intelligence involved in thinking that being gay or lesbian is a matter of choice aside, religion is a matter of choice. People convert to religions. Does that mean we shouldn't protect people against hate crimes based on religion?

Finally, we are told this is being sneaked through. One of the earlier speakers, in a total flight from reality, said it is being sneaked through. It passed the House. It was debated. It went through the regular committee process, and it passed the House. Yes, from time to time, the United States Senate, which has no rules preventing it, adds unrelated bills. If there are Members who have consistently opposed that practice, they have the right to oppose it here and say that is the reason.

But Members who have voted for legislation which the Senate attached to unrelated legislation who claim now to be offended by that practice clearly have no logical or other basis on which to make that claim.

There are people who do not think we should add a very vulnerable category, particularly people who are transgender, to the hate crimes protection. They lost that fight when we had it in the House. I would have had it come up again, but it is clearly just another example of another time-tried practice.

So little time, so many fallacies. The first fallacy is that we were not comparing the credit card bill to the defense bill; we were talking about a regular practice. It wasn't just the credit card bill. Regularly for years the Senate does this, and no Republican has ever risen to object to it. Their objection is not to the procedure, but to the substance. Nothing is being held hostage. The bill will pass or fail. If it failed because of this, it would come back without it.

Secondly, the gentleman's last point is simply nonsensical: one arrest that was inappropriate. There have been other inappropriate arrests. Hate crimes bills have been in effect, hate crimes laws, at the Federal and State level for years. There is zero example of that happening. There is an amendment offered by the gentleman from Kansas that makes it impossible.

When people use wholly irrelevant arguments against the bill, it means that they can't find a real argument that they want to use.

Finally, the gentleman from California, the ranking member said, don't have these hate crimes, violence is violence, or one of the Members said that. I guess then he is opposed to that amendment which prohibits a tax on U.S. servicemen on account of service because that is in here. There is in here a provision that protects servicemen who are attacked on account of service. If you are opposed in principle to that, then you ought to be opposed to that in general.

It is clear there is an animus against those of us who are gay or lesbian, against people who are transgender, on the part of many in the House, and they are reflecting a strong political sentiment in the country. They are entitled to it. I do not lament the loss of their friendship and affection; I can live without it. But it should not lead them to deny protection to vulnerable people, and we are talking here about crimes, not just murder, but about assault and destruction of property which are too often ignored.

So let's be very clear. There is no consistency to the argument about the procedure. There is no consistency to the argument about hate crimes. There is no validity whatsoever to the argument that some clergy would be arrested or prosecuted because none have been. This is simply a declaration of unhappiness that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are getting some protection.

Madam Speaker, the gentleman who just recognized me, the dean of our delegation, has the distinction of having worked very closely with the late Senator Kennedy for 33 years, for more than two-thirds of the Senator's term. And I know that Senator Kennedy greatly valued his colleagueship, as all of us do who serve with him as the dean, and his work now in a number of the areas pays tribute. I do think it is important to note that the longer you worked with Senator Kennedy, the more you came to admire what he did.

I would have one difference with my colleague with whom I rarely differ on things. He said Senator Kennedy would be seen as one of the greatest Senators. I would say the best. And I know my colleague is gracious and may have a Senator or two he needs on the cap-and-trade bill, so he doesn't want to go too far. But I think we would all agree.

I was a fledging academic before I went into politics. I was studying for a Ph.D., and I then learned I had a personal characteristic which was a defect in academics but absolutely essential to serve in this body. I have a very short attention span. And it works to my advantage here and to my disadvantage in serious scholarship. But from both ends, I don't think there is much question about his greatness as a Senator.

Obviously, those of us in the delegation and our great colleague and civil rights leader, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) who has worked with Senator Kennedy, goes back even before any of the rest of us in terms of colleagueship; but we obviously agreed with his values, and that is a big part of it. But even those who didn't, and this is what's so striking and so needed in our country today, many Members of Congress who served with him who disagreed with him on most substantive issues, joined in the praise for his integrity and his character and his dedication.

We are at a time now where politics is held in low repute by a lot of young people. I would hope that younger people in particular would think back to the deep, deep love for Senator Kennedy that was expressed by so many people across the political spectrum. Think about the accomplishments to which so many people attribute; think

about the people who express the enormous gratitude for the difference he made in their lives. There could not be a better example of how you can get into this business of politics and do good. I would hope people would be encouraged by that.

Beyond that, there is one particular point that I want to stress. We have a besetting sin today in our politics where people think that you show your depth of commitment to a cause by rigidity, not just by rigidity, but impugning the motives of those on your side who try to get something done. Compromise for its own sake is a very bad idea. People who talk about the ``center'' have to be clear what they mean. The ``center'' is not a place of value. It may be where you wind up. But you wind up there as you try to move the center. Yes, you want to try to be representative of a majority. Those who have as a goal finding the precise middle are giving up their own moral and intellectual capacity.

What Senator Kennedy did was to start firmly from a set of moral principles and then work to get them accomplished the best that he could. And that is, unfortunately, a practice that today isn't as appreciated as it should be. Purity is a wonderful state, I am told. I do not say that from experience. But it doesn't make anybody any better off.

No one was more firmly committed to the ideals of fairness and equity than Edward M. Kennedy, and he understood that the more firmly committed he was to them, the more he was morally obligated to make some progress on them.

I realize ideals help nobody, and I say that because he was at the same time one of the premier idealists of our time. No one better or more consistently articulated the goal of a society in which no one suffered unfairly, in which all were treated with dignity and had a certain minimum, at least, of substance. But while he was preeminent as a preacher of that set of moral virtues, he was also preeminent as a hands-on politician who could work with others within the democratic process with other people elected who might have disagreed with him, and because of him, more of his goals were accomplished than were accomplished by anybody else. No one did more to advance those causes which he exemplified.

But he never got all he wanted. And I hope that is also an example; and the example is that, sure, you do not belong in politics unless you have a set of ideals. You don't have any business trying to gain influence over others unless it's to make this world a better place.

But once you have those ideals, your obligation is not simply to treat them in a way that makes you feel good; it is to get them accomplished.

I do not think in American history over the time of his Senate career that anybody did a better job for people of all income, for the victims of discrimination, whether it was based on race or sexual orientation, or gender, for the whole concept of what we think is the genius of America; namely, that when you're born, you're born with a chance to maximize your potential, and the economic circumstances or the prejudice of others or anything else don't hold you back.

This Nation is enormously indebted to Senator Edward Kennedy for the work that he did and for the example that he set. And I thank my colleague, the dean of our delegation, for leading this Special Order.

Madam Speaker, the hardest part of our job is attending the funerals of those young men and women who have given their lives in the service of our country. Having voted to send American military forces into war in Afghanistan, I was profoundly moved--and troubled--when I attend the funeral of Sergeant Jared C. Monti of Raynham, Massachusetts, who lost his life in a brave effort to save a comrade in that country. These occasions are for us an important reminder that voting to send people to war is a last resort done only after the most thorough and thoughtful consideration, and only when no alternative is consistent with our security.

But Madam Speaker, to talk about the difficulty of our jobs in the context of the death in battle of this brave young man is an example of grave disproportion. For me, this was a sad day. For the family of Jared Monti, it was part of a period of deep and enduring sadness, and of course with Sergeant Monti himself it was the ultimate tragedy--a promising young life lost.

Madam Speaker, in the Boston Globe for Sunday, September 6, Bryan Bender of the Globe staff wrote a moving, eloquent article about Sergeant Monti, describing the battle in which he was killed as he with no regard for his own safety tried to save a wounded comrade. Next week I will be at the White House when Sergeant Monti's family receives the Medal of Honor that was posthumously awarded to him. Madam Speaker, as a tribute to an extraordinary young man, whose dedication to his comrades was unlimited, and as a reminder of what war really means to those who must fight it, I ask that Mr. Bender's excellent, sad article be printed here.

[From the Boston Globe, Sept. 6, 2009]

He Could Not Leave a Comrade Behind

(By Bryan Bender)

The sound of feet shuffling in the woods, high on a ridge

in remote Afghanistan, was the only warning that Sergeant

Jared C. Monti and the 15 men under his command were about to

be attacked. Before they could even react, they were

bombarded with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun

fire.

The ambush by mountain tribesmen allied with the Taliban

came so suddenly and with such ferocity that some members of

Monti's unit ``had their weapons literally shot out of their

hands,'' according to an Army report.

Monti, a 30-year-old staff sergeant from Raynham, shouted

orders and radioed for support as he found cover behind some

large rocks. An officer a few miles away asked whether he

could pinpoint the enemy's position.

``Sir, I can't give you a better read or I'm gonna eat an

RPG,'' Monti replied.

But later, when one of his men was wounded and lying in the

open, Monti braved intense fire to try to rescue him--not

once, but three times. It cost him his life.

Three years later, after an Army review of Monti's actions

that day, President Obama will award him the Medal of Honor,

the highest recognition for valor in the US military. When

Monti's parents, Paul and Janet, accept the award in a White

House ceremony on Sept. 17, it will be only the sixth time

the Medal of Honor has been awarded since Sept. 11, 2001, and

the first time someone from Massachusetts has earned it since

the Vietnam War.

Monti's story reveals not just the courageous actions of a

12-year Army veteran. It also illustrates the extreme

conditions of combat in Afghanistan, where increasing numbers

of US forces are dying, and the sheer chaos of the war.

Everything went wrong for Monti and his patrol. The unit

was left on that narrow ridge longer than intended, exposing

it to a much larger enemy. And while Monti's display of

``extreme personal courage and extraordinary self-

sacrifice,'' as the Army described it, helped turn the tide,

disaster struck again when the soldier Monti tried to save

was killed in a freak accident while being airlifted out.

Including Monti, four soldiers died.

``True valor is not defined so much by results,'' an Army

general wrote in recommending Monti for the medal, ``as it is

by

the depth of conviction that inspires its expression. On rare

occasions, the actions of men are so extraordinary that the

nobility rests, not in their outcome, but in the courage of

their undertaking.''

``He was very humble''

When Charlie Witkus learned his buddy Jared had been

killed, he organized a ``Viking'' funeral.

After his burial at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in

Bourne, Monti's friends collected cards, letters, and other

mementos of him and set them ablaze on a makeshift pyre

floating on a Taunton pond.

It was a fitting tribute, Witkus felt, for a guy who once

organized a ``survival style'' canoe trip down the Taunton

River, with no food or water.

``I was devastated,'' said Witkus, who last spoke with his

friend about three weeks before he died. ``He was the most

stand-up guy I ever knew.''

Monti was born in Abington and grew up in Raynham, 35 miles

south of Boston, the son of a schoolteacher and a nurse.

Stories of his generous spirit abound: As a youngster he

made lunches for his brother and sister to help his mom get

to nursing school on time. During his high school years, he

once cut down a spruce tree in their yard to give to a single

mother who could not afford a Christmas tree for her kids. He

even collected enough money for gifts.

But he rarely took credit for his deeds, relatives and

friends said. Only after he died did his father, Paul, find a

3-foot tall trophy Jared won in a weight-lifting

championship.

``That is the way he was,'' said Paul Monti. ``He was very

humble. He believed in doing things for other people.''

To honor his son's memory, Paul Monti has established an

annual scholarship fund for a Raynham senior headed to

college.

He also finds comfort driving Jared's pickup, still covered

with stickers from his beloved 10th Mountain Division.

Jared set his sights on the military early, inspired by an

uncle in the Navy. He joined the Massachusetts National

Guard's delayed entry program in 11th grade at Bridgewater-

Raynham Regional High School, attending weekend drills at the

recruiting station in Taunton until he graduated.

``I wanted to be that same person,'' he later wrote of how

the image of his uncle's crisp uniform captured his

imagination.

A steady hand

Monti was not a perfect soldier, but he proved that he

could earn the trust and respect of those he led; he called

them his ``boys,'' and some of them called him ``grandpa.''

When he left for basic training in Missouri in 1993, barely

18 years old, he had never been out of Massachusetts. Army

life was tough, he recalled, but he adjusted quickly and

eventually decided to enlist full time. He was disappointed

other soldiers didn't take it as seriously--a feeling he

later expressed in his own words in a journal his family

found on his computer after his death.

``I wanted to fight for my country at a time when everybody

else was smoking weed and or just there to earn a couple of

bucks toward college,'' he wrote.

He got into several bar fights, including with one of his

sergeants in Kansas who ridiculed him by calling him

``Rambo,'' and he did 14 days of hard labor for violating a

weekend pass when he was stationed in South Korea in the

1990s. ``I drank till there was no tomorrow,'' he wrote of

the incident.

But as he rose through the enlisted ranks, his superiors

quickly saw he had a steadiness and maturity that others

didn't. Monti was one of the first enlisted soldiers in the

82nd Airborne Division selected to be trained to call in air

strikes on enemy positions, an enormous responsibility that

brought the risk of civilian casualties.

``If a lot of guys were just sitting around, he was always

willing to teach us something,'' recalled Sergeant Clifford

Baird, who first met Monti, with his ever-present chewing

tobacco tucked under his lip, when they were posted together

at Fort Drum, N.Y. ``He'd sit there and give us a class. He

was very respected around here.''

Monti also had a special bond with junior soldiers. While

soldiers are required to shave every day, even in the field,

Monti would let his beard grow and shave only before

returning to base. The new guys loved that he would bend the

rules like that.

And he was as loyal to his men as they were to him. He once

gave up his leave to fill in for a soldier who hadn't seen

his family in two years. When stationed at Fort Bragg in

North Carolina, he gave his new kitchen set to a soldier

whose kids were eating on the floor. When his girlfriend,

Sherri, sent care packages with his favorite cigars, he would

promptly hand them out to his unit.

``One of the things that sets him apart was that he had a

great deal of compassion,'' said Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey

Abbott, the operations officer for Monti's squadron in

Afghanistan.

A heavy burden

He earned a chestful of medals, but Monti agonized over all

the killing war required, his family said. He returned from

Afghanistan in 2003 with a Bronze Star for valor, but his

mother recalled: ``He didn't like talking about it. Most of

the time he just liked to be left alone. He'd say, `Don't

tell anybody I am here.' He wasn't proud of it.''

When he was pressed about how he earned it, Janet Monti

said, he'd finally blurt out something like, ``I had to kill

someone's brother, or father, or sister.''

Monti described his private anxieties in an undated entry,

titled ``My story,'' that his father recently found on his

personal computer. ``We are not fighting in World War II,''

Monti wrote. ``We don't have the ability to justify any means

to our end. Wars of today are not black and white.''

Monti's job to call in air strikes ``weighed heavily on

him,'' said Jon Krakauer, a mountaineer and author of the

best-seller ``Into Thin Air'' who, while working on a book,

spent nearly five weeks with Monti's unit.

``It was always this tough call,'' Krakauer said. ``He was

conservative about it.''

Krakauer recalled a patrol with Monti when a Toyota Corolla

came barreling down the road. Fearing the driver was a

suicide bomber, a soldier prepared to open fire. But Monti

stopped him just in time. It turned out the driver was just a

local in a hurry.

``A split-second later it would have been really bad,''

said Krakauer.

It was Monti's humanity that also helped him get along

especially well with the locals, Krakauer said. He was called

on frequently to negotiate, through an interpreter, with

tribal leaders, who liked him so much they gave him a Muslim

name.

``He was only 30-years-old but he was an old soul,'' said

Krakauer.

``Worst-case scenario''

The nearly 300 members of the 3rd Squadron, 71st Calvary

Regiment had a grueling mission; they lost an average of 15

to 20 percent of their body weight, pulling 16- to 18-hour

days, seven days a week, often in 100-plus degree

temperatures.

In one of the longest maneuvers in recent US military

history, they trekked by Humvee along dirt paths and steep

mountain passes from a US base in southern Afghanistan to

remote Nuristan province in the northeast, about the distance

between New York and Washington, D.C.

``We moved into unknown terrain,'' recalled Abbott, the

squadron's operations officer, noting even the Soviet army

did not venture there during its brutal occupation of

Afghanistan in the 1980s.

``Sergeant Monti went out with reconnaissance teams to

learn the people,'' he said, ``to learn the populace, and to

gain knowledge of a terrain that nobody had ever been

employed in before.''

Monti's last mission was to scout Taliban positions near

infiltration routes from neighboring Pakistan--mainly goat

trails thousands of feet up--and gather targeting data for a

larger offensive, dubbed Operation Gowardesh after the nearby

town, to take place a few days later.

On the evening of June 17, 2006, the patrol was ferried by

helicopter a few miles from the town. To avoid detection and

the sweltering heat, they moved mostly in the dark, using

night-vision equipment to navigate the rugged terrain.

On June 20, they stopped on a narrow ridge overlooking the

Gremen Valley, with steep inclines on both sides, that

commanded a view of several enemy positions.

The 16 soldiers set up their observation post on a sloping

patch of ground, about 165 feet long and 65 feet wide, with a

tree line at the top end and a few large rocks, a portion of

an old stone wall, and a few small trees at the lower end,

according to the Army's recreation of the battle.

The next morning Monti was informed that the larger US

assault would be delayed for three days--the helicopters and

troops were needed elsewhere--leaving them low on food and

water. The plan had been to use the cover of the US assault

to resupply them by helicopter; now the resupply could expose

them to the enemy.

At about 1:30 p.m., Monti took most of the patrol to meet a

resupply helicopter about 500 feet away. A small group stayed

behind. They soon spotted a local man down in the valley

using military-style binoculars to look up toward their

position before he picked up a satchel and disappeared.

``It was the worst-case scenario,'' said former Army

Captain Ross A. Berkoff, the squadron's intelligence officer,

who was monitoring the situation from about 6 miles away.

``We stirred up a hornet's nest.''

well-coordinated attack

When the enemy fighters opened fire on the patrol just

before nightfall, the two soldiers nearest the woods bolted

down the slope to seek cover behind rocks.

Sergeant Patrick Lybert, 28, of Ladysmith, Wis., was

crouched behind a low stone wall, in the best position to

fire back. The others could barely raise their heads to aim.

The patrol faced between 60 and 80 fighters, most of them

members of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, a local tribal militia

aligned with the Taliban, according to Berkoff.

Monti calmly reported over the radio that the patrol was at

risk of being overrun, according to officers in the

operations center a few miles away. As shoulder-launched RPGs

(rocket-propelled grenades) skipped off the rocks right above

his head, he began plotting grid coordinates for another

group of soldiers on another ridge to fire mortar shells at

the advancing fighters.

Within minutes, Lybert, who had been holding off the enemy

from behind the stone wall, slumped forward, blood coming out

of his ears.

The tribal militia split into two groups to try to encircle

the patrol. Soldiers who still had weapons passed them back

and forth to the one in the best position to fire back.

The enemy ``had one goal in mind,'' said Abbott, who was

monitoring the battle from the command post. ``To overrun and

kill everybody in Monti's squad.''

Monti saw a group of fighters closing in fast. When they

came within 30 feet, he threw a grenade in their path. He

then took a head count. Private Brian Bradbury, who had been

near the tree line, was missing.

a dark ending

Monti called out for him over the din of the battle. He

called again. Finally, the 22-year-old from Lowville, N.Y.,

replied weakly that he was badly injured and couldn't move.

He was lying about 30 feet away, where Monti couldn't see

him, but directly in the enemy's sights.

Monti told Bradbury he was coming to get him. He handed off

his radio, tightened the chin strap of his helmet, and ran

out into the open. The woods, about 100 feet past Bradbury,

immediately erupted with more gunfire and RPGs.

Moving low and fast, according to the testimony of his

fellow soldiers, Monti got within less than a dozen feet of

Bradbury before he had to dive behind the low stone wall

where Lybert lay dead. After a brief pause, he made another

attempt but the shooting was even more intense. He scrambled

back behind the low wall.

He prepared to make another attempt to save Bradbury, this

time asking some of his men to cover him with more gun fire

trained on the woods. But as he lunged toward Bradbury the

third time, an RPG exploded in his path.

The blast blew off his legs, but Monti struggled to get

back to the stone wall, his men calling out in encouragement.

With his last breaths, his soldiers later reported, Monti

said he made his peace with God. And right before he died he

asked them to tell his family he loved them.

As darkness fell over the valley, the mortar rounds Monti

called for began to hit the enemy positions. US aircraft also

dropped several bombs into the woods.

``Monti's selfless act of courage rallied the patrol to

defeat the enemy attack,'' the Army concluded.

It was dark by the time Bradbury was pulled to safety and

treated by the medic. A helicopter arrived but couldn't land

because of the rough terrain. Staff Sergeant Heathe Craig,

28, a medic from Severn, Md., was lowered to Bradbury, who

had a team of doctors waiting to treat him back at the base.

But as they were being hoisted up, the winch broke. Both fell

to their deaths.

Berkoff remembered standing in front of the field hospital

and thinking, ``Could anything possibly go right today?''

Monti was posthumously promoted to sergeant first class.

As she prepares to accept the Medal of Honor from the

president for her son's sacrifice, Janet Monti says she can't

help but wonder what Jared would think about it. ``He would

say this medal isn't just for me. He would want to share this

medal with everybody who died that day.''

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to H. Res. 697, I call up the bill (H.R. 3269) to amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to provide shareholders with an advisory vote on executive compensation and to prevent perverse incentives in the compensation practices of financial institutions, and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days on this bill to revise and extend their remarks and include therein extraneous material.

Mr. Speaker, I recognize myself for such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I have encountered gaps between rhetoric and reality in this Chamber, never one as great as the wildly distorted description of this bill that we've got before us.

Let's be very clear. There are differences between the parties here on the whole, at least as reflected in the committee vote. I think it will probably be different on the floor. There is much less difference than there used to be about one piece of it, the say-on-pay.

When the say-on-pay bill came up previously in 2007--by the way, when the Republicans were in the majority prior to 2007, on this, as on many other issues, we Democrats tried to do some reforms, predatory lending being one--we got nowhere--credit cards being another. We did try, in our Committee on Financial Services, to bring this up. The Republicans used their majority not to allow it.

In 2007, when we were in the majority, we did bring it to the floor, and it passed over the objection of most Republicans, and I will introduce into the Record their comments denouncing say-on-pay. But 2 years later, they have moved some. So they are now for reform on say- on-pay, many of them, although a somewhat watered-down form.

I should say there is a stark difference between us remaining on whether or not any action should be taken whatsoever by the Federal Government to restrain compensation practices that inflict excessive risk on the economy. We should be very clear; this assertion that this amounts to control of all wages and prices is nonsense. There is, of course, nothing about prices at all in the bill. As to wages, what it says is that the SEC shall impose rules that prevent excessive risk- taking, and the reference to wages is only in that context.

The amount of wages is irrelevant to the SEC. What this bill explicitly aims at is the practice whereby people are given bonuses that pay off if the gamble or the risk pays off but don't lose you anything if it doesn't. That is, there is a wide consensus that this incentivizes excessive risk for you a shorter time. If you're the head of a financial institution or you're one of the decisionmakers or you take actions that are risky and 1 month later it looks like they paid off and you get your money and then 6 months later it turns out it blew up, you don't lose any of the money you got. And if at the outset you take a risk and it costs the company a lot of money, that doesn't cost you anything.

All we are saying is that there has to be some balance to the risk- taking. And people ask, What is excessive risk? Excessive risk is when the people who take the risk pay no penalty when it goes wrong; when they have a heads they win, tails they break even situation; when the company loses money and the economy may suffer, but the decision-makers do not.

Now, one of the sillier remarks we heard was this will cause us a problem with international competition. In fact, say-on-pay, when the Republican Party overwhelmingly opposed it 2 years ago, was already borrowed from Great Britain, the United Kingdom. And we were told during 2006 that we were losing a lot of business to Great Britain, that we should cut back on Sarbanes-Oxley, for instance, because people would go to England. But England had the very proposal that they were saying was going to drive people away.

In fact, today--I will read from an article from a couple weeks ago. The Prime Minister of England says they are going to adopt plans forcing banks to hold back half of all bonuses for up to 5 years to discourage excessive risk-taking. That's our major financial competitor. And the conservative opposition is critical because it's not mandatory.

We have been in conversations with the European Union, the United Kingdom, with Canada, and others. This will be done on a coordinated basis. In fact, American salaries, American compensation has been much higher.

So, no, there is no price control; no, there is no wage control; no, it is not a problem for international competition. And by the way, as to every institution, every credit union--you heard that rhetoric--the bill exempts any institution with less than $1 billion in assets, and it gives the SEC the authority to even raise that so there's even less. But here's the nub of it: The Republican Party has reluctantly been dragged--reality sometimes has an impact--to supporting a watered-down version of say-on-pay.

Say-on-pay, by the way, says that the shareholders of the company can vote and express their opinion. The gentleman from Texas was upset that we don't have a Federal Election Commission mechanism for these votes. But why only these votes? Shareholders vote on everything. Apparently it's only when the shareholders tend to vote on pay that Republican sensibilities are trampled.

We do not, in this bill, talk about the amounts. We do say the shareholders should. We say, in consultation with all the advocacy groups who represent shareholders and pension funds and elsewhere, that the people who own the company, the shareholders, should be able to express their opinion on the compensation.

We go beyond that to say that we believe the Federal Government has interest--not in the level of compensation, that's up to the shareholders--in the structure. When you have, as we have seen, structures whereby companies lose lots of money, and they lose lots of money on particular deals, but the people who made those deals make money on them, that has a systemic

negative impact on this society because it incentivizes much too much risk.

Now, what is the Republican approach to that? Nothing. They admit that these are problems. They regret that these things are happening, but their regrets won't stop the damage. In the Republican substitute there is a watering down of say on pay, but they at least acknowledge that reluctantly. But when it comes to the practice of large corporations in the financial area structuring bonuses that incentivize excessive risk, my Republican friends admit that that's the case and lament it and are adamant that we should do nothing about it. That's the big difference.

We believe that the SEC--and by the way, as to the form, it was a Republican former Member of this body, Christopher Cox, who was Chair of the SEC, proposed disclosure. He broached it first. He said we have an important public interest in knowing it.

So we are going to take the form of disclosure of compensation prescribed by a Republican Member of this House as Chairman of the SEC, with his colleagues, and let the shareholders say yes or no. We are going to go beyond that and say that the SEC should look at this and say, you know, you have a situation here where people making the decisions will have an incentive to take too much risk. If you tell people that if they take a risk and it pays off they are enriched, and if it fails miserably, they don't lose anything, they will take more risk than rationally should be taken.

You should not incentivize people to take risks where they can only benefit and never suffer a penalty. That's all this bill says. We will prevent that kind of thing from happening. We won't set amounts. We won't deal with wage controls. We won't do anything else, and we exempt institutions under $1 billion.

So I await the Republican counter. Yes, they want to water down say- on-pay, but they reluctantly accept it, but they have zero to offer with regard to the situation of excessive bonuses. And yes, we did get some reluctant agreement that we put some limits on the people who are recipients of TARP funds, but one of those who received TARP funds prospered with those funds, paid back the funds, and are now engaging in the same risky bonus practices they had before.

The Republican position, at least in committee, was to do nothing about it, zero. Ours is, have rules, not that set the limits, not that set wage controls, but simply say that you cannot structure it so that whatever level of compensation you have, you profit if the bonus pays off and you lose nothing if the bonus causes great damage to your company and the economy.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 3 minutes to deal with some of these comments.

First of all, I am struck by the fact that the gentleman, as he indicated in our markup, is sufficiently nervous about the political implications of opposing this bill and having the House take no action whatsoever to deal with the problem of risk-incentivizing bonuses but he wants to debate cap-and-trade and health care. They're not before us. What's before us is this bill. And when Members debate the bills that aren't there, it's an indication that they're a little shaky on the bills that are there.

Secondly, yes, it does say that they can deal with all wages but not in general. The gentleman reads very selectively. The language about taking action is in this context: to determine whether the compensation structure is aligned with sound risk management, is structured to account for the time horizon of risks, and will reduce unreasonable incentives by such institutions for employees to take undue risks.

It is limited in its grant of authority only to structures that incentivize excessive risk. There is no mandate here to set wages for anybody. There is no mandate to say this percentage is bonuses and that percentage is pay. It is a mandate only to act where the structure incentivizes risk, as has been recognized as part of the problem, very broadly.

I will plead guilty to one issue, yes. We are not in this case taking orders from the Obama administration. And maybe having represented a party that took orders from the Bush administration, they now wish they didn't, but that's not an example I want to follow. I am not here as a Member of Congress or as chairman of a committee to do whatever the administration says. I am here for us to put our independent judgment on it.

The gentleman closed with the key difference between us: the Republican position, as he articulates it--and I don't think it will be the unanimous position--is have the Federal Government take no action whatsoever to restrain the granting of bonuses that incentivize excessive risk. If they pay back that TARP money having benefited from it--and, by the way, on the bailout, every single bailout now underway happened under the Bush administration. But their position is, do nothing to deal with this. We take the opposite position.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to a member of the committee, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to say on behalf of the Obama administration, I welcome this very temporary expression of deference to their views. It will not last very long. As soon as it is politically convenient, it will disappear. So I urge them to enjoy that brief moment of graciousness.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Al Green).

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

There is, of course, a contradiction here. When we are talking about a power, namely, to reduce excessive risk incentivizing bonuses that the Republicans want to defend, they talk about the unelected bureaucrats. The unelected bureaucrats can't be trusted. Except the gentleman from Texas, of course, just closed by saying don't worry, the unelected bureaucrats are out there to protect us.

The unelected bureaucrats in the Republican cosmology are like the Obama administration: they are either convenient whipping boys or great sources of wisdom, depending on where Republican ideology turns to them. But the gentleman from Texas just said we don't have to worry. We have those, as his colleagues called them, unelected bureaucrats to do it.

But I am interested, I have noticed a number of Members have said they don't like the bonuses. Is there a Republican proposal to deal with the bonuses that are being given?

Our proposal does not empower anybody to limit the amounts. The question is, is there a Republican proposal that would deal with what Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke and the financial regulators in England and Warren Buffett and many others believe is a destabilizing tendency to give out bonuses that give you an incentive to take excessive risks, excessive in the sense that you benefit if the risk pays off and you don't lose.

We want people to take risks, but we want them to take risks which balance the upside and the downside, not which just look only at the upside. And I continue to point out not in that committee, not in that 12 years they controlled this place, not during this debate today, not in the Rules Committee, we have not seen a single Republican proposal to deal with bonuses.

Their position apparently is however the financial industry wants to structure bonuses, no matter what they say, that you get a bonus if it pays off in the short term and it turns sour in the long term. You get a bonus if it pays off, but you don't lose a thing if it doesn't pay off. They would leave that entirely unchanged. I think that is very dangerous to the economy, and, yes, there is a consensus among financial regulators and others that this has contributed to risk- taking.

We all believe in the free-market system and the incentives. How can it be that you acknowledge that there is a system which says to people, take a risk, because it is risk-free for you?

It's risk-free for the individual. It's risky for the company; and when you accumulate all those risks for the company, it's risky for the economy. We're saying, if it's risky for the company and risky for the economy, it ought to be risky for the individual. We want an alignment of risks. We don't want risk-free individuals taking big risks on behalf of those who are going to have to suffer. We have a proposal to restrain that. The Republican position on that is, do nothing. Let them keep going exactly as they have been going.

Let us return, as I said the other day, to the thrilling days of yesteryear when the lone rangers will ride again, untrammeled by any set of rules. They will be able to continue to give themselves bonuses that allow them to be free of risk. That's the deal. The company will face risk. The economy will accumulate and face risk. But the decision- makers will be free of the risks' negative side; they will gain from the risks' positive side; and like rational people, they will take more risks.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, there is a little bit of an imbalance. I would ask if I could reserve for one more speaker while I work something out.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 15 seconds to say I welcome the gentleman from Georgia to the cause of say-on-pay. When we debated this on March 22, 2007, he was quite critical of it. So maybe 2 years from now, he will think we should do something about excessive, incentivizing bonuses.

I now yield for a question to the gentlewoman from California.

Yes. As to section 4, if they are public companies, they are covered by say-on-pay. And there may be companies not now federally regulated that may become so by decision. But as of now, if they're not federally regulated, they're not covered. Of course AIG was federally regulated by the OTS, so they would have been covered. The gentlewoman is correct.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I have only one more speaker. So I am going to reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, Aflac was the first publicly traded company to give shareholders an opportunity to vote on executive compensation, commonly referred to as say-on-pay. Aflac CEO Daniel P. Amos explained the company's decision to voluntarily adopt the measure by saying, ``Our shareholders, as owners of the company, have the right to know how executive compensation works. An advisory vote on our compensation report is a helpful avenue for our shareholders to provide feedback on our pay-for-performance compensation philosophy and pay package.''

The first year of the vote, 2008, 93% of the shareholders voting approved the company's pay-for-performance compensation policies and procedures. In May of this year, 97% of the shareholders voting cast ballots in favor of the compensation policies, even though the stock price of virtually all financial companies had declined--including Aflac's. The results of both shareholder votes clearly demonstrate that shareholders appreciate Aflac's philosophy of paying for performance and the company's long history of transparency.

I submit the following for the Record.

[From USA TODAY, July 15, 2009]

CEOs Openly Oppose Push for Say-on-Pay by Shareholders

(By Del Jones)

Top executives have taken a relentless public thrashing as

they lay off workers and fight to keep stock prices above the

floor. In a suffering economy, no one seems happy with

leadership, and the image of CEOs has sunk so low that their

approval scores are now south of those serving in Congress.

But no matter how low their image sinks, nor how shrill the

outrage, executives have remained steadfast in their

opposition to one thing: They are roundly against legislation

that would force companies to let shareholders vote on CEO

compensation packages.

``I wonder if the congressmen backing this legislation

would propose similar laws governing their own

compensation,'' says Steve Hafner, CEO of travel search

engine Kayak. ``I'd love to vote on congressional pay and

perks,''

EXEC PAY: Proposal gives shareholders non-binding say

That executives oppose congressional noodling with their

pay is unsurprising. What is surprising is that they are

willing to go so public in their opposition, even though

passage of a so-called ``say-on-pay'' law is likely, says

Dawn Wolfe, associate director of social research for Boston

Common Asset Management.

President Obama, who co-sponsored say-on-pay legislation

while in the Senate, remains in support, as is the Democrat-

controlled Congress. Likewise the public at large. Focus

groups have been describing CEO pay with words such as

``obscene'' and ``immoral'' rather than words like

``excessive'' or ``overly generous'' as in the past, says

Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist at Weber

Shandwick.

``Everyone I talk to understands say-on-pay legislation to

be a question of when, not if,'' Wolfe says. ``There is a

sense in the investment community that it is inevitable.''

CEOs have opinions like everyone else, but the public

rarely sees that side because positions on anything

controversial risk upsetting customers. When they feel

compelled to take a stand at odds with the public, it is

usually articulated by trade associations and lobbyists, so

as to put CEOs and the companies they run at arm's length

from controversy. Not this time, Even though say-on-pay

legislation is almost a sure thing, CEOs and former CEOs

contacted by USA TODAY spoke out against it, both forcefully

and individually.

``Say-on-pay is just another government regulation and

intrusion into free enterprise,'' says Howard Putnam, former

CEO of Southwest and Braniff airlines.

No one likes downward pressure applied to their pay, and in

this respect CEOs are no different than professional

athletes, rock stars, union members, Social Security

recipients--and elected officials. Howard Behar, former

president of Starbucks, asks: Why not let people vote on the

salaries of government workers? He says government employee

unions influence politicians, who commit huge resources to

pensions and raises to get re-elected.

How say-on-pay would work

Say-on-pay legislation would require companies to give

shareholders an up-or-down vote each year on the compensation

of the top five executives of publicly traded companies. The

vote would not be binding, leaving the final decision in the

hands of boards of directors. However, directors are elected

by shareholders and a shareholder vote against a pay

package would likely pressure directors to rethink the

package and make changes.

The Netherlands requires binding shareholder votes on

executive pay. The U.S. law would model those in Britain,

Australia, Norway, Spain and France, where the vote is non-

binding. Boston Common Asset Management has been pushing

shareholder say-on-pay resolutions for three years, and Wolfe

says she doesn't understand the CEO opposition, as there are

only two examples in Britain when shareholders voted a

majority against a CEO's pay: at GlaxoSmithKline in 2003 and

at home builder Bellway in 2009. It may be true that most

CEOs are fairly paid, she said, which means they have nothing

to fear.

Only 24 U.S. companies have implemented say-on-pay without

legislation, Wolfe says. Of those, only Aflac and RiskMetrics

did so without it first coming to a shareholder vote. The

Securities and Exchange Commission continues to get feedback

regarding say-on-pay at companies that have accepted

government money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program

(TARP).

At Aflac, shareholders approved the pay of CEO Dan Amos by

93% in 2008, and that approval rose to 97% this year when

Amos did not accept a $2.8 million bonus even though he had

met the conditions of the bonus as set by the Aflac board.

``That tells me that (shareholders) had the ability to look

beyond the price of stocks and understand,'' says Amos, who

supports say-on-pay at Aflac but declines to weigh in on what

is best at other companies. Giving shareholders a voice

``takes away the frustration that is out there,'' he says.

``People just want to be heard.''

Sarah Anderson, director of the global economy program for

the liberal think tank Institute for Policy Studies, says

say-on-pay is a first step but does not go far enough to rein

in abuses. She cites oil executives who had big paydays that

had nothing to do with personal performance and everything to

do with spikes in oil prices. But shareholders didn't ``bat

an eye'' because they were happy with rising stock prices.

``Everyone, not just shareholders, has a stake in fixing

the executive compensation system,'' Anderson says.

Ralph Ward, publisher of Boardroom Insider, an online

newsletter about boards of directors, agrees that say-on-pay

does not go far enough, because it offers shareholders ``so

little substance.''

Substance or not, CEOs complain that say-on-pay is

government intrusion into the private sector. Such consensus

among CEOs is rare because they run very different companies

that can be made winners and losers on a range of sensitive

issues, from energy to health care. They lean Republican, but

there are signs that they are increasingly blue, and 40%

supported Democrats during the last presidential primary

season, according to an unscientific USA TODAY survey. But

when USA TODAY last month contacted 31 CEOs and former CEOs

of large companies, 77% were against say-on-pay.

Are CEOs fairly compensated? Two of the 31 CEOs declined to

answer, but 24 of the other 29 (83%) said yes. Five (17%)

said that, in general, CEOs are overcompensated. When asked

if say-on-pay would influence CEO compensation, 76% said yes.

CEO median compensation at S&P 500 companies rose 23% from

2003-2008 despite going down 7.5% to $8 million from 2007 to

2008, according to Equilar, which tracks executive

compensation. John Castellani, president of the Business

Roundtable, an association representing CEOs of companies

with more than $5 trillion in annual revenue, says

shareholders have always had the ability to enforce say-on-

pay by using the shareholder resolution process. That makes

legislation unnecessary, he says.

The pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce is also against

legislation. ``The decision to allow say-on-pay votes should

come, as it has, through a dialogue between shareholders,

directors and management, not via a Washington mandate,''

says Tom Quaadman, the chamber's executive director for

capital markets.

CEOs' arguments against it

CEOs say the legislation would open the door to

micromanagement by largely uninformed shareholders, who

understand neither the competitive market forces that drive

executive pay nor the complex incentives designed by experts

to get the best results. The law could drive top talent to

private companies and injure the ability of U.S. companies to

compete in a global market, they say.

``You cannot run companies effectively through the

democratic process of voting on all things,'' says Judy Odom,

former CEO of Software Spectrum. ``Independent boards should

be elected, and they should do their jobs.''

While most shareholders are uninformed, some are so

informed that they could use a say-on-pay law to an unfair

advantage, says Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, which

operates Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. For example, certain

investors could threaten to vote ``no'' on the CEO's pay to

coerce the CEO into making decisions for short-term gain,

such as delaying capital investment or taking on unnecessary

debt. Such tactics could temporarily boost the stock price to

the detriment of the company's long-term health, he says.

An argument could be made that CEO pay is excessive and

does not drive performance, says Anders Gustafsson, CEO of

publicly traded Zebra Technologies, which sells printing

services to 90% of Fortune 500 companies. But he says CEOs

have a significant impact on company performance and are

being unfairly targeted in a bad economy because their pay is

publicly disclosed.

CEOs are not unanimous in their opinions, even where it

comes to pay. Patrick Byrne, CEO of Internet retailer

Overstock, says he is more concerned about CEOs influencing

boards than shareholders influencing CEOs.

``The CEO is hired by shareholders. He works for them, just

like a farmhand works for the folks who own the ranch,'' says

Byrne, among the CEOs who support say-on-pay legislation. He

says CEOs ``capture'' their boards, leaving shareholders

unrepresented.

Real estate developer Don Peebles, recently named by Forbes

as one of the 20 wealthiest African-Americans, also supports

say-on-pay. He says CEOs who have no significant ownership

often have compensation packages designed to reward them on

the upside, but they suffer few consequences on the downside.

``There is no real alignment of interests,'' Peebles says.

But Behar says he has served on eight boards and says

directors are not stupid, and they are in control of CEOs.

``How will our country be better off if CEOs earn less than

$2 million a year?'' says Behar. ``Are we trying to create a

country without the opportunity to get rich? We had better be

careful about the buttons we push down. We may not like the

ones that pop up.''

Mr. Speaker, I offer an amendment.

I yield myself 1 minute.

At the markup, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Price) offered an amendment, which I said we would be willing to accept subject to some further change. We've talked. We have not yet reached agreement, and this is going to be an entirely legitimate debate.

What the gentleman was concerned about, and I think legitimately, was the possibility of a callback; that is, a requirement that people give back bonuses they'd already received. That would be arbitrary. Now, we hope that there will be rules adopted that will set those rules in place, and I agree that there should not be people's pay subjected unreasonably to arbitrary retroactive decisions.

But there was--and I was not aware of it at the time--an SEC decision that said that where someone had received the compensation and it subsequently turned out that the transaction was not profitable, although it appeared to be, that a return of the money that was given because of the profitability might be appropriate. So our language reflects that. It does not overturn that SEC decision. It does give some protection against arbitrary return.

I reserve the balance of my time.

How much time remains?

Who has the right to close, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds to acknowledge one thing that should have been drafted better. The word ``require'' is ambiguous here. The word should have been ``permit'' rather than ``require.'' That is, we did mean to say that you could not require the individual to give it back. We do want to restrain the SEC or anybody else from an inappropriate one. We will try to change that one word, and it will make a difference to the gentleman of Georgia, but I believe that ``permit'' would have been more appropriate. When we say ``require,'' we mean that you could not require the individual to give it back. That was it.

I now yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Miller).

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman is going to close with his remaining time, I will just take, I think, 15 seconds to say that I've talked to the gentleman from Georgia. Again, we will still have a disagreement, but instead of ``require,'' it should say-- and he and I have agreed within the limited version here--``allow'' them to require it. In other words, we don't want the SEC to be able to make an inappropriate requirement. So that will be clarified.

I will take our remaining time to say, yes, we did tentatively agree to it. There had been an SEC decision that day, which I wasn't aware of, and I did believe that the amendment as we originally agreed--and I did say to the gentleman that I thought we would want to make some further changes.

Yes.

Yes.

I would ask unanimous consent, if that is permissible--we are in the whole House--to change line 2. Instead of ``require,'' it will read ``shall allow to require,'' ``shall allow the SEC to require.'' No. I take it back. Here is how I will say it: ``Shall be allowed to require.''

Yes.

That's easy for you to say, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield to me, I would ask unanimous consent to amend the bill according to that language which the gentleman has seen.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

I yield myself 3 minutes.

First, I had been taking as given that the President's press secretary said he had some problems with the bill. I know Mr. Sperling did, and as I said, we have the Republicans in a temporary mode of obedience to the President. A little bit of a culture gap there. They thought it was still George Bush. They are used to snapping to attention for President Bush. Apparently, a little of that left over for President Obama. I think we should have been independent in both cases.

I read the transcript of the press conference. Mr. Gibbs said nothing negative about this. He was asked if he would sign this bill. He said, Well, there are some pieces of it we are moving and it will go through the Senate. And when he didn't fully answer it, he got a tough follow- up question about whether or not they were trying to avoid spilling beer on the President's children's table.

I do also want to talk about say-on-pay, which the Republicans are now embracing.

Here's what the gentleman from Alabama, the ranking member of the committee, had to say as a prediction when we debated this in March of 2007:

Evidence that free-market forces are already at work to correct any excesses in the system should give this committee real pause before it seeks to impose a legislative fix that could, like past efforts in this area, have unintended and negative consequences.

In March, well over 2 years ago, the gentleman from Alabama confidently predicted that free-market forces are already at work to correct pay excesses. So apparently the gentleman from Alabama was correct, there have been no pay excesses in 2\1/2\ years. We've all been hallucinating. He was wrong then, and he's wrong now. Now they're wrong on different levels. They've now had to acknowledge the importance of say-on-pay.

I also would repeat when I say the Republicans have no version. They want to weaken say-on-pay, but with regard to the bonus structure that gives people an incentive to take risks because the decision-maker is risk free, even though the company is at risk, the Republican position is zero. There has not been in any of our deliberations any Republican approach to how you deal with the incentive to take excessive risk. No way, no how.

They have reluctantly agreed to say-on-pay, although they want to water it down, and that's to the argument that an annual vote focuses you short term. Of course not. There is an annual proxy vote. It goes on the proxy. It doesn't require you--if you've got a 3-year contract, then every year it would still be approved.

So this notion that it focuses on the shorter term is, of course, wholly inaccurate because it simply says you put it on the proxy every year. Some companies will have annual contracts, some biennial, and they are voted on. And if they are triennial, there is nothing at issue.

But again, the central point is this. The purpose of this amendment-- there are two. We can say on paper but more importantly have the Federal Government say nothing whatsoever about the bonus structure. Those financial institutions that received TARP money and paid it back and now want to do these bonuses in ways that will recreate the risk will be entirely free to do so under this amendment.

Mr. Speaker, just briefly, the gentleman talked about the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler which, of course, was under the Bush administration. The fact that the Bush administration decided to initiate a bailout of General Motors and Chrysler is not binding on this legislation. They are not under financial regulators and wouldn't be covered under this bill.

I now yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. Speaker, I will take 30 seconds to say, apparently the gentleman from Alabama only has witnesses if he's sure he will agree with everything they've ever

said. He says it's ``man bites dog'' because we had an honest witness with whom we agreed in some parts and disagreed on others. Apparently, the notion of having a witness that you haven't totally vetted for everything she's ever said is new to the gentleman from Alabama.

I will continue to invite witnesses that I think are useful, even if I don't always agree with them. And I would repeat that the gentleman from Alabama's say on this--he was against say-on-pay. He says it's just not much, but it was enough for him to say it was going to cause real problems 2\1/2\ years ago. And I repeat his view on pay, in March of 2007, Evidence that free market forces are already at work to create any excesses should give this committee pause, but seeks to oppose a legislative fix that could have unintended and negative consequences. He was talking about that insignificant say-on-pay.

I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Carson).

Parliamentary inquiry.

Did the gentleman not notice that Mr. Price had the right to close because he was defending the committee on the amendment that I offered?

I yield our remaining time to a leading member of the committee, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Perlmutter).

Let me reserve the right to object.

Members want to get out of here. I cannot be responsible for keeping Members here.

Apparently there is an effort--I don't think we ought to keep everybody in the dark about all this. There is apparently an effort to negotiate a unanimous consent agreement involving another bill, so they are asking us to delay this. I am perfectly willing to do this as long as people know it's not our fault. We were ready to get finished. There is a bipartisan leadership request that we wait another 10 minutes. I am perfectly prepared once people understand that, but I do think this kind of whisper-whisper, nobody will know is not a good way to go, so let's be honest about it.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve my time. I have, at most, one further speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

First of all, let me emphasize when the gentleman from New Jersey says ``trust the shareholders,'' that's a conversion. We are born-again shareholder advocates, because in 2006 when the Republicans controlled this institution, they would not even on the Financial Services Committee allow it to come up. We had a petition under the rules for a hearing. Then we asked for a markup and they refused it.

Then in 2007 the gentleman from Alabama, the gentleman from New Jersey, and the others, they all opposed say-on-pay. The gentleman from Alabama told us in 2007 that the free enterprise system was taking care of pay excess. He said that in March of 2007. All of the problems that we've had with pay in the interim apparently were figments of our imagination. The gentleman from Alabama had such confidence in the free enterprise system 2\1/2\ years ago, he told us they weren't going to happen. And say-on-pay now, oh, it's not a big deal. It was a big enough deal for them to oppose it.

By the way, let me say to the gentleman from New Jersey, here's the problem: No, it's not so much conscious acts of deregulation as nonregulation. What happened was new things grew up in the economy, particularly in the area of subprime mortgage and the way of packaging them and sending them around. And some of us in the minority wanted to change it. There were party differences.

In 2004 my friend from North Carolina (Mr. Miller) who was here earlier, he spoke with people at the Center For Responsible Lending in North Carolina who told us in 2004 trouble was coming. By the way, trouble was coming because of an excessive encouragement of low-income people to buy homes, not from the CRA and not from liberal Democrats, but from the Bush administration. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling) inserted an amendment which we adopted. In 2002 the Bush administration sped this up. In 2004, over my objection among others, the Bush Administration directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to substantially increase the number of subprime mortgages they were buying and for people below income. That's in the amendment that Mr. Hensarling offered that we adopted.

And some of us saw the problem at that point. I hadn't seen a problem with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before, but I did in 2004 become worried. I joined the gentleman Mr. Oxley in trying to pass a bill, although I had a housing problem on the floor. The gentleman from Alabama voted with Mr. Oxley and many others did. Other Republicans thought Mr. Oxley was too soft, and we then got into an intra- Republican dispute on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac where the House passed the bill, the House under the Republicans, supported by the overwhelming majority of Republicans, every amendment offering to toughen it up rejected by an overwhelming majority of Republicans.

And the Republican Senate had a difference. Ironically, the Democrats in the Senate agreed with Mr. Oxley. The Republicans in the Senate agreed with Mr. Bush. No bill.

We also tried, as I said, to do something about subprime lending. The gentleman from North Carolina pushed for legislation. The gentleman from Alabama, to his credit, was somewhat interested in working with us on it. But the Republicans were overruled by the then-majority leader, Mr. DeLay, who used the rhetoric we're hearing today: keep the bureaucrats out of it and let the free enterprise system do it. That was the prevailing philosophy of the Republicans who ruled this House in 2004 and 2005.

So when some of us, including the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Bachus), tried to work on legislation to restrict subprime lending, Mr. Bachus was even chairman of the subcommittee, and he was overruled. The chairman of the committee, Mr. Oxley, was told, No, we don't do that. We're Republicans. We believe in free enterprise.

So it was a conscious decision not to do anything about----

I yield to the gentleman from California.

No. I tell you, to the gentleman from California, he's going to have to speed up. I'm not going to slow down. But if he waits a couple of days, there's a very competent transcriber here. He'll be able to read it, and maybe we can even get it put into large type for the gentleman from California.

And now, the gentleman's having tried to interrupt me because that's what people do when they don't like what you're saying, I will return to the tale of how the Republicans told us not to do subprime lending. And we had legislation working. If we had been able in 2005 to get that legislation done, we could have retarded the depths of the crisis. So, yes, there were regulators who didn't do their job, but there were conscious decisions not to regulate.

There was a bill passed, by the way, in 1994 by a Democratic Congress, replaced in 1995 by a Republican Congress, which gave the Federal Reserve the authority to regulate mortgages of the kind that caused trouble. Alan Greenspan, supported by the Republicans in Congress, refused to use that authority. It was when he continued to refuse that some of us tried to do something. So, yes, that's where we got this, because a Republican commitment to never doing anything of the sort that they are talking about now that let subprime mortgages flourish.