Mr. President, I commend my colleagues for their work on this amendment. But, as I have stated, I believe it will fuel, and not limit, the type of charter shopping in search of the most lax regulator that we have seen in this past crisis.…
Mr. President, I commend my colleagues for their work on this amendment. But, as I have stated, I believe it will fuel, and not limit, the type of charter shopping in search of the most lax regulator that we have seen in this past crisis.
The Hutchinson amendment would preserve the status quo by allowing the Federal Reserve to continue regulating about 845 State banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System out of a total of approximately 6,000 State banks.
This is a tremendous shame. Over the last 2 years, I sat through 80 hearings, listening to witnesses discuss the failings of the Fed--the failure of the agency to write rules protecting consumers, the failure of the agency to regulate derivatives, and its failure to properly supervise holding companies.
In response to these hearings, I initially introduced a bill that would have both streamlined our bank regulatory system and stopped banks from being able to engage in regulatory arbitrage. It would have consolidated the bank supervisory functions of four regulatory agencies--the OCC, the OTS, the FDIC, and the Fed--and would have created a single new agency to supervise banks. In other words, it would have taken the Fed out of the business of bank supervision entirely.
I ended up modifying this proposal in response to concerns raised by my colleagues, but the bill that we passed out of committee still consolidates bank regulatory functions in a clear and logical way. It eliminates the OTS, and gives supervision of all federally chartered depositories to the OCC, and all State-chartered depositories, including both State member and nonmember banks, to the FDIC.
And small holding companies and their banks are supervised by a single regulator. We looked into how these companies are structured and determined that in most cases these holding companies are just shells and their primary assets are just simply banks. In these circumstances, it just makes no sense to have a separate holding company regulator. So, under the bill, small national banks and their holding companies are regulated by the OCC. And small State-chartered banks and their holding companies are regulated by the FDIC.
Meanwhile, the bill requires the Fed to focus on several key areas-- its monetary policy role, and its role as lender of last resort. It also expands the Fed's reach into areas that compliment these central bank functions.
The bill gives the Fed supervision of bank holding companies with $50 billion in assets and over, and the supervision of other nonbank financial companies if the failure of these companies would pose a risk to the U.S. financial stability.
The Fed is given the responsibility to establish heightened prudential standards for these companies, including tougher capital and liquidity requires.
And, the bill gives the Fed additional authority to regulate the payments system.
But apparently this isn't enough.
One of the main arguments the Fed makes for retaining this authority is that it needs a window into the workings of small banks in order to formulate monetary policy.
I say to my colleagues--this is a red herring. Take a look at the Fed's Beige Book. The Fed is able to collect information about a variety of sectors in the economy--about manufacturing, real estate, the energy sector, and the agricultural sector without direct regulation in these areas.
And by law, the Fed can already gather any information it wants from any depository institution--whether it regulates that institution or not. Let me read from the relevant parts of the law:
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shall
be authorized and empowered . . . to require any depository
institution specified in this paragraph to make, at such
intervals as the Board may prescribe, such reports of its
liabilities and assets as the Board may determine to be
necessary or desirable to enable the Board to discharge its
responsibility to monitor and control monetary and credit
aggregates. [12 USC 248(a).]
The Fed also is arguing that it needs to be the regulator of all holding companies so that it can respond effectively in the event of a regional crisis.
I ask my colleagues--do we need a regulator that can respond effectively in the event of a regional crisis or that can effectively prevent the next crisis from occurring?
I would like to point out the possible downside of allowing the Fed to continue supervising State member banks.
Let me play this out. The agency that regulates this country's largest national banks is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is a bureau of the Treasury Department. The OCC is funded through assessments on the banks that it regulates.
By contrast, the FDIC and the Fed use revenues from their other operations to pay for their supervisory activities and don't charge their banks for examinations. State banks are examined by State authorities every other year, but the States do not charge as much as the OCC. So, it is much cheaper to be a State bank.
I fear that the very largest national banks will have tremendous incentives to become State member banks so that they will have a single Federal regulator--the Federal Reserve. This will concentrate enormous power in the Federal Reserve System--an agency that the financial crisis has shown is already stretched too thin with its many and varied responsibilities.
This could also result in increased regulatory arbitrage. Since the OCC depends on assessments from the banks it regulates to fund its operations, the agency may go to great lengths to keep its banks from converting to State charters. We have seen what happens when depository institutions exploit these weaknesses in our bank regulatory system and when agencies compromise their supervisory integrity to maintain companies within their domain.
If this happens, we could have another race to the bottom--just like the competition and regulatory arbitrage that lead to the financial crisis.
Some will argue that my fears are unfounded, but I remain concerned about the unintended consequences that will flow from the Fed's continued regulation of State member banks.
And therefore I oppose the Hutchison amendment.
I thank my colleague from Tennessee. He has been a positive, constructive Member of this effort before us, but I oppose his amendment for two reasons.
First of all, it creates a very bright line of mandating 5 percent. Every nonprofit, all FHA mortgages would be subject to that rule, which would exclude an awful lot. The Merkley-Klobuchar amendment we just adopted establishes underwriting standards.
Further, what the Corker amendment does is it strips out the skin in the game. One of the things we learned is that brokers and mortgage dealers had no skin in the game. They were selling off these items and they didn't care what was in it because they were being paid.
Under an amendment we will adopt after the Corker amendment is considered--the Isakson-Landrieu amendment--we will set a standard allowing for the option of that skin in the game, which I think strengthens the bill even further, and I appreciate Senator Isakson and Senator Landrieu offering that idea to this bill that will come right after this.
For those reasons, I urge my colleagues, respectfully, to reject the Corker amendment.
I yield back.
Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and I move to lay that motion on the table.
The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
Amendment No. 3759, as Modified
Mr. President, I yield my time. Unless someone wants to speak in opposition, I oppose the amendment but I am not going to speak against it.
Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.
Mr. President, I move to reconsider that vote and lay that motion upon the table.
The motion to lay upon the table was agreed to.
Mr. President, what I wish to do at this juncture, if we could, is we have an amendment being offered by our colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, and our colleague from Georgia, Senator Isakson.
I believe if they take 10 minutes or so, we could do it on a voice vote. I support and, in fact, I am a cosponsor of their amendment. I think it strengthens our bill tremendously. I want to thank my colleague from Georgia very much, who has forgotten more about real estate than most of us will ever know, having spent a good separate part of his life involved in the business.
We have worked together on a lot of issues over the last couple of years related to real estate. I thank him for his contribution, as well as my dear friend from Louisiana.
I yield the floor to them.
I appreciate that. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we temporarily lay aside the Landrieu-Isakson amendment.
Mr. President, I thank both of my colleagues, not only for their work on this particular amendment but for the way they have approached the bill. They have been tremendously constructive in offering very solid ideas.
This is one amendment that does a great deal of service to the legislation. As the Senator from Maine pointed out, it was certainly always our intent not to include retailers and merchants under the auspices of the consumer financial product safety commission. The language they have now offered and on which they worked so hard makes that abundantly clear. The word ``significantly'' clearly is an opaque word. No matter how much I tried to make clear what my intentions were with that language, this amendment strengthens it tremendously. As I have said, this was never intended to affect Main Street merchants.
I am delighted that the National Federation of Independent Business, along with the American Dental Association and the American Association of Orthodontists, is now in support, because they were two groups about which it was unclear whether they would be included. As a result of what we have been able to craft, with the leadership of Senators Snowe and Landrieu, we now have their support. I thank them.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague from Virginia. He is absolutely right. That is exactly the case. Under the Constitution of the United States, all revenue-rising measures must originate in the other body, the House of Representatives.
Despite the merits of his amendment, with which I agree, we have what we call a blue slip. When an amendment originates over here and it impacts the Internal Revenue Code, it is subject to an objection, what we call a blue slip. It does not go to the merits of the amendment. It goes to the constitutionality of such a proposal where revenue is affected. Those matters must begin in the House.
I say to my colleague from Virginia, there will be opportunities, I am sure, with revenue measures coming from the House for our consideration to raise this amendment again. I, for one, am attracted to the amendment and what he is proposing and hope at another point-- and I presume that opportunity will arise in the next couple months because I gather revenue measures will be coming over--that we will have another chance to address this issue.
I appreciate his consideration of this matter and look forward to working with him on this question the next opportunity we have to do so. It is my understanding the amendment would suffer from that constitutional question at this point.
Mr. President, while we are waiting, there are two pending amendments which we can voice vote, but I gather there may be a second- degree amendment offered to one of these amendments. It will be the first time a second-degree amendment has been offered to one of these amendments.
We are trying to go through the process and give everybody a chance to air their ideas. There have been no tabling motions, no filibusters, at least none declared on the bill at this point. Nonetheless, Senators have the right to offer second-degree amendments, if they wish. We have avoided it up to now, having considered quite a few proposals on the floor of the Senate.
I count about 15, 16, at least on my list of amendments, on the Democratic side Members who would like to be given the opportunity to raise. I cannot speak to the number on the other side, but it is not a large number. Our Republican colleagues, at least based on the list I have seen--it is about six or seven or eight. I may be off a little bit on that count, but it is not a large number.
Here we are again, it is almost 12:30 p.m. and sitting here, potentially going to a quorum call. I am hearing again my colleagues say we have to stay on this bill and don't get off it. I am prepared to stay and work, but we cannot work when Members will not come over and at least allow us to vote up or down on rollcall votes on these amendments.
On Saturday, I submitted to my good friend from Alabama, Senator Shelby, and his staff a list of technical amendments, as well as bipartisan amendments and others that I thought were noncontroversial that we could make part of a managers' amendment. We can only do a managers' amendment when we get consent. Obviously, any objections to any of the suggestions I sent over on Saturday would exclude them from a managers' amendment.
It is now Wednesday, and I have not heard back whether we can subtract or add to those amendments. It would help tremendously to clean out a lot of issues on which I believe there is consensus.
I made it privately and I make a plea publicly. At some point, the leader is going to say enough is enough on the bill. We are trying to go back and forth in an orderly fashion so Members will have a chance, on either side of this so-called political divide, which I wish did not exist--even in this Chamber--for people to offer amendments. In a dead time such as this, the clock is ticking. We have no votes this Friday. We will not be in on Saturday or Sunday. We would like to move on to other issues.
We have taken a lot of time on this bill. I am a strong advocate of doing that to prove this body can function, we can consider each others' ideas, modify them, vote for them, vote against them but to do what we tell every high school class or elementary school class we talk to as Senators about how the Senate functions. I think we are proving we can do that on this bill, despite the significance of it--the first time in almost 100 years reforming the financial structure of our Nation.
My hope is we will continue and finish it without having to get involved in procedural motions that would deprive people of being heard on their ideas, whether you like it or not, but at least have the opportunity for it to come up.
I am trying to orchestrate the votes that relate to the matters with which we are dealing. It does not work perfectly. It is what every manager tries to do. I know some Members are frustrated because they have not been able to be heard yet on their ideas. I wish to give them an opportunity to do so.
When we get delays such as this, when the time could be filled on considering these matters, it sets us back from the goal of having a bill completed in this Congress where all Members have had a chance to be heard, that we were able to tackle a significant issue and come to a conclusion about it.
There are those who think we cannot do that any longer. I believe we can, and we have been proving it in the last couple weeks. After 2 weeks of a good, spirited, civil, in some cases partisan but civil debate, let us complete the work as we have begun it.
My plea to my colleagues, particularly on the minority side right now, is please respond to these requests so we can have some idea of what can be accepted, what can be modified and not accepted so we can move forward with the legislation.
I yield the floor.
Mr. President, if my colleague will yield for a minute, I thank the Senator from Arkansas. She is chairperson of the Agriculture Committee, which is a huge undertaking. Every State is affected by decisions made in that committee. Even small States in New England, contrary to what many people may think, have agricultural interests, maybe not to the extent of Oregon and Arkansas but we have them.
I am very grateful to her and members of her committee for the work they engaged in. We are truly fortunate to have the Senator from Arkansas in the position she is in--making decisions, providing valuable contributions, not just to this effort; we have worked together on a lot of issues over the years. She is a great advocate of her State, but I also say she is a great advocate of our country. That is the quality we hope people bring. We have an obligation to keep an eye out for what happens in our States but also to keep an eye out for what happens to our country. Striking that balance is a challenge we face at one time or another. No one does it better than the Senator from Arkansas, striking a balance.
I have heard that word about Arkansans over and over during her tenure. She is as tenacious a fighter as any State has had in my 30 years here. She is also mindful that Arkansas, similar to Connecticut, is part of a country, and we all have to be mindful of each other's interests. Striking that balance has been invaluable in this debate.
I did not want the moment to pass without thanking her immensely and her staff and others for the contributions they have made.
First, Mr. President, are we temporarily laying aside the Snowe-Landrieu? What is the pending amendment?
OK.
First, let me acknowledge the contributions of Senator Crapo to the Banking Committee efforts. While not endorsing the bill as it presently reads, he has been a valuable member of the committee for many years. I deeply appreciate his input. His ideas are always tremendously constructive in any debate we have. I thank him for that.
I have asked my staff to meet with his staff to try to clear up some things. I would like to be in a position of where we can accept the amendment. I am not trying to prejudice one over the other. We would like to keep some risk retention or good underwriting standards so the choice is there. We are not trying to impose both.
I know the staffs are talking. On page 2 of the amendment, beginning around line 18, paragraph (I), beginning ``retention of'' and then it lists three paragraphs and possibly a fourth. We are looking for some clarity on the meaning of ``the value of securities sold to investors or the interest of the seller in revolving assets.'' On those two, we particularly need some clarity on what that means. It seems vague to us as to how that would apply.
Rather than rush this along, we would like to take a few minutes and see if we can come to some resolution of that and possibly accept it. Senator Landrieu will have to come over. It is her amendment we are amending. We will see if we can reach accommodation and adopt it, if possible.
Let's take a few minutes and look at how we might work on this together. If we can come to a conclusion, I will be prepared to support the Senator's amendment. I am not trying to distinguish real estate from commercial. I realize there are some differences. They are different transactions, obviously, but the point is the same. We would like to make sure the securitization, on which the Senator is absolutely correct--I think these words become pejorative. When done well, it expands opportunities tremendously in terms of creating additional liquidity, making resources more available for more loans, home sales, and the like, providing there are sound underwriting principles involved so we are not getting ourselves into trouble again. That is why we have had an insistence on strong underwriting standards and risk retention, the old skin in the game. That is what risk retention means. If you have equity in it, you will be careful about what goes out the door and becomes securitized.
I am not interested in having risk retention if, in fact, we have good standards that apply and we don't end up where we were 2 years ago, discovering a lot of these instruments that got securitized ended up being worthless, even worse than worthless, in some cases, because of the problems they caused.
I respect where my colleague is coming from. If we can spend a few minutes and try and resolve this, then maybe we can come to some agreement. That would be my hope.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to temporarily lay aside the Landrieu-Isakson amendment.
Mr. President, I believe we are prepared to have a voice vote on the Snowe-Landrieu amendment, which is the pending amendment, if I am not mistaken.
Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to lay that motion on the table.
The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.
Mr. President, let me once again thank Senators Snowe and Landrieu for their very valuable contribution to this bill in more clearly refining and making it abundantly clear that merchants and retailers and others are not included as financial services or financial products companies and are not to be covered by the consumer financial product bureau. I am very appreciative to both of them for their contribution.
With that, Mr. President, I see my colleague from North Dakota is here, and I yield the floor.
Reserving the right to object, and I will not object at all, I have chatted with my friend, Senator Chambliss, as well. I know he is inquiring among his members, as is my colleague from Arkansas as well, about a time agreement on the Chambliss amendment.
My hope would be it would not take too long. I know that is the plea of every manager, majority and minority leader. So if they can inquire as soon as possible on a time. There are several other amendments tonight I think we will be able to deal with, some of which will not require any rollcall votes.
But, obviously, Members like to get some sense of when votes will occur. I am not trying to suggest we truncate anything. I know my colleagues agree that we need to find a time agreement. So I make that plea to both the chairman and the ranking member of the subcommittee.
With that, I have no objection.
I say to my good friend, he is on the list. We are going to try to get to that amendment as soon as we can. I promise the Senator that.
I thank my colleague.
Mr. President, let me begin by expressing my gratitude to Senator Lincoln of Arkansas and Senator Chambliss of Georgia and members of their committee for their tremendous work. In fact, there is some overlap in membership. I think a couple members of the Banking Committee are also members of the Agriculture Committee.
I know how hard they have worked on what is such a critically important piece of this legislation. It is probably an area with which a lot of people are not terribly familiar. A lot of the language we use in describing this area of the bill sounds pretty foreign to a lot of people, but it is terribly important we get this right, for reasons I will try to briefly explain this afternoon.
For many Americans who aren't necessarily experts on our financial system, this is one of the most confusing parts of our work, but it is also incredibly important in terms of our overall reform of the financial system. I am sure this has already been described by the Senator from Arkansas and the Senator from Georgia, so this may be somewhat repetitive.
People ask me: What is a derivative? It is a fancy word, ``derivative.'' Really, what it amounts to, in simple terms that most Americans can understand is, it is a bet. It is a wager, in a sense--an important wager but nonetheless a wager. It is a wager placed on the future value of something, either as a future protection against change in the
value of that instrument or a way to make some money off of it. It is a legitimate operation, provided it is done properly. There is nothing wrong with them. In fact, they play a very important role. If used responsibly as a way to hedge a commercial risk, they are tremendously important.
Many of us have heard about, for instance, the candymakers. We hear this example all the time. Candymakers are able to keep their costs stable as a production company through the use of derivatives. If you are an end user, as they are called, and your costs depend upon future prices of a commodity such as sugar or other additives, that is a way to stabilize those costs and provide some certainty to that particular company; or it can be the future direction of interest rates which can have a huge impact on the cost of a product and the success and well- being of a company as well.
Derivatives can serve as a form of insurance against an unexpected spike in either the price of a product or interest rates. But the problem is this: As companies have come up with new and innovative ways to use derivatives--and they have--much of this activity has taken place in the shadow economy where there is little sunlight at all to expose what these instruments are and how they affect the overall economy of our country. They operate outside the supervision of any regulator, and that is where the problems arise. Not in derivatives themselves, but how they are perceived, how they are seen.
That is how one night in September of 2008, I found myself, along with several other Members of this body, in a room not far from where this Chamber exists listening to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Mr. Benjamin Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson as they explained what had happened to AIG, the largest insurance company in the world, and what would need to happen to fix the problems posed by the activities in which the company was involved.
Just as some international corporations create shell companies in the Cayman Islands to avoid tax responsibilities, AIG created a subsidiary called AIG Financial Products to sell complex and risky products. It was thus able to take advantage of the fact that there was no regulatory requirement that AIG hold enough capital to cover its exposure to these products.
Meanwhile, because AIG was rated AAA by the rating agencies as a company, their counterparties didn't demand much in the way of collateral or margin. Essentially, AIG guaranteed other people's bets; that is, these counterparties--Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, a French bank--without having the money to pay them if those bets failed. AIG was able to do so without anyone knowing how many of these guarantees they had actually sold. As we now know, they sold trillions of dollars' worth. When it turned out that AIG couldn't pay up, our government--or more sadly, the American taxpayer--was left holding the bag. We were faced as a country with the unprecedented and unpleasant taxpayer bailout to prevent this shocking failure from bringing down our whole economy, or melting down as we were warned.
To make the problem worse, we now know AIG wasn't alone. Unregulated derivatives also helped to mask the credit-worthiness of nonfinancial users such as the Government of Greece. We all know about that and what has happened over the last few days and the problems created in Europe as a result of that problem, to their own ultimate or eventual detriment, as we now know. Hedge funds such as Long-Term Capital Management, energy companies such as Enron, industrial concerns such as Proctor and Gamble, and a wide array of governments at home and abroad have all fallen prey to the problems in the derivatives market.
I think the solution is becoming obvious--at least we hope it is--to put an end to risky, uncovered bets that leave taxpayers and our financial system as vulnerable as it has been. That is why capital and margin requirements, imposed either by regulators or by central clearinghouses, are so critically important in this area of our economy.
Chairman Bernanke of the Federal Reserve described margin requirements as ``an appropriate cost of protecting against counterparty risk.''
The sad truth is this solution has been obvious for some time. You don't need to have just the events of the last couple of years to understand this problem. You can go back 16 years ago. At that time, in 1994, the General Accounting Office produced a report entitled ``Financial Derivatives: Actions Needed to Protect the Financial System.''
At the time of their report, the General Accounting Office determined that the size of the derivatives market was $12.1 trillion--not an insignificant amount in 1994. The report described risks arising from the interconnected relationships between dealers of derivatives and end users, not to mention the rapid growth and increasing complexity of derivative activities because the relationships between the major derivatives dealers and end users, and the exchange-traded markets were so close, the failure of any one part of this system could prove devastating to our entire financial system. This, we knew in 1994, 16 years ago. That was their report.
By 2008, 16 years later, the derivatives market had grown from $12.1 trillion that I mentioned a few minutes ago to an astonishing $600 trillion in 16 years. In a related story, it had gone almost entirely underground.
Each time the Congress had a chance to act, it chose a legislative path that created even more loopholes, more opportunities for these risks to migrate to unregulated pockets of our economy. In 2000, the Congress passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act which, to a large extent, explicitly exempted over-the-counter derivatives from regulation by the CFTC and the SEC.
So whereas in 1998, 41 percent of derivatives were traded in the shadows, by 2008, 10 years later, that proportion grew to 60 percent-- almost a 20-percent increase in 10 years.
Essentially, over time, our financial system came up with more and more ways to take bigger and bigger risks with fewer and fewer safeguards and less and less supervision. That, of course, as we now painfully have learned, was a recipe for disaster, and disaster is what we got. That is why Chairman Lincoln, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Senator Judd Gregg, Senator Saxby Chambliss, and others of our colleagues have worked so hard over these last number of months to bring the derivatives market out of the shadows and into the sunlight where they belong. That is why the derivatives language in this bill is so critically important if we are going to live up to our descriptions of this bill as a major reform of the financial markets in our country.
For the first time in our Nation, over-the-counter derivatives would be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. It includes the Banking Committee's tough requirements for central clearing, exchange trading, capital margin, and reporting that are critical to reducing systemic risk and ensuring that taxpayers would not have to clean up the mess resulting from another AIG implosion.
I know the financial sector lobbyists don't like these rules. In fact, over 1,000 corporate lobbyists have flooded this town--this body, in fact--in an attempt to water down these proposals.
But Joe Dear, the chief investment officer of the California Public Employees Retirement System, explained it well when he said:
Every firm has reasons why its contracts are
``exceptional'' and should trade privately; in reality, most
derivatives contracts are standardized--or standardizable--
and could trade rather on exchanges.
Thanks to the work of Senator Lincoln and the Agriculture Committee, commercial end users have been carefully exempted from these new rules, so companies such as those candymakers I talked about can keep hedging their commercial risks. In fact, the market in which these companies operate will become safer and less expensive because of the new rules for big players: the swap dealers and major participants.
Those big players--the VIPs in the derivatives casino--will have to register with the SEC and CFTC and meet strict requirements for business capital, business conduct, and reporting.
Every single transaction will be reported through a clearinghouse or trade repository or directly to a regulator.
The SEC and CFTC will have enhanced authority to police these markets for fraud, manipulation, and abuse. Those don't sound like radical ideas. Those are commonsense proposals that I think most Americans can understand, even if they don't appreciate the complexities of these instruments.
The combination of these regulatory tools will provide market participants and investors with a lot more confidence during times of crisis, taxpayers with protection against the need to pay for mistakes made by companies, derivatives users with more price transparency and liquidity, and regulators, of course, with more information about the risks in the system.
Instead of an underground gambling club, derivatives will be traded in a well-regulated, transparent market, with rules that must be followed and safety provisions that must be respected.
Everyone is a winner. Derivatives are valuable and important, and we need to have them out there to help our economy grow. Why should some of these ideas be so frightening to people? It seems to me that if we do exactly what we are talking about here, everybody is a winner in the chain, particularly the derivatives users who will have much more clarity, and regulators and taxpayers are protected against abuses that will occur if we don't try to provide what is being proposed with this legislation. I welcome these improvements. Again, this is a debate back and forth.
Despite a lot of hard work between Members of this body to come to some common answers, there are differences that emerge in this debate. The substitute being offered by my friend from Georgia has no requirement for transparent trading and weakens, in my view, those safeguards for major market players.
It loosens capital requirements on the large Wall Street firms. That is a huge mistake, in my view, after what we have gone through that would practically beg for another AIG-type crisis.
The substitute limits the central clearing requirement to only those trades that take place between the very largest firms, providing a blanket carve-out to other financial firms, and letting much of the market continue to operate without the accountability, transparency, and regulation that I think is so critically important.
Unfortunately, there is sort of the status quo. There is some improvement. I acknowledge that. We have an opportunity to make a difference now with the proposals being made by the Agriculture Committee. The status quo is a system in which companies you have never heard of take risks they cannot back up in markets nobody can see.
When they collapse, as they inevitably will--one of the things we have said over and over again in this bill is that we are not going to stop the next economic crisis. We are going to have them. The question is, Do we have the tools in place to minimize collapses when they occur? That is what we are trying to do with this bill. Even with the Agriculture Committee proposals, I cannot imagine--and I am sure I am speaking for her when I say this--there is no suggestion that we are going to stop another company from having great difficulties. We want to minimize that when it happens so it doesn't migrate into the rest of the economy. So we are looking to minimize that kind of chaos that can occur when some company collapses for reasons unrelated to this, as we saw with AIG. When they fell, the price the country paid was vastly in excess of one company having difficulties. Taxpayers were put on the hook to fill the capital holes when they occurred.
This has to stop. This market needs oversight and regulation. It needs to exist, as well, if our economy is going to grow and jobs are to be created. It has been 18 months since AIG proved that once and for all. It is time to bring this trail of destruction to an end and take the steps necessary to allow this market to operate and people to make these kinds of investments and hedge against the kinds of problems that can emerge down the road, so they don't collapse for reasons unrelated to their own difficulties.
That is why hedging is important and why derivatives are important. But also, these safeguards need to be in place if everyone is going to be a winner, as a result of what we are trying to achieve with this legislation. There are debates about various aspects of this bill, and I look forward to that discussion.
I hope we will reject this particular proposal, with all due respect to it, and adopt what has been proposed by the Agriculture Committee and consider that there are additional changes we may work on in order to satisfy some legitimate interests. It seems to me we ought to vote on this proposal and move on to other aspects of the legislation.
With that, I yield the floor. I see my friend from Nebraska as well as my colleague from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, if I could have the attention of our colleagues to give them some sense of things.
Senator Reed and Senator Brown of Massachusetts have an amendment which will take just a very few minutes to discuss, and then they would like to have a vote on that, which we have agreed to. At the conclusion, that would be the last vote of the evening.
Then the next amendment would be the Sessions amendment. Senator Sessions has agreed to debate his amendment tonight. We will vote on that in the morning. Senator Specter would be the following amendment and we will debate his amendment this evening and vote on that tomorrow as well. Senator Collins, I know, has an amendment and she can debate, if she would, this evening and we will try and
line that up in the morning so we have a series of votes when we come in.
So the last vote today would be on the Reed-Brown amendment, if Members would stay around for just a few minutes to hear that, and then we could be free of any more votes. At least that is the plan.
I strongly support the amendment offered by our two colleagues from New England, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Senator Brown of Massachusetts. Both of these colleagues speak with some authority on this amendment. Jack Reed is a graduate of West Point and served in uniform for our country for a number of years with great distinction. Senator Brown has spent some 30 years in the National Guard in Massachusetts and also speaks with more than just passing authority about the importance of the amendment they offer.
It is a very important amendment because it sets the table for a debate tomorrow regarding a certain area of finance companies. The amendment establishes an Office of Military Liaison within the consumer bureau we have created in the overall legislation.
In today's New York Times, there was a description of the case of Matthew Garcia, a 25-year-old Army specialist who was recently subjected to a trick called yo-yo financing by an unscrupulous car dealer, just as he was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. According to the story, Specialist Garcia, stationed at Fort Hood, TX, bought an automobile at a used car lot and signed up for a loan at a 19.9-percent interest rate. That is not even the abuse, believe it or not, as high as that rate is. The problem came when Specialist Garcia drove the car home. The dealer called Specialist Garcia several days later to say that the financing contract had actually fallen through and demanded an additional $2,500 in cash. To make sure he paid up, the dealer blocked the soldier's car in so that no one could leave. That is the way some-- few but some--auto dealers are treating our men and women in uniform. That is why we need the Office of Military Liaison within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Unfortunately, the story of Specialist Garcia is not unique. It is all too common, whether it is in the area of auto financing, payday lending, mortgage lending, check cashing, these unregulated areas of finance so many of our fellow citizens are subjected to on an hourly basis, let alone a daily one.
Creating an office within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to focus on the problems of our young men and women in the military and their families is an important contribution to this legislation. I thank both of our colleagues for offering this proposal.
The office we are creating with this amendment will help resolve many of the complaints brought to the office by our service men and women. It will help advise the director of the bureau's rule writing to take into account the special needs of military families. By doing this, it will help our military readiness as well.
I have letters from the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army, sent to me and to other Members, laying out the value of having some protection within the automobile financing area.
It is important we have this language in the bill. Let me emphasize as well that unfortunately we are not talking about many auto dealers that engage in financing that cause these problems, but, like most laws on the books, if they were only written because there were a majority of people committing the offenses, it would be hard to make the case against them. But we don't write laws for the many; we write laws for the few, those who will abuse their offices, abuse their operations in such a way as to cause harm to people who otherwise have no protection.
I have talked a lot about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the last number of days. The importance of this is that for the first time in the history of our country, individuals who are taken advantage of in the financial services sector will have someplace to seek redress for the grievances to which they have been subjected. I don't think this is a radical idea, particularly in light of what so many of our fellow citizens have been through over the last several years where homes have been lost, jobs lost, the tremendous abuse that has occurred in too many of the areas of what I call the shadow economy, the unregulated areas of our economy.
The most important purchase the average American makes is buying a home, and we all know what can happen, as we have seen with brokers and mortgage lenders who were unregulated taking advantage of people by getting them into situations they knew they couldn't afford. People say it ought to be buyer beware. I don't argue with that. Obviously, we all bear responsibility to be better informed about financial arrangements. But to suggest this is a level playing field when it comes to home mortgages or car financing is to belie the facts. The analogy may not be perfect, but it has some value.
We don't expect patients necessarily to be as well informed when they are making decisions about their health care. There is something called medical malpractice. Obviously, we have an obligation to ask questions before we submit ourselves to surgery or other things. But we know in the end that if a doctor has abused the Hippocratic Oath and put a patient at risk, there is an ability to seek redress of those harms. It is called medical malpractice. It allows a person who has been injured or harmed because of the misfeasance or malfeasance of someone in the medical profession to get recovery. We understand it is not exactly a level playing field when the average person is trying to make intelligent decisions about their medical care.
The same could be said for mortgage lending. You can't expect the average person to understand all of the details, necessarily, involved. I suggest there is a higher degree of responsibility in the area of mortgage financing by a borrower than there would be necessarily in the case of medical malpractice, but nonetheless there are some legitimate comparisons.
Some have suggested mortgage malpractice may be an appropriate description for what happens when you are across that table from a lender. You have picked out the home you have fallen in love with. Your family is excited about this new place. In many instances, it is the first home you are buying. The idea that you will have your own home to raise your family in is a very emotional time. That lender across the table who is being unscrupulous in his or her behavior can extract commitments, and so forth, from that borrower that could put them at a distinct advantage. We believe in those instances there should be good underwriting standards by law. And if there is some harm done through the misfeasance or malfeasance of someone in the mortgage lending business, you can get some redress when that occurs.
Car financing is not the same as a home mortgage, but if you are an 18- or 19-year-old young person in uniform and you find that automobile you love and you are so attracted to it--I am not suggesting borrowers don't have a responsibility to be well informed--most Americans know what happens. All of a sudden, you end up like Specialist Garcia. You think you have bought the automobile. And at 19, almost 20 percent financing, that in itself ought to be illegal. But the fact that you then find you have a $2,500 extra charge and the wheels have been blocked so you can't drive away--that is the kind of individual who ought not to be allowed to continue to operate under those circumstances.
We believe when it comes to financing such as this we should not say to one sector: You are exempt; we will carve you out; you don't have to worry about any of the laws.
We make that local banker, who also might like to extend that loan, subject to the law's protections. The credit union is subject to the same laws. Why should someone engaged in the financing of a product--an automobile--be exempt? The local bank isn't. They
have to meet their requirements under the law to make sure they are not abusing--not that many do but some do--the rights of an individual and protect them from a disadvantage in that second largest purchase a person may make aside from their home.
I know tomorrow there will be a debate. Senator Brownback will offer an amendment to exempt auto dealers and financing. Auto dealers are not covered. If you are a dealer, you are not affected by this any more than you are if you are a butcher or a dentist or any other retailer merchant. If you are in the financing business, you are the one who is engaging in that contract despite the fact the papers may have been written up by some other lender that is doing business with the auto dealer. Shouldn't we provide to that individual the same kind of protection they would expect if they went to the local bank, the community bank to get a car loan or to the credit union to get a car loan? We require them to meet basic rules, not exaggerated rules but basic protections so you are not taken advantage of.
I have a wonderful relationship with the auto dealers in my State. I fought hard for them last year. The program we had on the clunkers that allowed for people to turn in older automobiles, I fought hard for that. I have a great relationship. In fact, they offered me a nice award last year for my efforts on behalf of auto dealers in my State. I am very proud of it. The overwhelming majority of my dealers, as I know is the case in all of our States, do a good job and are fair. They wouldn't be in business very long if they did not. But all of us also know there are people who take advantage. Certainly to be exempt from any kind of rulemaking when it comes to protecting people ought not to be the decision we are making.
Here we have the Reed-Brown amendment that says we will establish within the office of consumer financial protection an office to protect the men and women in uniform from the abuses of people who would take advantage of them. Then less than 24 hours later we write an exemption and take away one of the major problems these young men and women have. What an irony. What is this institution saying? On the one hand, we say our young men and women in uniform ought to be protected from people who take advantage of them. Then less than 24 hours later we say: But, by the way, in a major area of abuse that occurs, you are exempt. Don't worry about it. The law doesn't apply to you. I am sorry, Mr. Community Banker. I am sorry, Mr. Local Credit Union. You will have to live by the rules. So there is a great disadvantage at the local level. The community bankers and credit unions are rightfully annoyed that they may be subjected to one set of rules and the person down the street who finances an automobile for an unsuspecting purchaser is exempt. That doesn't make any sense to me.
I hope that tomorrow my colleagues will react as I am to this. Again, I am not in any way indicting automobile dealers--quite the contrary. They have been through an awful lot. They have seen the struggle with major problems of the industry in this country. We made major efforts here to get them back on their feet. I am proud to have been involved in that, to see to it we restore and maintain a strong manufacturing sector in our country of automobile dealerships and manufacturers. But to turn around at the local level and say: I will give you a pass on those who would abuse the law and take advantage of people--in fact, it is an invitation to do it. It seems to me, by carving this out, we are not just sending a message to those who are presently engaging in this but to those who may decide this isn't a bad area of business in which to get involved.
The local bank has to meet those obligations and the local credit union or some other financing operation covered under our legislation. Now we will no longer have shadow operators. We cover payday lenders. We cover the check-cashing operations involved in financial services or products. But in the second largest purchase the average American ever makes, you are going to be exempt from any of the laws involving consumer protection when it comes to financing.
I know there is a lot of pressure, a lot of lobbying going on all over the place to carve out this exception. But I urge my colleagues to please be careful about this, to walk in tomorrow and to basically gut the Reed-Brown amendment by saying in this one major area of abuse-- read the letter from Secretary Gates. Read the letter from the Secretary of the Army. Listen to our colleagues who are listening to the people on their military bases in the respective States, what goes on every single day by those who take advantage of people who are in uniform.
I urge my colleagues, tomorrow, when we have an opportunity to debate the Brownback amendment, not be lured away from their support of putting an office within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and basically gut the very bureau before the ink is dry on the amendment by allowing for a massive exception which would allow for consumers, particularly men and women in uniform, to be taken advantage of.
Mr. President, I yield to the minority leader.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent, if I may, that the pending amendments be set aside and that it be in order to call up the following amendments and that once reported by number, they be set aside:
Senator Leahy's amendment No. 3823; Senator Durbin's amendment No. 3932, and Senator Franken's amendment No. 3808.
Mr. President, at some point fairly soon, I hope to be able to--at the request of the authors of the two amendments--propose two amendments I believe will be accepted. In fact, I know they will be accepted on a voice vote. There is some language being worked out. That will come before we adjourn for the evening.
We have also laid down--I believe there will be nine amendments tomorrow, equally divided between the minority and the majority, including the amendment we just heard proposed by my good friend from Alabama, Senator Sessions, along with others. It will be a busy day tomorrow.
Today we have done eight amendments, by the time we are finished, which is a good day's work. Obviously, more needs to be done. Five of them were done by recorded votes and three by voice votes. We hope they will be voice-voted.
I want to take a minute or so, if I may, to express my feelings about the Sessions amendment. First of all, I am joined in these sentiments by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy, who opposes the Sessions amendment as well. Let me explain why I oppose this amendment.
I say this respectfully of Senator Sessions, who is a good friend. I noticed in his remarks he did not cite any bankruptcy lawyers opposed to the provisions in the bill. I am not terribly shocked that bankruptcy lawyers would be opposed to a provision in the bill short of bankruptcy, although the presumption is bankruptcy in titles I and II.
If my colleagues remember, it was the Shelby-Dodd amendment which we voted on a week ago--several days ago--that took care of the concerns people had about title I and title II of the bill which deals with the resolution mechanisms. Senators Corker and Warner worked very hard on those two provisions of the bill, as other members of the committee did. I want to briefly describe why those provisions are important and why they should remain intact.
Of course, we voted as a Senate 93 to 5 in favor of the Shelby-Dodd amendment, codifying the perfections, as Senator Shelby described them, in those two titles.
I oppose the Sessions amendment to strike the language creating an orderly liquidation authority, language, as I said, that Senator Shelby and I crafted together in order to end the too-big-to-fail argument once and for all. Most nonbank financial firms, including large and complex ones, will go through the normal bankruptcy process if they fail, and they should. That is the presumption in the bill.
The new liquidation authority Senator Shelby and I crafted should be
used very rarely. It is a painful process to go through and would certainly not be the avenue of choice given the implications. We have put in some very high hurdles to trigger its use, including judicial review.
Moreover, the advance warning systems that we have included in our bill, and the tough new standards we impose on large financial companies, will put in place speed bumps so these companies slow down and become less risky and, therefore, avoid the very issue of bankruptcy or resolution. Early on we try to minimize those events from occurring.
When there is a financial crisis, however, bankruptcy may not be the best option. The experience of 2008, especially the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and its disastrous effects on our financial markets and our economy, has taught us we need a workable alternative to bankruptcy for the largest, most interconnected financial firms and that the alternative could not and should not be a bailout. Given the choices now, it is just bankruptcy or bailout. We tried to create an alternative under rare circumstances for a resolution mechanism.
Throughout 2009, the Banking Committee heard testimony from administration and other financial regulators, experts, stakeholders, and others who all agree the bankruptcy framework is poorly equipped to protect the Nation's financial stability if a very large and complex and interconnected financial firm goes under.
Why do we say that? It can be with a large financial firm that is interconnected there are many good, solid firms--it may be that a large interconnected firm will have an effect on some very solvent, well-run firms. Bankruptcy could bring all of these well-run companies down to their knees. None of us wants to be part of that. So we need an alternative other than just bailing out that firm when confronted with that kind of a choice.
If the only two choices are bankruptcy, which could take a lot of firms and businesses that are solid, well run, well managed, producing jobs, contributing to our economy--that is the alternative. Those firms then would be adversely and, unfortunately, affected through a bankruptcy process or bailout. Of course, no one wants to write a check for $700 billion again to bail out firms that are failing. The idea of a resolution mechanism under rare circumstances is the alternative choice which we collectively--Democrats and Republicans--after the long work of this committee believed was the alternative in our bill.
The Sessions amendment fails to recognize the fundamental difference between the new liquidation authority and bankruptcy. The new liquidation authority is intended to be an emergency exception to bankruptcy. The presumption, again, is bankruptcy. That is where we begin. But if under these rare circumstances that alternative would do more damage to the overall economy, despite our feelings about a mismanaged company, we need to have an alternative.
The new liquidation authority is intended to be an emergency exception to bankruptcy when necessary to protect the financial stability, the overall stability of the United States, and not to protect irresponsible creditors.
The Sessions amendment, like today's bankruptcy framework, is focused on protecting and repaying creditors of a failed financial firm. It does not provide the tools we need to protect taxpayers from the devastating effects of the next Lehman Brothers. That is why Senator Shelby and I sought to create a liquidation process that would provide for the orderly wind-down of large, complex financial institutions, while still forcing shareholders to be wiped out, culpable management to be fired, and creditors to bear losses, in addition to a prohibition against those very managers who caused the failure from being involved for years afterwards in the financial services sector of our economy.
That is a rough road--shareholders get wiped out, creditors suffer, management gets fired, and they are banned from being involved in financial services. That is tough medicine if, in fact, they go the resolution route under our bill. But we need to have at least some mechanism other than just the two terrible alternatives of bankruptcy, that could cause broader financial problems, or a bailout. This is why Senator Shelby and I sought to create this liquidation process.
Any payments under our bill to creditors above liquidation value will be clawed back, and large financial companies will be assessed, as necessary, to ensure that taxpayers do not lose a penny.
You may recall the debate we had about prepayment or postpayment. We had originally, at the suggestion of my Republican colleagues, a $50 billion upfront assessment on large institutions. Then there was a change of heart by many, and they said: No, you cannot have that out there because that looks like you are providing for a resolution mechanism rather than bankruptcy; the optics of that do not look good. I was never overly committed to that idea. The only reason I included it in the further draft of the bill is because I thought it brought Republican support to the legislation.
The irony is, some of the very people who were advocates of it one day changed their minds. So we took it out of the bill.
The thing I wanted to make sure of was that taxpayers would not be exposed. The House-passed legislation has $150 billion in a prepayment fund. Again, I heard my good friend from Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, say he would like to take it out as well in light of some of the allegations made about the bill. We took that out. I know my colleague from Alabama referenced that and may not have been aware that was one of the provisions in the Shelby-Dodd amendment, to remove that prepayment fund created in the earlier draft of the bill.
Striking the orderly liquidation authority, as the Sessions amendment would, would do just the opposite of what the amendment's sponsors intend. It would ensure we face a repeat of the unacceptable choices between a disastrous bankruptcy where innocent, solvent, well-run companies could be caught in the vortex and drawn down and destroyed in the process or writing that big check that Americans are furious over. So we created this resolution authority to be used under very rare circumstances.
The Senate, of course, supported our proposal, the Shelby-Dodd approach, by a vote of 93 to 5. I urge my colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, to reaffirm their support for ending the too-big-to- fail concept by rejecting the Sessions amendment.
I say that respectfully of my colleague of Alabama. He has been a longstanding member of the Judiciary Committee. He knows these issues well. And I understand his concerns. But I believe as Senator Leahy will speak to, either directly or indirectly, this would do great damage to this bill and expose us once again to that taxpayer bailout, which none of us wants whatsoever. Because if bankruptcy would cause greater harm for our economy than the failure of one company, then what are we left with if we reject that idea and we are back to the bailout scenario? None of us wants to be in that situation ever again.
I urge, when the vote occurs tomorrow, that we reject the Sessions amendment. Stick with what we have written in this bill--which occurred over many months, by the way. This was not drafted over a weekend, I can tell you that. We have gone back literally months trying to get this right and listen to literally hundreds of people who brought their expertise and knowledge of this process to the table. It was purely a bipartisan effort in our committee, along with others, to craft the first two titles of our bill.
I urge, again, the rejection of the Sessions amendment when it occurs.
Amendments Nos. 3989 and 3991
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Durbin and Franken amendments be considered withdrawn, and that the Durbin amendment No. 3989 and the Franken amendment No. 3991 be considered called up in their place.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now resume consideration of the Landrieu amendment No. 3956 and the Crapo amendment No. 3992; that the Landrieu amendment be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that the Crapo amendment, No. 3992, be modified with the changes at the desk; that the amendment, as modified, be considered and agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be made and laid upon the table.
Mr. President, again, I want to take a moment and express my gratitude to my colleagues. I want to thank Senator Landrieu. She was involved in a lot of this, so I want to thank her immensely for her contribution. She chairs the Small Business Committee of the Senate and she and my very good friend from Georgia, Johnny Isakson, crafted a very good amendment, which we just adopted. It is going to make our whole section dealing with underwriting a very important part of this bill, and I thank them for that.
I want to thank Senator Mike Crapo from Idaho, my colleague on the Banking Committee. He made a very constructive suggestion to this part of the bill. I want to thank his staff as well and the staff of Senator Landrieu, who did a very good job in working through the language this afternoon that allowed us to come to this conclusion. They both couldn't be here at this particular moment, late in the evening, so I am speaking on their behalves, but I thank them both.
Again, this is exactly what we are trying to achieve in this bill-- which I know is taking a lot of time on the floor of the Senate--with the contributions of Republicans and Democrats--people such as Johnny Isakson and Mike Crapo, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and so many others who have contributed to this product. We are dealing with a very complex area but a critically needed one for our Nation.
We are getting closer and closer to final passage of this bill. We have more amendments to consider, but my hope is that in the next few days we can wrap up the remaining amendments and have our opportunity to vote--to debate on these matters and then get to the point where we can cast our ballots in favor of what I hope will be an overwhelming vote in favor of financial reform in this legislation.
Tomorrow, as I mentioned earlier, there will be some nine amendments, at least, that we have set up for debate. I will be looking for time agreements on them. For those who may be listening at this late hour in their respective offices, I would urge them to work with us on time agreements, if they want a decent amount of time, but please do not ask for exaggerated amounts of time. There are still many more amendments to consider.
We are going to be here on Friday. We won't have votes on Friday, but I will want to get to all these matters. There will be amendments voted on tomorrow, and additional amendments before we finish tomorrow evening, and then on Friday I will be here to listen to debate, maybe lay down a remaining amendment to be considered on Monday when we come back.
My hope is that by Tuesday, no later than Tuesday--at the max maybe Wednesday--we could have final passage on this bill. I know there are other matters the majority leader wants to handle, and I can't thank him enough for providing the kind of window that has allowed this Senate to operate without tabling motions. We have only had one. We haven't had any second-degree amendments on any amendment so far, and no filibusters involved at all on a very major piece of legislation.
As I said earlier today, all of us at one time or another talk to students in our respective States, and they ask us about how the Senate functions, and we usually describe exactly what has happened. The unfortunate part is that it rarely does happen in this way. We are not done yet, so I realize we have not completed the process. But this is how this institution was intended to operate. People have a right to offer their amendments, to be heard, to debate them, and then to vote on critical issues facing our country. I never thought a few weeks ago we might actually get to this point where we are engaging in the business of the Senate, offering amendments, debating them, trying to modify where we can to agree on how best to do this.
There are 100 of us here trying to craft a piece of legislation that affects 300 million of our fellow citizens in this Nation, not to mention others beyond our own shores because we are setting rules by which we are going to operate. My hope is that these rules will be harmonized with others around the world so we can avoid the kind of catastrophes occurring in Europe as I speak here, as well as the problems that have emerged in the Asian markets and elsewhere. So this is more than just an ordinary undertaking.
Yesterday, in speaking to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, he notified me during one of our debates that the central bankers of Europe, because of the availability of technology, were literally watching and monitoring the debate here on the floor of the Senate about a critical issue as it was occurring. That is how the world has changed. Today, the actions we take here not only affect what happens in our own country but elsewhere as well. This is a major undertaking, and I can't begin to express my gratitude to my fellow colleagues for the manner in which they have conducted this debate.
My thanks to majority leader Harry Reid in particular. Only through the majority leader can you create an environment that allows this to happen. That is the leadership that Harry Reid has demonstrated over and over and over again in his stewardship as the majority leader of this body. Again, with all the other things he has to grapple with and deal with--many other issues to confront here--this is the kind of leadership the American people expect to see, and he is providing it for our country.
Again, I thank as well my colleague from Alabama, Senator Shelby, the ranking member, for his work and the staffs' work. Again I thank the floor staff and others in their respective offices.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following article be printed in the Record.