Floor Statements

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act of 2009. I want to thank Senators Alexander, Whitehouse, Lautenberg, and Kerry for joining me for this introduction.

Food allergies are an increasing food safety and public health concern in this country, especially among young children. I know first- hand just how frightening food allergies can be in a young person's life. My own family has been personally touched by this troubling condition and we continue to struggle with it each and every day. Sadly, there is no cure for food allergies.

The number of Americans with food allergies is on the rise. From 1997 to 2007 the prevalence of food allergies among children increased by 18 percent. Today, 3 million children in the United States have a food allergy. While food allergies were at one time considered relatively infrequent, they now rank third among common chronic diseases in children under 18 years of age. Peanuts are among several allergenic foods that can produce life-threatening allergic reactions in susceptible children. Peanut allergies doubled among school-age children from 1997-2002.

Clearly, food allergies are of great concern for school-age children nationwide, and yet, there are no federal guidelines concerning the management of life-threatening food allergies in our nation's schools.

I have heard from parents, teachers and school administrators that students with severe food allergies often face inconsistent food allergy management approaches when they change

schools. Too often, families are not aware of the food allergy policy at their children's school, or the policy is vastly different from the one they knew at their previous school, and they are left wondering whether their child is safe.

In 2006, Connecticut became the first State to enact school-based guidelines concerning food allergies and the prevention of life- threatening incidents in schools. I am very proud of these efforts, and I know that the parents of children who suffer from food allergies in Connecticut have confidence that their children are safe throughout the school day. I had the opportunity to visit with students and parents at Washington Elementary School in West Haven, CT, last May who shared with me their schools' comprehensive plan for its students with food allergies.

Nine other States, including Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont, New Jersey, Arizona, Michigan, New York, Washington, and Maryland have enacted statewide guidelines. But too many States across the country have food allergy management guidelines that are inconsistent from one school district to the next. The result is a patchwork of guidelines that not only may vary from State to State, but also from school district to school district.

In my view, this lack of consistency underscores the need for enactment of uniform, federal guidelines that school districts can choose to adopt and implement. For this reason, my colleague Senator Alexander and I are introducing the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Management Act of 2009 today to address the growing need for uniform and consistent school-based food allergy management policy. I thank Senator Alexander for his hard work and commitment to this important legislation.

Mr. President, the bill we are introducing today closely mirrors legislation I introduced last Congress which was cosponsored by 41 of my colleagues. Last May, I, along with Senator Alexander, chaired a hearing in our Children and Families Subcommittee exploring the current state of food allergies and the challenges parents of children with food allergies face.

Since that hearing, Senator Alexander and I have been working with members on both sides of the aisle to address any concerns they had with the legislation. As a result, the legislation we are introducing today reflects many excellent suggestions and changes offered by my colleagues. It is my sincere hope that the Senate will move quickly on this bipartisan legislation this year.

The legislation does two things. First, it directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to develop and make available voluntary food allergy management guidelines for preventing exposure to food allergens and assuring a prompt response when a student suffers a potentially fatal anaphylactic reaction. The guidelines developed by the Secretary are voluntary, not mandatory. Under the legislation, each school district or early childhood education program across the country can voluntarily choose to implement these guidelines. The intent of the legislation is not to mandate individual school policy, but rather to provide for consistency of policies relating to school-based food allergy management by providing schools with consistent guidelines at the federal level.

Second, the bill provides for incentive grants to school districts to assist them with adoption and implementation of the federal government's allergy management guidelines in all K-12 public schools.

I would like to recognize the leadership of Congresswoman Nita Lowey who is introducing companion legislation today in the House of Representatives. She has been a longstanding champion for children and for awareness of the devastating impact of food allergies. I also wish to acknowledge and offer my sincere appreciation to the members of the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network for their commitment to this legislation and for raising public awareness, providing advocacy, and advancing research on behalf of all individuals who suffer from food allergies.

This legislation is supported by the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, and many others.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill and a letter of support be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to speak about the agreement that was reached a day or so ago by conferees on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the inclusion of two priorities of mine in particular.

Before I give the substance of my remarks, let me commend the leadership of the Senate and the House as well as the Members on both sides of the so-called political divide in this Chamber and elsewhere who helped put this together. I know there were many who obviously did not want this bill to pass and who have spoken against it. Most, I believe, feel that inaction is unacceptable. We may have significant disagreements about what should have been included in this package-- whether it is stimulative enough; whether the size of the package itself will provide the necessary jolt to our economy to have us moving in a better direction than the one we are obviously in. I happen to believe we are doing the right thing by doing this. I don't take any great joy or pleasure in the fact we are doing it, any more than I did when we had the vote last fall on the emergency economic stabilization effort. That was no great moment of joy either.

Normally when we pass legislation, we are directly helping some group or helping the country in some way. These efforts obviously help, but they help us get out of a mess we are in, one that, in my view, could have been avoided. This was not a natural disaster that occurred in our country; this was a manmade disaster--inattention, misfeasance, malfeasance that allowed this country to watch the greatest economy in the history of mankind evaporate in the pockets of many overnight. Job losses--20,000 a day--with our fellow citizens finding themselves without an income. Nine thousand to

ten thousand homes a day are foreclosing in our country. Retirements are evaporating within minutes. People who have spent years accumulating, to be able to enjoy the latter years of their lives in some peace and comfort and security, knowing they can take care of themselves and their loved ones as they step out of the workforce and enjoy a well-deserved period of retirement, are now in jeopardy. People may have to stay at work, if they can find work, at an older age in our country.

So while I am pleased this bill is going through and pleased that my State will be the beneficiary of some help at this particular hour, I don't take any great pleasure in this moment at all; quite the contrary. It saddens me that it has come to this. So with that as a framework, I wish to share some thoughts about what is in this bill and why I think it can be of some help to get us moving in the right direction.

Most Americans I think are aware now that our economy has been in a recession for the last 14 months or so and has impacted every State differently. My State of Connecticut is no exception. While the effects of the recession took a bit longer to hit my State than others, economists believe Connecticut may take longer to recover for a variety of unique reasons, including the kinds of jobs we provide and the like. We have lost about 125,000 jobs in my State. Close to 20,000 homes have been foreclosed on. One of my cities alone, the city of Bridgeport, has had 1,100 foreclosures--one city, 1,100 foreclosures. That means our efforts to get our economy moving in this bill are going to be important to families all across the country, and certainly my State is no exception.

We are addressing many priorities with this economic recovery package, providing urgent help to communities who are struggling in the midst of this recession while making a downpayment on long-term needs as the new President, President Obama, has articulated in Indiana, in Florida, and in Illinois, where he has spoken in townhall meetings about this over the last several days, as he did in his first nationally televised press conference. At a time when layoffs are increasing the rolls of the uninsured, this bill provides $24 billion in health care premium assistance to 7 million unemployed workers. I can't begin to tell my colleagues how important that is.

I have held two townhall meetings in my State in the last two weeks on health care. I had one at 8:30 on a Monday morning, which is a dreadful time to hold a townhall meeting, obviously. We anticipated maybe 75 people might show up at the small community college on the banks of the Connecticut River outside of Hartford. Well, 700 people showed up at 8:30 in the morning to talk about health care and to talk about what they are going through. The discussion was supposed to be about coverage. Specifically, we had three themes: one on coverage, one on costs, and one on prevention. But the conversation was far beyond the issue of coverage. Seven hundred people showing up at 8:30 in the morning. These are people who either didn't have coverage--most had coverage, but couldn't afford the 42-percent increase in premiums they have seen in the last 6 years.

Then, last Saturday at Western Connecticut State University at 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon--not exactly, again, an optimum time for a townhall meeting--500 people showed up to express their views and to listen to some professionals in the field talk about what they thought ought to be included in a comprehensive universal health care program, one I hope that will be charting a course and moving forward very quickly. I know my great friend from Montana, the chairman of the Finance Committee, Max Baucus, is already deeply involved. Senator Ted Kennedy has been a champion of this issue for decades. While he is struggling with his own health issues, he is on the phone every day, talking to everybody, and he wants his committee to be deeply involved in this effort as well.

But in the midst of it, until that gets done, more and more people-- the 20,000 a day who lose their jobs--if they had health care are losing that as well. So the fact that we are providing $26 billion to help out unemployed workers at a time such as this, I think most Americans--most; not all, but most Americans--would say that is the right thing for our country to do for hard-working people who, through no fault of their own, may find themselves on an unemployment line today, tomorrow, or next week, to know of the fear and fright that you may have a health care crisis with you or your family and all of a sudden don't have the capacity to deal with it.

These people didn't lose their jobs because of something they did wrong and should not be put in a position where their ability to take care of their families regarding their health care needs will be disregarded.

To ensure that people have safe, affordable shelter during these tough economic times, there is a $4 billion downpayment on an estimated $30 billion backlog for capital repair needs in public housing. A lot of people are falling behind out there. That will put people to work, and that is the major goal here.

As we see families struggling to make ends meet, I am proud and pleased that people in Connecticut will receive over a billion dollars in Medicaid assistance. Every State in the country and every Governor has asked for assistance in this area. We have a program called the HUSKY Program--our Medicaid Program. It is strongly supported across the political spectrum. This assistance will help out in that area.

I am glad we were able to include assistance for our fire first responders. Fire departments in my State are reporting they are turning down awarded what they call SAFER grants--funds used to put additional people on these rigs. You ought to have at least four people in a rig when going out to deal with these fires and problems they have to face. Those numbers are dwindling. This bill provides assistance and support for first responders. I am pleased to say that is the case.

We included $8.8 billion in stabilization funds to States to provide for public safety and other critical services. That was a change--a welcome one.

Across our State, from city to town, communities faced with budget deficits are crunching the numbers to maintain critical education, police, firefighter jobs, and services.

In East Hartford, CT, the town was forced to lay off 8 municipal employees and eliminate 11 positions that were vacant or will be vacant because of retirements--including firefighters and police officers.

The city of Stamford was counting on $500,000 in State assistance that was eliminated in the State budget in the last several days for the city's $16 million overhaul of their police and fire radio systems, and that interoperability will get help.

The communities of Farmington and Colchester are trying to replace decade-old fire engines.

These stabilization funds will help communities in my State, and others across the country, to prevent layoffs of first responders, firefighters and police officers, which are so critical to the well- being of our communities.

Our communities' safety must not get left behind during this economic downturn. While the comprehensive economic recovery package before us today will provide critical support for a broad range of additional needs, there are three issues I want to focus on today.

First, I wish to highlight an amendment I authored to restrict executive compensation and bonuses. I have to thank the majority leader, his staff, and others, for making its inclusion a priority. On executive compensation, let me say that when the American people wake up in the morning and see some institution just received billions of dollars and you have a headline that 700 employees received income in excess of a million dollars, people ask themselves: What are you thinking of?

The idea that we continue to pour billions of dollars into institutions that are still awarding their employees massive amounts of income is infuriating--and that hardly describes the reaction of the American people. This is about trying to save an economy in our country, with 20,000 people losing their jobs every day. I promise you that the overwhelming majority of these people are making nothing like a million dollars a year or $500,000 a year. They are earning $40,000, 50,000 to raise a family of four. When they see their tax dollars going out the door and

into institutions that are then, in some cases, not lending but are hoarding and doing other things, I cannot begin to describe the anger we hear. Then we turn around and say to that taxpayer that we need to have them step up and do more because the economy needs assistance. The American public really reacts to this.

If you have hope of convincing the public we are on the right track-- I see my colleague from Alaska, and I know she has time constraints.

I am digressing from the text, but, again, I find it incredible that people are calling up and bellowing about this, how upset they are that we have asked for some constraints in this area. Do they have any idea what is going on? I am mesmerized that people are calling up and bellowing because somehow they are going to be asked to be restrained from providing these exorbitant incomes for some people.

This country is hurting. This is the deepest financial crisis we have had in many years in America, and they are worried about their pay. Our system of economy is at risk these days, and we will be judged by history as to whether we can respond intelligently to it. To be preoccupied over whether someone is going to get a bonus of--whatever it is, is misplaced energy and attention. It is stunning that the very people in the communities who are directly involved in this and the conception are the ones calling about that issue.

The stories we have seen in recent weeks about CEOs giving themselves bonuses and spa vacations on the taxpayer dime after they have been rescued by the taxpayer infuriate the public, and they ought to.

Families in Connecticut have lost everything as a result of this financial crisis. They don't have jobs, health care, their retirement, and they may have lost their homes. When they hear about the complaints coming out of these towers of financial success--about pay cuts--after all these people have gone through, they deserve better than having to put up with the behavior from some of the most fortunate among us, who have made many of the decisions that got us into this crisis.

I have said again and again that if your institution is receiving funds through TARP and at the same time paying out lucrative bonuses, we should look at every possible legal means to have that money come back and ban the practice outright for high-paid executives going forward.

As a result of the inclusion of this language in the legislation, it will prohibit bonuses to the 25 most highly paid employees of the large companies that receive TARP funding--and severely limit other performance-based bonuses as well. It will empower the Treasury Secretary to get back bonuses or compensation paid to an executive at these companies based on false earnings reports or anything else later found to be materially inaccurate or misrepresentative of what was occurring. It will also give shareholders the right to vote on executive pay at these firms. And it will strictly prohibit golden parachutes to senior executives of companies that receive taxpayer help. Because of this bill, we now will provide far more safeguards than exist today--measuring whether executive compensation plans pose risk to the financial health of the company and preventing the manipulation of earnings reports.

The President told the world a few weeks ago that a new era of responsibility had begun--it is time our executives in those companies understood that message.

The second issue I wish to discuss is transit. The bill dedicates some $8.4 billion to transit issues. Connecticut alone will receive $137 million, which will meet many important needs, reducing congestion in our State. Route 95 through Connecticut and other arteries of transport are under tremendous congestion. Transit assistance and support is long overdue. This bill provides that needed assistance.

The American Public Transit Association has said that $48 billion worth of transit projects are to be completed over the next 2 years; therefore, jobs will be created, putting people back to work. That is valuable not only in the short term but for the long-term economic growth in investments for transit. That is not only about being shovel- ready, it is also future ready. Ridership is already at record levels. Traffic congestion in metropolitan areas is getting worse, and our population is going to grow by another 50 percent by 2050.

I am pleased that the legislation includes $100 million to establish and implement a program to provide assistance to transit agencies to become more energy efficient as well. This is a very important part of this bill. There are a number of other provisions that provide that kind of assistance.

Public transit saves over 4 billion gallons of gasoline annually and reduces carbon emissions by some 37 million metric tons a year--that is the equivalent to the electricity used by almost 5 million households. The need to repair our highways, roads and bridges is obvious, and I am pleased the bill includes $302 million in highway funds for my State of Connecticut.

But the most effective way to reduce congestion is to provide transportation options that take cars off the road. Investing in transit creates jobs, it addresses climate change and reduces our dependence on foreign oil, and makes our economy competitive in the 21st century.

Third is an area where I think we fell short in this bill--the failure to include the amendment I offered with Senator Martinez of Florida, which would require the administration to use $50 billion of the TARP money to attack the root cause of the economic crisis: foreclosure. It would have gone a long way toward dealing with the safe harbor so we can avoid the kind of litigation that may slow down some of these workouts. That was a mistake. We are trying to get to the root cause of the problem, the foreclosure issue. Senator Martinez had a very good idea that was adopted unanimously, and it had no cost of any measurable amount. I don't understand why it was taken out, but it is gone. That will create problems in terms of addressing the foreclosure issue. Clearly, we wanted the $50 billion used for foreclosure prevention.

In 2001, this body approved $1.3 trillion in tax cuts at a time when unemployment was 4 percent and our economy was in fairly good shape. Today, with an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent and headed upward and as many as 8 million foreclosures potentially on the horizon, we are dedicating $800 billion to jump-starting our economy. Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 families enter into foreclosure every day, as I mentioned earlier. In December alone, there were 2,000 foreclosures in Connecticut. Other States, such as California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, have many more than we do. Eight million homes are underwater, with mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.

Perhaps the most important step we could have taken in this bill is to require Treasury to spend some of the TARP money Congress previously released to modify home loans. By providing the Treasury with the authority and funds in this bill to design and implement a loan modification program in consultation with FDIC, HUD, and the Federal Reserve, we could have ensured we would help nearly 2 million families.

Some 16,000 families in my State of Connecticut would have avoided losing their home, moving them out of these unaffordable, exploding and often predatory mortgages that are strangling our economy and into mortgages they can afford.

While I am disappointed we didn't codify this requirement into law, I am pleased that the Treasury Secretary has pledged to dedicate at least $50 billion to preventing foreclosures--and I believe that is in no small part due to the strong support this body expressed for this amendment last week.

Quite frankly, that is a step which should have been taken months ago in the previous administration. There was no interest in it despite the fact that expert after expert warned that unless you get to the bottom of the residential mortgage market, the economic crisis will persist. They are right. I hope we will see a change in direction and resources committed to the underlying problem of our economic issues.

While we will hold this administration's feet to the fire, I believe they recognize that unless we act now to stop foreclosures and put a tourniquet on the crisis, the hemorrhaging will get worse--the number of layoffs will increase, more businesses will shutter

their doors, and more Americans will suffer.

With this bill, we begin to get our economy moving again. This is not a moment of great joy, as I said. We should not have had to have been in this moment to talk about this, but we are here. While I know many have said they are going to vote against this, I think they bear a responsibility of having offered some alternative ideas because just saying no is not enough, in my view. That is the conclusion of almost every economist who has analyzed this issue over the last number of weeks and months.

Again, I commend the efforts of Senator Reid, the majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and the efforts made by Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter, who have agreed to work with us and come up with this package. We would not be at this point without them. I appreciate their efforts.

Lastly, some of my colleagues are concerned that some of their amendments were dropped as well. Senator Sessions mentioned one, the E- Verify Program. E-Verify is currently authorized through March. When we take up the omnibus spending bill in 2 weeks, I am told it will include a provision to extend that until September 30, 2009. This is a program that, when fully funded, will be operational for hires funded by the stimulus bill for companies participating in the program.

I see my friend and colleague from Alaska, who I know wants to express her thoughts on this.

I thank those who put this together. We need to get back on our feet again. Obviously, unleashing the clogged-up credit market is a critical issue, but also providing that jolt this stimulus package will provide is also necessary if we are going to complete the effort to do what we can to improve the economic conditions in our country. For those reasons, I will be supportive of the bill.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to honor and celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People--the NAACP--and thank my colleagues for unanimously adopting H. Con. Res. 35, introduced by my friend, Congressman Al Green, of Texas. I was honored to introduce companion legislation in the Senate.

Yesterday we were reminded once again of the historic nature of the work the NAACP has done over the last century as our Nation's first African-American President came to the United States Capitol to pay tribute to President Abraham Lincoln on his 200th birthday.

When we reflect on how far we have come in this country, we must acknowledge the crucial role the NAACP has played in making so many of those steps possible.

Founded on February 12, 1909, in New York City by a small multiracial group of activists that included Ida Wells-Barnett and W. E. B. Dubois, the NAACP spent decades working to eliminate discrimination in schools and throughout our society at the grassroots. Nearly a half century later, it would make itself known to the world with one of our Nation's greatest legal victories, the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1955, the Secretary of the NAACP's Montgomery, AL, branch suffered humiliation and unwarranted arrest for refusing to give up her front seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, AL. Rosa Parks' simple yet powerful action would ignite the largest civil rights grassroots movement in the history of this country, reminding us once again of the difference that even one American can make to change the course of history.

The NAACP also played an essential role in ensuring the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964.

Though the right to vote was declared to be a basic human right under the U.S. Constitution, persons of color, especially African Americans, were historically--and shamefully--denied this fundamental right. The NAACP played a substantial role pushing for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, partnering with the likes of Cesar Chavez.

While the NAACP's political work is extraordinary, its community service efforts deserve recognition as well. In

2005, it created the Disaster Relief Fund to provide assistance for Hurricane Katrina victims in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama at a time when they needed it most.

As President Obama said, ``A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.'' The NAACP has reminded us of those words for a century.

For all this achievement symbolizes to Americans and the world, the NAACP still recognizes the importance of remaining vigilant in our fight for equality, never allowing the past to be forgotten. I am honored that it has supported the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act that I introduced last Congress, in commemoration of the unspeakably brutal and unjustified murder of an African-American youth, ensuring that criminals of the unsolved hate crimes of the civil rights struggle are brought to justice and that its victims can finally find peace. And I am pleased that this legislation has become law.

Much progress has been made in the lives of persons of color because of the NAACP and its tireless, life-risking, and never-ending work.

As Thurgood Marshall, who a dozen years after arguing Brown v. the Board of Education before the Supreme Court would become the first African American to serve on our nation's highest court, said:

In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay

ourselves the highest tribute.

Today, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives return that tribute to the NAACP and everyone who has been associated with its achievements and advocacy for this last century.

May its work to ensure equality for all American citizens continue as each of us in this institution and across our country commit to diminishing its necessity.

Mr. President, I rise today to mark the 75th anniversary of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, this country's official export credit agency. Its mandate is to create and support jobs here in the United States by financing U.S. exports that might otherwise be lost because private sector financing is unavailable or to meet the competition of foreign governments' export credit agencies that are supporting their exporters to secure the deal. Obviously, the work of Ex-Im Bank is especially relevant in difficult economic times such as we are currently experiencing, because U.S. exports equal U.S. jobs.

The Export-Import Bank falls under the jurisdiction of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and I am aware of the many positive effects it has had for U.S. manufacturers. In the past 5 years, it has helped at least 75 companies in 43 communities in Connecticut finance over $700 million in exports. These export sales create and sustain high-paying manufacturing and other jobs related to exports.

Ex-Im Bank is also accustomed to stepping in when times are hard. It was founded on February 12, 1934, in order to help facilitate exports during the Great Depression. Since then, it has supported over $400 billion in U.S. exports that would not have gone forward without it-- exports that support U.S. jobs.

Just after World War II, Ex-Im Bank became a precursor of the Marshall Plan, authorizing over $2 billion for the reconstruction of Europe. In more recent times, Ex-Im Bank has stepped in to assist U.S. exporters during the Mexican debt crisis of the 1980s and the Asian debt crisis of the 1990s.

Don't confuse this with foreign aid. Ex-Im Bank charges for its services and is self-financing, and is therefore not a drain on U.S. taxpayers. Ex-Im Bank makes credit judgments on the basis of reasonable assurance of repayment, and has a historical default rate under 2 percent. Over 80 percent of Ex-Im Bank's transactions directly benefit small businesses, which are the most effective generators of jobs in our economy.

Over the past 75 years, Ex-Im Bank has responded in difficult times to the problems of U.S. exporters. In this time of economic hardship, we need government institutions like the Ex-Im Bank to provide strong leadership in responding effectively and efficiently to the challenges facing U.S. exporters, large and small.

I am happy to join with leaders from across the political spectrum in wishing the Export-Import Bank of the United States well on its 75th anniversary.

Mr. President, I am pleased today to be reintroducing comprehensive credit card legislation that would reform credit card practices and prohibit card issuers from continuing policies that are threatening the financial security of American consumers and their families. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, Credit CARD Act, will help to end the practices that cost American families billions of dollars each year.

This is a time of serious hardship for American families. As losses mount as a result of the economic crisis, lenders are squeezing consumers, often unfairly and without adequate notice, by raising credit card rates and tightening repayment terms. Credit card delinquency rates are inching higher, and repayment rates are dipping. At a time when Americans are becoming increasingly reliant on credit cards, credit card companies are being more aggressive about finding ways to charge their customers. Over $17 billion in credit card penalty fees were charged to Americans in 2006--a ten-fold increase from what was charged just ten years ago. These penalties are contributing to the avalanche of credit card debt under which many American consumers increasingly find themselves buried.

In my travels around Connecticut, I hear frequently about the burden of these credit card practices from constituents. Connecticut has the third-

highest median amount of credit card debt in the country--$2,094 per person. Non-business bankruptcy filings in the State are increasing, and in the second quarter of last year, credit card delinquencies increased in 7 of the 8 counties in the State.

In December, the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision, and National Credit Union Administration finalized unfair and deceptive acts and practices rules aimed at curbing some of these practices. For example, for customers in good standing the new rules will prevent issuers from applying interest rate increases retroactively to credit card debt incurred prior to the interest rate increase. They will also help ensure that issuers apply payments fairly, and extend the time that consumers have to make their credit card payments. The rules are a good first step in providing needed consumer protections in some areas. They fall short in other important areas, however, failing to address issues including universal default, ``any time any reason'' repricing, multiple overlimit fees, and youth marketing, which I'll explain in a moment.

In anticipation of rules going into effect in July of 2010, issuers are raising their interest rates and cutting lines of credit even on consumers with a long and unblemished history of good payment, thereby underscoring the need for this legislation.

That is why I am reintroducing the Credit CARD Act. This bill will help to reform credit card practices that drag so many American families further and further into debt, and prevent banks from taking advantage of consumers through confusing, misleading, and unfair terms and procedures. It strengthens regulation and oversight of the credit card industry and prohibits the unfair and deceptive practices that in far too many instances keep consumers mired in debt.

Among its other provisions, the CARD Act will eliminate imposition of excessive fees and penalties; universal default provisions that permit credit card issuers to increase interest rates on cardholders in good standing for reasons unrelated to the cardholder's behavior with respect to that card; ``Any time any reason'' changes to credit card agreements--the bill prevents issuers from unilaterally changing the terms of a credit card contract for the length of the card agreement; and retroactive interest rate increases, unfair payment allocation practices, and double-cycle billing.

The Credit Card Act also contains additional critical consumer protections. Among other things, the bill would: allow customers who close their accounts to pay under the terms existing at the time the account is closed; ensure that cardholders receive sufficient information about the terms of their account; require issuers to lower penalty rates that have been imposed on a cardholder after 6 months if the cardholder meets the obligations of the credit card terms; and enhance regulators' ability to protect consumers against unfair credit card practices by giving each federal banking agency the authority to prescribe regulations governing unfair or deceptive practices by the institutions they regulate.

The bill also reins in irresponsible lending through a number of provisions aimed at protecting young consumers who lack the ability to repay substantial credit card debt.

This legislation incorporates several key concepts included in the legislative proposals put forth by some of my colleagues, notably Senators Levin, Menendez, Akaka, and Tester. Each is a cosponsor of this legislation, as are Senators Reed, Schumer, Brown, Merkley, Kerry, Leahy, Durbin, Harkin, McCaskill, Whitehouse, and Casey.

This bill has the support of a wide array of consumer advocates and labor organizations, including the Center for Responsible Lending, Connecticut Public Interest Research Group, the Connecticut Association for Human Services, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Demos, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Consumer Law Center, the National Council of LaRaza, the Service Employees International Union, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. The bill also has the support of the National Small Business Association.

As the U.S. economy tightens, financially vulnerable families need the protections of the Credit CARD Act more than ever. That is what the American people and the people of Connecticut are demanding. For this reason, I urge my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring, and eventually in enacting the Credit CARD Act.

Mr. President, I am pleased today to be reintroducing comprehensive credit card legislation that would reform credit card practices and prohibit card issuers from continuing policies that are threatening the financial security of American consumers and their families. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, Credit CARD Act, will help to end the practices that cost American families billions of dollars each year.

This is a time of serious hardship for American families. As losses mount as a result of the economic crisis, lenders are squeezing consumers, often unfairly and without adequate notice, by raising credit card rates and tightening repayment terms. Credit card delinquency rates are inching higher, and repayment rates are dipping. At a time when Americans are becoming increasingly reliant on credit cards, credit card companies are being more aggressive about finding ways to charge their customers. Over $17 billion in credit card penalty fees were charged to Americans in 2006--a ten-fold increase from what was charged just ten years ago. These penalties are contributing to the avalanche of credit card debt under which many American consumers increasingly find themselves buried.

In my travels around Connecticut, I hear frequently about the burden of these credit card practices from constituents. Connecticut has the third-

highest median amount of credit card debt in the country--$2,094 per person. Non-business bankruptcy filings in the State are increasing, and in the second quarter of last year, credit card delinquencies increased in 7 of the 8 counties in the State.

In December, the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision, and National Credit Union Administration finalized unfair and deceptive acts and practices rules aimed at curbing some of these practices. For example, for customers in good standing the new rules will prevent issuers from applying interest rate increases retroactively to credit card debt incurred prior to the interest rate increase. They will also help ensure that issuers apply payments fairly, and extend the time that consumers have to make their credit card payments. The rules are a good first step in providing needed consumer protections in some areas. They fall short in other important areas, however, failing to address issues including universal default, ``any time any reason'' repricing, multiple overlimit fees, and youth marketing, which I'll explain in a moment.

In anticipation of rules going into effect in July of 2010, issuers are raising their interest rates and cutting lines of credit even on consumers with a long and unblemished history of good payment, thereby underscoring the need for this legislation.

That is why I am reintroducing the Credit CARD Act. This bill will help to reform credit card practices that drag so many American families further and further into debt, and prevent banks from taking advantage of consumers through confusing, misleading, and unfair terms and procedures. It strengthens regulation and oversight of the credit card industry and prohibits the unfair and deceptive practices that in far too many instances keep consumers mired in debt.

Among its other provisions, the CARD Act will eliminate imposition of excessive fees and penalties; universal default provisions that permit credit card issuers to increase interest rates on cardholders in good standing for reasons unrelated to the cardholder's behavior with respect to that card; ``Any time any reason'' changes to credit card agreements--the bill prevents issuers from unilaterally changing the terms of a credit card contract for the length of the card agreement; and retroactive interest rate increases, unfair payment allocation practices, and double-cycle billing.

The Credit Card Act also contains additional critical consumer protections. Among other things, the bill would: allow customers who close their accounts to pay under the terms existing at the time the account is closed; ensure that cardholders receive sufficient information about the terms of their account; require issuers to lower penalty rates that have been imposed on a cardholder after 6 months if the cardholder meets the obligations of the credit card terms; and enhance regulators' ability to protect consumers against unfair credit card practices by giving each federal banking agency the authority to prescribe regulations governing unfair or deceptive practices by the institutions they regulate.

The bill also reins in irresponsible lending through a number of provisions aimed at protecting young consumers who lack the ability to repay substantial credit card debt.

This legislation incorporates several key concepts included in the legislative proposals put forth by some of my colleagues, notably Senators Levin, Menendez, Akaka, and Tester. Each is a cosponsor of this legislation, as are Senators Reed, Schumer, Brown, Merkley, Kerry, Leahy, Durbin, Harkin, McCaskill, Whitehouse, and Casey.

This bill has the support of a wide array of consumer advocates and labor organizations, including the Center for Responsible Lending, Connecticut Public Interest Research Group, the Connecticut Association for Human Services, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Demos, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Consumer Law Center, the National Council of LaRaza, the Service Employees International Union, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. The bill also has the support of the National Small Business Association.

As the U.S. economy tightens, financially vulnerable families need the protections of the Credit CARD Act more than ever. That is what the American people and the people of Connecticut are demanding. For this reason, I urge my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring, and eventually in enacting the Credit CARD Act.

Mr. President, I was recently approached, along with my colleague Senator Shelby and leaders of the House Financial Services Committee, by the Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair, with a request to increase the FDIC's borrowing authority from Treasury from the current $30 billion to $100 billion, for use by the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund, and for temporary additional borrowing authority to weather the economic crisis.

The FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund, DIF, absorbs losses that result from the Corporation's obligation to protect insured deposits when FDIC-insured financial institutions fail. Insured financial institutions pay premiums that support the DIF and under current law those premiums can be increased to cover any losses to the fund. At the end of the third quarter of last year, the fund held approximately $35 billion.

Legislation to substantially and permanently increase this borrowing authority has already passed the House, as part of the TARP legislation passed in January. A scaled back version of it was also incorporated into financial services legislation ordered reported by the House Financial Services Committee earlier this week. Treasury Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board have also recently written to me underscoring their support for this request.

Since the FDIC's borrowing authority was last increased in 1991, the asset size of banks has tripled. Even more important, the financial system is under considerable stress, and the level of thrift and bank failures has been rising. This line of credit is designed strictly to serve as a backstop to cover potential losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund.

Though this statutory borrowing authority has historically never been tapped, and Chairman Bair has made clear she does not anticipate doing so, I agree with Chairman Bair, Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke that under current economic circumstances such an increase in borrowing authority is both prudent and necessary. While the current fund has substantial reserves, it is important that we increase this line of borrowing authority so that the FDIC has the funds available which might be needed to meet its obligations to protect insured depositors and to reassure the public that the government continues to stand firmly behind the FDIC's insurance guarantee.

I had intended to try to incorporate a provision to increase FDIC borrowing authority into the Economic Recovery legislation, with certain protections to

require concurrence from other federal officials--including ultimately the President--in exigent circumstances, and at least on a temporary basis. I sought to do this yesterday. Unfortunately, my Republican colleagues made clear that they would object to this proposal at this time. And, for this reason, I will not offer it today. However, I intend to work with them and those in the administration to craft a proposal that satisfies their concerns in order to ensure that the FDIC as the borrowing authority that it needs going forward.

I ask unanimous consent that copies of the letters from FDIC Chairman Bair, Treasury Secretary Geithner, and Fed Chairman Bernanke be printed in the Record. I will continue to work to ensure that the FDIC has sufficient borrowing authority going forward to deal with a wide range of contingencies.

Mr. President, I rise today to talk about an amendment, amendment No. 427, that Senators Bingaman, Isakson, and I offered to help mitigate the foreclosure crisis, which is at the root of our economic downturn. Currently, foreclosures are being filed at the rate of nearly 10,000 a day; one in six homeowners are underwater; and a recent study shows that U.S. homeowners lost a cumulative $3.3 trillion in home equity during 2008. Addressing the foreclosure crisis is key to restoring growth to the economy.

According to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the most effective way to reduce foreclosures is to restore positive equity by writing down mortgage principal. In fact, the HOPE for Homeowners program requires principal write-down for participation.

Yet, under current tax law, most people who get loan modifications involving principal reductions would have to pay taxes on the amount of the loan forgiven. This is a significant barrier to people participating in effective loan modifications and a terrible burden to put on struggling families.

In 2007, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act provided a tax exemption for forgiven mortgage debt if that mortgage debt was used exclusively to purchase or substantially improve the home.

However, many homeowners, including a majority of subprime borrowers, did not get their current loans to buy a home. Rather, in many cases, they were steered by unscrupulous mortgage brokers into high-cost refinance loans with hidden features that they did not understand. In some cases, these funds were used to pay health care costs, educational or other expenses. Many of these borrowers are now delinquent and seeking loan modifications. Too many will end up in foreclosure.

These borrowers do not qualify for this current exemption. The threat of a large tax bill has dissuaded many homeowners from getting loan modifications.

In fact, in their 2008 Annual Report to Congress, the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate wrote ``[we] recommend that Congress pass legislation to make it easier for financially distressed taxpayers to exclude cancelled [forgiven debt] from gross income.''

This amendment, by eliminating the income tax on all forgiven mortgage debt, would remove a significant obstacle to loan modifications at a cost of $98 million over the next 10 years. This benefit would still expire, as it currently stands, at the end of 2012.

In addition, I urge the IRS to ease the burden of complying with the reporting requirements that taxpayers face when claiming this exclusion.

In its 2008 Annual Report to Congress, the IRS's Office of the National Taxpayer Advocate stated that current reporting requirements ``are so complex that many and probably most taxpayers who qualify to exclude [QPRI] from their gross income do not do so.'' QPRI or qualified principle residence indebtedness is the technical term the IRS uses for tax exempt forgiven mortgage debt. One way the IRS can ease this burden, is by allowing taxpayers claiming the exemption to calculate the fair market value based on the appraisal value of the originating loan, which should ease the tax filing burden on the millions of Americans who were tricked by predatory lenders. In addition, the IRS should simplify the reporting requirement to claim this tax exemption. Right now, taxpayers who claim the QPRI exclusion must file a form, Form 982, that is not well known, is not supported by most tax software programs or Volunteer Income Tax Assistance--VITA-- programs, and is extremely complicated. The IRS estimates that it takes the average business taxpayer 10 hours and 43 minutes to complete this form.

The goals of this amendment are both to expand the definition of QPRI to include home equity indebtedness and also to relieve taxpayers from the burden of filing any forms that they would not otherwise need to file but for receiving the benefit of the QPRI exclusion. Specifically, I urge the IRS to change Form 1099-C, used for all cancelled debts, not just mortgage debts, to include ``check boxes'' for lenders to check off when they are forgiving debt that is ``QPRI'' under the new definition. These check boxes--similar to the check box currently provided for debts discharged in bankruptcy should identify whether the taxpayer is receiving QPRI debt forgiveness and should indicate whether the taxpayer has lost their home, due to a foreclosure, short sale, or deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure, or will continue to own the home as a result of a loan modification.

Check boxes that make clear whether the taxpayer has lost the home are important because a taxpayer should not be required to make adjustments to the tax basis of the home that they no longer live in. If the homeowner continues to live in their home and the appropriate box is checked, the Form 1099-C will provide the IRS with complete information about the basis adjustments that will be required due to the QPRI exclusion at the time of the property's sale or disposition. Thus, as in the case of bankruptcy, the Form 1099-C should provide the IRS with sufficient information so that the taxpayer will not be required to fill out a Form 982 or use the long form 1040 to claim the QPRI, and taxpayers who are exempt from filing tax returns will not have to file returns solely to claim this exclusion.

Reserving the right to object, is there some time in opposition to the amendment?

First, let me begin by thanking both of my colleagues from North Dakota and South Carolina for their interest in the subject matter.

Now, as I pointed out, 2 years ago tomorrow, I think it was, February 7, 2007, as the new chairman of the Banking Committee, I held my first hearings, and the first hearings were on the foreclosure crisis.

At that time, a fellow by the name of Eakes testified before the committee and predicted 2.2 million foreclosures in the country. He was scoffed at all across the country for having such an outrageous prediction.

In fact, the criticism was correct. It was an outrageous prediction, because it was not 2.2 million, it is now 8 million.

I see my friend from New Jersey, Bob Menendez, who was at that hearing 2 years ago today. And he predicted a tsunami, were his words-- I will never forget them--of how foreclosures were occurring in the country. And again, people laughed and ridiculed and suggested that we were somehow predicting things that were never going to happen.

We have all learned, painfully, the results. We are in the pickle we are in today because we didn't respond to the foreclosure crisis at the time. This is a major problem that deserves major attention. When we wrote the so-called TARP legislation in September, we required four things. I won't bother with the first three; they were accountability, taxpayer issues. One of the four points was to mitigate against foreclosures. We have learned, painfully over the last number of weeks, that virtually nothing was done about foreclosure mitigation with the original $350 billion tranche.

My concerns--and I appreciate immensely the effort we are finally getting some attention to this issue and looking for resources--are the following: One, I am not sure foreclosure mitigation ought to be a part of a stimulus package. You can make a case for doing something about foreclosures, but that is why we have the TARP program. It is not only the financial system. They are, of course, interrelated. It is not like there is a housing issue and a financial system at risk that are separate issues. They are the same issue, the foreclosure issue and the financial mess.

I am going to be offering shortly, along with Senators Reid and Martinez, legislation that requires that of the $310 to $350 billion in the second tranche, that $50 billion be dedicated to foreclosure mitigation because that was what the intention was originally. While I am attracted to the proposal made by Sheila Bair at FDIC--and I mention that in the amendment as one of the ideas, but there are a number of ideas. I say, respectfully, to both my good friends, Senators Graham and Conrad, as I read the amendment, it would require the adoption of the Sheila Bair approach. To me, that is worrisome because it is one idea but not the only idea, to allocate $20-some-odd billion to one idea at a time when we ought to be looking at various ideas that might actually work to mitigate foreclosures. She believes $25 billion would do 1.2. She thinks $50 would double that number to 2.2 or close to 3. We have a lot of numbers that get thrown around here.

My point is, it ought to be something we try not to congressionally mandate. We are good at a lot of things in the Congress, but when we start micromanaging ideas such as this, we get ourselves into trouble. That is why, hopefully, we have smart people out there who will consider ideas and manage them well. But up here, when you try to set accounting standards or rigidly determine a particular formulation, I get uneasy.

The amendment we will offer goes beyond foreclosure mitigation. We also clean up HOPE for Homeowners, which we all supported last summer-- almost all of us did--as a way to try and also deal with foreclosure mitigation. My concern would be that the adoption of this amendment would preclude the adoption of the second amendment. I, respectfully, suggest that what we have offered as our second amendment is a more comprehensive approach.

I have held 82 hearings. I see my friend from Kentucky, Senator Bunning, a member of the committee. We spent a lot of time over the last 2 years on these issues. We haven't all agreed every time on everything--but 82 hearings and meetings, a third of which were on this subject matter alone. I know we all respect each other for doing the jobs we try to do. But having spent this much time trying to figure out what is the best answer, it seems to me TARP resources ought to be used, stimulant money ought to be used for job creation. Not that I wouldn't like to have extra resources to deal with this. We ought to have a broad approach so we are not rigidly locked into a congressionally mandated formula.

I won't bother to address offsets. My colleagues are trying very hard to do what we all ought to do and that is to pay for various things. I will let others go down the list and whether they like or dislike the various offsets.

I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

I find myself sort of in an awkward position. I don't want to be in the position of disagreeing with trying to do something about foreclosure mitigation. But we end up doing this and the next and we get to 75 or in excess of $75 billion for this particular issue, we are getting excessive, it seems to me, without knowing whether a smaller amount might achieve the job. If we are mandating it with two provisions, then we are excluding resources that could be used for other things, including job creation, which is the debate about the stimulus package. My friend from North Dakota and I have talked about this privately, and I thank my colleagues for raising the issue. I truly have mixed emotions about this because I like what they are doing on the one hand, but I am concerned that as between the two choices-- the one Senators Martinez, Reid, and I will offer and this one--I think we offer a more comprehensive one, one that relies on greater flexibility and uses TARP money rather than stimulant money to achieve the result.

There is only in this sense. This bill has a specific requirement that a particular plan be adopted and funded with this proposal. I admire Sheila Bair's proposal, but we also recognize there are others. At the same time, if we are dealing with foreclosure mitigation but not getting that person who is probably in foreclosure because they may have lost a job, if we don't make it possible for them to get back to work because we minimize the resources in the stimulus, saving their home but not saving their job ends up with sort of a very mixed message.

Mr. President, I yield whatever time my colleague from New York would need.

Mr. President, this is, obviously, a discussion that has provoked a bit more discussion than I think any of us anticipated, and it is a worthwhile discussion. So I ask unanimous consent that there be an additional 10 minutes because I know there are several other Members who want to be heard on this amendment, and certainly my colleague from North Dakota may request some additional time as well. We may not use it all, but to give us enough time to flesh this out, if we can, I ask for 10 additional minutes.

Yes, equally divided. I do not know how much time we will need, but just to--and I will yield whatever time my colleague from New York needs. Two minutes.

Mr. President, first of all, acting now or acting later-- assuming we vote on this amendment offered by my friends from South Carolina and North Dakota, within minutes after that, I will be offering the amendment that would require that the $50 billion come out of the TARP money. I do not know what delay we are talking about.

We are promoting the same piece of legislation. The money has already been appropriated to deal TARP, so it is there. So the question is not about delaying one in favor of the other. The question is, Which pot do you want to draw from?

This is sort of a disconnect amendment. We were debating a stimulus package, I thought. Maybe we are not. I know there is some debate about that in the Chamber.

Mr. President, I yield to my colleague for a question.

Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks of my colleague. I only have 1 minute. I have not been directly involved in the Finance or Appropriations Committees, but I have listened to the debate over the last several days, and I think the debate is this: Is this bill a stimulus bill? If it is a stimulus bill, we are talking about job creation. Is it a foreclosure bill? Maybe we changed the debate. If it is a foreclosure debate, I thought I was on something else. So if we want to talk about putting people to work and simultaneously now we are going to take $23 billion out of the stimulus bill and put it in foreclosure mitigation, it seems to me this is a different debate.

I would just say to my colleagues as someone who has chairmanship with jurisdiction over TARP at this point: No, the money has not been allocated. In fact, we have the Secretary of the Treasury coming to our committee on Tuesday to describe exactly what their intentions are with the $310 billion to $350 billion, and I don't know what it is yet.

This much I will tell you. I went through all the debate and the discussion last fall with the previous administration, and we as a body said: We want you to do three or four things with that money, one of which is foreclosure mitigation. I got the commitments, all the handshakes, and not a nickel of it was spent on it. I am assuming this new crowd may be a bit different on that subject matter. But if you were to ask me whether I have a commitment that any of that $310 billion or $350 billion is going to be spent on housing, my answer is I don't know.

I have an amendment with Senator Martinez and Senator Reid in a minute that mandates that $50 billion go to foreclosure mitigation out of the TARP funds. No debate any longer, you have to do it. You know, burn me once, burn me twice--we all know the expression. So I am not going to run the risk

of watching another TARP come along and end up going to Citi and Bank of America and everyone else and nothing happening on foreclosure mitigation.

So it is a choice we have to make. We have a stimulus bill to do something about job creation. That is the debate over the last week. Many of my colleagues on the other side have raised issues about whether we are spending money to actually create jobs in the country. That is a legitimate debate. But you can't on the one hand complain about this bill because it doesn't create jobs and then offer a $24 billion amendment that doesn't do anything about jobs. It deals with foreclosure.

Now, if you are going to take $75 billion and dedicate it to a subject matter that can be handled with a lot less, that is a waste of money. So it is a matter of choices. We are bypassing each other. The debate is about stimulus.

Now, $16 billion, $17 billion of the money comes out of one fund for States. My colleagues ought to look at this. There is a lot of other spending. I am not going to pretend to understand this; I don't serve on the committee. I respect those who think some of this is unnecessary spending. But $17 billion going back to the States for job creation, I would remind my colleagues, is what they cut out of the bill if this amendment is adopted. I suspect the States all across this country may be counting on some of that for job creation, maybe not.

I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Well, then 2 minutes.

We are going round and round on this, but I find this debate--again, I want to make the point that I am grateful to both of my colleagues for raising the issue of foreclosures in housing. I find myself somewhat at cross-purposes because, on the one hand I agree with what they are trying to do; on the other hand--I say this respectfully--I think we are undermining our cause by approaching it this way. We are diminishing the effect of the stimulus bill by doing something on housing, which is a legitimate issue but is not the subject of the debate of the underlying bill, and we are simultaneously potentially denying our opportunity to mandate that this new administration dedicate resources within the TARP to deal exactly with the underlying cause of the economic crisis.

So that is the real choice involved. Again, I say it is an awkward debate and argument. I know Senator Inouye and others wish to be heard on these appropriations issues and, particularly, I suspect the $16 billion to the States. I will let my colleagues make that case. I know Senator Inouye would like some time on that to address that issue. But that is the real point in a sense. I have listened to my colleagues say this bill is loaded up with things that don't effect job creation, and I would say, respectfully, by insisting upon foreclosure mitigation in this bill, it seems to me we are just contributing to the very arguments being made about the underlying criticism of the legislation.

I yield the floor.

I see my good friend from Arizona and my friend from Oregon. They have been patient. We debated my amendment already so I am just going to be very brief.

Senators Conrad and Graham and I were discussing the Conrad-Graham amendment. I talked about the alternative idea that I am proposing with Senator Martinez and Senator Reid of Nevada, and that is to acquire in this bill--I realize it doesn't relate to the funding in this bill--it would require that $50 billion of TARP money that will now be allocated be dedicated to foreclosure mitigation, including looking at the Sheila Baird FDIC proposal, but not exclusively so. Also, as a second part of that amendment, I suggest some alterations to the Hope For Homeowners Program that we think would make the program far more effective than it has been.

Despite the good intentions of its authors last summer, myself included, it has not produced anywhere near the results we desired. These were suggested by Treasury and others who thought it would help make it more attractive to those in foreclosure.

At the appropriate time, myself and Senators Martinez and Reid will offer this amendment. Again, I say to my good friend Senator Conrad and good friend Lindsey Graham, I respect the effort they are making. I don't think what they are talking about in the stimulus bill is justified when we can do it out of TARP, and the money that is being suggested should be more focused on stimulation and job creation.

For those reasons, I oppose the Conrad amendment. I remind my colleagues this amendment that Senator Martinez and I will be offering is the right approach for us to be taking regarding TARP funding, which was dedicated initially, at least in part, toward foreclosure mitigation. We are going to require it statutorily, lest there be any doubt in the minds of those managing the program what our congressional intention was when we passed it back late in October.

Mr. President, with that, I apologize for taking any time at all and yield the floor.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 145, as Modified

Madam President, I will take part of the 1 minute and then offer time to my colleague from Florida, who is my cosponsor on this amendment, Senator Martinez, to quickly address the amendment.

This amendment is the response to how we ought to deal with the foreclosure mitigation issue. We require in this amendment that $50 billion of the second tranche of the TARP money be dedicated to foreclosure mitigation as well as some modifications of the HOPE for Homeowners Act.

The third part--I want to commend my colleague from Florida--is a very solid and wise suggestion he made dealing with services, and I yield to him to explain his part of the amendment.

Madam President, I commend my colleague for his very wise suggestion to this amendment.

Madam President, if I could have 30 seconds to respond?

Taxpayers not losing their homes is preserving something-- not getting something back, No. 1. No. 2, when we wrote the original legislation in September, there were four requirements that we expected of the TARP funds, one of which was foreclosure mitigation. Regrettably, nothing was done at all about it. Not a nickel was spent on foreclosure mitigation. We are merely fulfilling the obligation we agreed to when the TARP legislation was adopted on October 1.

Madam President, I will accept a voice vote at this time.

I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. President, first, I commend our good friend and colleague from Montana. He has been on the Senate floor it seems endlessly over the last several weeks with a number of bills--SCHIP and now this stimulus package and others. I commend him and his staff for the tremendous job they have been doing. It is a lot of hard work. They have been very patient with all of us. Senator Inouye as well, and his staff on the Appropriations Committee. They have done a good job as well.

I have two amendments that will be offered at some point later today. I wish to take a couple minutes to describe each of them since we will have limited time during the series of votes that will occur to describe them in detail.

The first amendment I will be offering, along with Senator John Kerry who offered to be a cosponsor of this amendment, involves the mitigation on foreclosure issue.

It was exactly 2 years ago the day after tomorrow that I held my first hearing as Chairman of the Banking Committee on the foreclosure issue. At that time we had a hearing on this issue. I warned at the time, as did several of my colleagues on the Committee, about the serious mounting problems with the threats to the residential mortgage market in the country and what this could likely do to our economy if we didn't put a tourniquet on this beginning hemorrhage in the residential mortgage market.

At that time, Martin Eakes, who is President and CEO of the Self-Help Credit Union and the Center for Responsible Lending, predicted at that hearing there would be over 2 million foreclosures in the United States. This was in February of 2007. The reaction from the Mortgage Bankers Association and other industry groups was immediate and definitive that day. No way, they said. They accused Mr. Eakes of crying wolf and exaggerating the problem.

Well, the industry was half right. Mr. Eakes and the consumer advocates were very wrong. We weren't facing 2 million foreclosures. We now know we are facing 8 million foreclosures 2 years later. And of course we are all painfully aware of the condition of our economy today, the worst since the Great Depression, going back 80 years; and, unfortunately, getting worse every day, with 20,000 jobs a day being lost in our country, and somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 homes being foreclosed.

When we wrote the TARP program in the fall of last year, one of the major provisions was to mitigate foreclosures. Regretfully, very little has been done on that issue, and today we still see the mounting foreclosures in our country. In fact, last summer, we passed the Hope for Homeowners legislation. This amendment I am offering today does two things: one, it makes it possible for the Hope for Homeowners bill to work better than we intended it would back in July by eliminating several provisions in that bill, or at least modifying, including lowering the future equity that homeowners must share from 50 percent to 25 percent of the original price; reduce the upfront and annual premiums charged to borrowers under that program; provide incentive payments to servicers who participate in the program; and allow for bulk sale of mortgages at discounts to promote a higher volume of loan modifications. Now, these ideas will increase participation, which has been almost nonexistent. With these modifications, there are many who believe we will see a substantial increase in people taking advantage of that program.

The second part of the amendment is one that would require within 15 days of the enactment of this legislation to develop a program in consultation with the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and the Secretary of HUD to develop a program to mitigate additional foreclosures. We would require and devote no less than $50 billion of the TARP fund--not of the

stimulus package, of the TARP funding--to go to a loan modification program. And the program, I would point out, is expected to prevent at least 2 million foreclosures in the country.

The amendment does not dictate any particular loan modification plan. I think we owe the administration, which has committed to moving on this matter, the ability to develop the best plan they are able to. So I leave it up to them to decide how this can be done. I am particularly attracted to the plan Sheila Bair at FDIC has promoted, but I know there are other ideas. But at least here we would commit $50 billion of that $350 billion to do something that will require and mandate that we begin to deal with this problem.

I don't know of anyone who believes today that if we don't deal with the foreclosure problem we will not get to the bottom of our economic crisis. I have been saying it for 2 years. We had 30 hearings in the Banking Committee, of the 80 we held in meetings on this subject matter, and witness after witness, regardless of ideology or political stripe all said the same thing: We have to deal with the foreclosure issue.

Today, with 8 million homes in jeopardy, 9,000 a day being lost, we finally I think have to say with some certainty that if we are going to be using this next tranche of $350 billion, we have to dedicate $50 billion of it to foreclosure mitigation. So in addition to the modifications to the Hope for Homeowners, the amendment would also require that $50 billion be spent of the TARP program on this issue.

The second amendment I will be offering deals with executive compensation. Now, let me say right at the outset, this issue can be trivialized, if we are not careful. I think a lot of attention has been paid to this issue because, obviously, it is infuriating to people when they watch taxpayer money go into an institution and then they read where top executives walk away with multimillion dollar bonuses or contracts. It absolutely is more than infuriating to people when they read about it and hear about it. The problem is, if you don't do something about this, we are never going to be able to build the confidence and optimism people need to feel about the larger part of this program. So a tremendous amount of heat and understandable anger is focused on executive compensation.

Again, I emphasize that I think there are other issues we need to deal with, but in order to deal with and build some support for them, we have to deal with the executive compensation issues. This amendment does so. I realize this is painful for some, and I am not suggesting everyone who has been receiving bonuses or excessive compensation is necessarily an evil person at all. Quite the contrary, in many cases they are good people. But there needs to be a sense of reality that if you are literally dumping billions of dollars into these institutions to try to save them, when in many cases the very people who mismanaged these operations are walking away with millions of dollars in compensation. You can begin to understand why people in this country are so angry.

Let me describe a few of the major provisions regarding this. The amendment would ban bonuses, retention bonuses, and incentive compensation for some of the most senior employees at TARP recipient firms. It would authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to increase the number of executives ineligible for such compensation if he deems it to be in the public interest.

Secondly, this amendment is not only about the prospective TARP recipients, it also requires the Secretary of the Treasury to conduct a retroactive review of past bonus awards, retention awards, and other compensation that TARP recipients paid to employees. If the Secretary determines any payments were excessive and inconsistent with the purposes of TARP or otherwise contrary to public interest, the amendment directs the Treasury to seek to negotiate a reimbursement to the American taxpayer.

Currently, shareholders of public companies may offer proposals on executive compensation, but it takes an initiative by the shareholders. We apply that provision now to TARP recipients. Under this amendment, it would require the TARP recipient of the company to automatically put a proposal on these cash bonuses and compensation on its annual proxy statement to shareholders without requiring shareholders to make a prior request or formulate the proposal. Such proposals would call for an advisory shareholder vote on the company's executive cash compensation program. This ``say on pay'' vote would enable shareholders of TARP recipients to voice their views. And as the owners of the companies, I think they ought to be heard on these matters.

Thirdly, under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, we included a clawback requirement, which allows the TARP to recover any bonuses or incentive compensation paid to an executive based on reported earnings or other criteria later found to be materially inaccurate. This amendment expands the number of senior employees who would be subject to this clawback as well.

As former SEC Chairman Bill Donaldson wrote not that long ago, and I quote him:

People with targets, and jobs dependent on meeting them,

will probably meet their targets--even if they have to

destroy the enterprise to do it.

This amendment ensures that isn't the case for companies receiving TARP funds. First, it would prohibit any compensation plan that would encourage the manipulation of reported earnings. It would also create a compensation committee composed entirely of independent directors--not only monitoring the objectivity of compensation awards but evaluating compensation plans and their potential risk to the financial health of the company. Finally, the amendment would require the chief executive officer of the TARP-receiving company and the chief financial officer of the company to certify compliance with these requirements. We have required that under Sarbanes-Oxley, and I think in this area we ought to do it as well.

There will be those who think these are excessive, but unfortunately, what we have seen is excessive. If we are going to convince the American public that what we are trying to do is in their interest, then we have to be certain when it comes to these matters.

Again, I urge my colleagues to be supportive of this. It is broad, it is far reaching, it gives the Secretary additional powers, but it allows us to deal with these issues in a comprehensive fashion.

Unless we do this, I will tell you that I think it will become virtually impossible to get this Congress, either body, to support any additional funds of this nature that may very well be needed. Unless we start to calm the anger of the American public over how some of these dollars are being used, we are never going to succeed in that effort.

So while it is not a significant portion of the money overall, it is a significant cause of the lack of confidence, and therefore I urge my colleagues to support the amendment when it is offered. The first amendment is on housing, and this one is on executive compensation.

I apologize for taking a little longer. I know other Members wish to be heard.

Mr. President, I may not need the full minute. This is the amendment dealing with executive compensation. There are a number of proposals. This is one that would set some limits, basically allowing for some reaching back if, in fact, TARP businesses are found to have violated

various provisions of law. It would allow the Secretary to negotiate resources to come back if there has been excessive compensation.

I say to my colleagues, our colleague Senator Vitter in the Banking Committee made a point I wish to repeat. This is not the single most important issue. In fact, it could be trivialized. We all appreciate when we talk to our constituents about the TARP program, many of our constituents are so angry with what they see in executive compensation, it is difficult to have a conversation about the larger questions. We are trying to deal with this issue in a thoughtful way that does not impinge upon their ability to compensate people, but simultaneously we are not reading about compensation going to executives where billions of dollars have gone to those companies abusively.

This amendment is to deal with that particular problem. I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I want to add my voice to that of our colleague from Georgia, Senator Isakson, in support of his amendment. This is an idea that is not inexpensive to do, but I think it may be the kind of confidence-building measure that is necessary to free our credit markets and begin to get the housing issue moving again. It is not the only answer. I think it is a critical component and element in achieving the results we all desire.

I think our colleague from Georgia came up with an idea worth our support. Therefore, I am going to be a cosponsor as chairman of the Banking Committee, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

Madam President, first, I want to commend my colleague from Florida. This is a well-intended proposal. Here is the one problem with it that I tell my colleague: It breaks contracts. There is a constitutional issue here, where servicers could sue.

What we are doing with this amendment, if I understand it correctly, is that the compensation due to a servicer would now fall on the taxpayer. So we would have to set up a bureaucracy to pay the servicer where the legal liability was determined. That poses some real problems.

The other part of the amendment I totally agree with. In fact, we try to cover it. In fact, we established a safe harbor, my colleague will recall, in the bill we did together, and also trying to figure out a way to deal with this.

But I am nervous. There is $1.7 billion dollars in the amendment. No one can say with any certainty whether that would be an adequate amount to cover the government costs were these determined to be liabilities of the government. So I am uneasy about establishing a new bureaucracy here, and also the constitutional question of breaking these contracts which raises some very serious issues.

But what I recommend to my colleague is, we have got an amendment coming up in a little while, maybe tomorrow, where we can work together to try to accommodate this to deal with exactly what he is talking about. But I have a very difficult time accepting this for the reasons I have described.

Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. President, I will be very brief. I know others want to be heard. I appreciate the consideration of the manager of this part of the bill, Senator Baucus.

This amendment would apply to recipients of TARP assistance, stronger restrictions on executive compensation. I will make some comments this evening and invite my colleagues to look at the language of the amendment.

It is the one that I hope all Members will be able to support. It does not directly apply to the stimulus package, but it is an opportunity for us to speak on the executive compensation issues which are critically important.

The amendment bans bonuses for most highly paid executives of TARP- recipient firms: Prohibits TARP recipients from paying a bonus, retention award, or other similar incentive compensation to the 25 most highly-paid employees ``or such higher number as the Secretary of the Treasury may determine is in the public interest with respect to any TARP recipient.''

It requires a retroactive review: The Secretary of the Treasury must review bonus awards paid to executives of TARP recipients to determine whether any payments were excessive, inconsistent with the purposes of the act or the TARP or otherwise contrary to public interest and, if so, seek to negotiate with the recipient and the subject employee for appropriate reimbursement to the Government.

It requires each TARP recipient to include on annual proxy statement a ``say on pay'' proposal or advisory shareholder vote on the company's executive cash compensation program.

It allows for the Government to clawback any bonus or incentive compensation paid to an executive based on reported earnings or other criteria later found to be materially inaccurate.

It prohibits compensation plans that would encourage manipulation of reported earnings.

The Board Compensation Committee of each TARP recipient must be composed entirely of independent directors; and requires the committee to evaluate compensation plans and their potential risk to the financial health of the company.

It prohibits golden parachutes to top senior executives.

It prohibits a compensation plan that has incentives for employees to take unnecessary and excessive risks that threaten the value of the company.

This will encourage the companies to use the TARP funds for the purposes they were intended and assure the American taxpayers that their funds are being used properly.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I understand there has been an objection. I am not going to offer an amendment at this point until after this is resolved.

I wish to take a couple of minutes, if I may, on an amendment I will call up either this evening or tomorrow once this has been resolved, this process matter has been resolved. I intend to offer an amendment that would statutorily require a dedication of $50 billion from the second tranche of the so-called TARP funding to be dedicated to foreclosure mitigation.

As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee--and I am pleased to recognize that the distinguished Presiding Officer is a new member of that committee--for the last 2 years--in fact, 2 years ago this very week, we had our very first hearing, and I became chairman of the committee on the foreclosure problems in this country and the problems with the residential mortgage market generally. We had witnesses at that time who warned that we might face as many as 2 million foreclosures in the country. I recall when the witness testified to that effect, there were those who scoffed at that prediction, that nothing such as that could possibly happen in the United States. Now it seems like a modest prediction in light of what has occurred over the last 2 years regarding our economy, in this country, all of which began with the residential mortgage market in this Nation.

More so than anything else, it was the predatory lending that drew people into mortgages they were ill-prepared to meet, did not require documentation; they were actually called liar loans, in a sense. Of course, the brokers and the servicers and lenders were all passing on the responsibility with little or no accountability, were being compensated for their efforts, and no longer had any underwriting standards or requirements that would have required that the borrowers meet certain requirements in order to protect that mortgage and that homeowner.

I won't dwell on that this evening except to say that now we have 8 million homes underwater in effect, where the mortgages exceed the value of the homes. It is predicted that several millions more could lose their homes. Mr. President, 10,000 people a day in this country are losing their homes, along with the 20,000 losing their jobs, and there is an increase in the likelihood of further deterioration in the housing market.

I had hoped earlier on, with the first tranche of $350 billion, that more would be done in foreclosure mitigation. Regretfully, despite promises to the contrary, that never occurred. I am hopeful--in fact, beyond hopeful--because this amendment would require that $50 billion of that remaining $350 billion be dedicated to this purpose. I am confident that the new administration is committed to that. They certainly indicated as much in their comments. While not specifically identifying a number, they certainly indicated they intend to dedicate serious resources toward foreclosure mitigation. This amendment would secure, beyond any doubt--that those resources I have identified would be allocated for foreclosure mitigation. There are some other points in the amendment, but that is the major thrust.

Most economists, regardless of ideology or political perspective, have agreed that until we deal with the foreclosure crisis, the economic situation will continue to deteriorate until we get to the bottom of that. There are a variety of different proposals that have been suggested on how we might

achieve that. This amendment I am offering does not insist upon any particular formulation. There are a number of ideas out there. I think Sheila Bair, who is the chairperson of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has one of the more creative ideas, an idea that has been warmly embraced by the Obama administration. That is not to say they agree with every dotted ``I'' and crossed ``t,'' but they certainly indicated they think it is more than just a reasonable idea but may very well contribute to putting a tourniquet on this hemorrhaging that is occurring in the residential mortgage market. That is one idea. There are others as well. Several of my colleagues on both sides of this political divide have offered ideas that I think would contribute to the reduction of foreclosures in the country, many of which are very solid ideas. Some may need further work than others, but I think all of us are now aiming in the right direction.

It has been a journey of some length. It was only in the spring of last year that we faced some six filibusters in this Chamber when we tried to fashion a housing program that would reduce some of the problems we saw a year ago. Obviously, the mood has changed dramatically. We now have virtually everyone talking about how to deal with the foreclosure problem. I only regret that same consensus had not developed earlier. Had it done so, in my view, we would not be where we are today. This is not a natural disaster that has occurred; this was an avoidable problem. That is the great tragedy of it. This was an avoidable economic problem that has at its roots the mortgage crisis. Unfortunately, it went unattended for so long despite repeated warnings by many of us.

But here we are at the outset of 2009 with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and a problem that has now spread throughout the globe. So it is incumbent upon us to take various steps to try to address this issue. I think the money that was allocated back last fall minimized the problem in a sense that it would have been far worse than it is today without those resources. Unfortunately, the management of those resources has not been as well executed as it could have been. My hope is that this next tranche will be far better managed with far greater accountability, far greater transparency, and far greater controls on such things as executive compensation.

Obviously, the stimulus package is also important. I wish to commend President Obama because he has said this well; that is, these steps we are taking are not in and of themselves going to resolve the economic crisis. What I think they do is minimize further deterioration of our economy. The President said the other day that he wishes these actions would turn the corner for us. What he hopes it will achieve is to stop the deterioration or the flow of this economy moving in the wrong direction.

So I think it is important as we talk about the stimulus package that we talk about these TARP funds. These are all steps that are needed to get us moving in the right direction, to create jobs in the country and stop the tremendous increase in unemployment--as I mentioned, 20,000 jobs a day--and begin to repair our credit market and the financial system in this country.

Far more will need to be done. Anyone who stands on this floor or elsewhere and predicts that because of the steps we are taking we are going to miraculously or immediately cure our economic ills is misspeaking. It will not. But it will get us pointed in the right direction. That is what is important about these steps we are about to take. It will move us in a direction of improving our economy.

I see my colleague from Missouri.

I am pleased to yield.

Mr. President, I would say to my colleague from Missouri that she has an excellent memory. I had 82 hearings in the Banking Committee, over a third of them on this subject matter alone. We came to the floor of the Senate at the behest of the majority leader, Senator Reid, who was a champion of these issues. We had these hearings prior to the Passover, Easter break in committee, over a third of them on this subject matter alone. We faced six filibusters--almost a record number--on a single piece of legislation. It was after that break that things began to open up and move.

My colleague from Missouri has this exactly right. There were those who were vehemently opposed. There were all sorts of amendments, all sorts of efforts made to obstruct any effort for us to come up with ideas to allow us to mitigate the rising foreclosures in the country. Had we dealt with it then, a year ago, I think it is safe to say to my colleagues that we would not be in the situation we are in today.

Mr. President, responding to my colleague and friend from Missouri, she is absolutely correct. I think there is a tendency to look at these issues as if they were somehow stovepiped, separate from each other, this dealing with the TARP legislation and dealing with the financial crisis and now dealing with the stimulus package is unrelated. It has been pointed out that there is a likelihood we will lose as much as $2 trillion out of our economy over the next 2 years. Making up that gap is going to require some effort.

This bill will ultimately, I hope, result in an appropriation of something between $800 billion and $900 billion--no small amount but far short of what will be lost in our economy over the next 2 years. If we defeat this or shelve this, as has been suggested, we exacerbate the economic problems of this Nation to a significant degree, which would require this body coming back at a later date with something that none of us even wants to contemplate at this point.

So this is not an unrelated matter. You shelve this, you walk away from this responsibility, and you burden the American taxpayer to the likes none of us could even begin to calculate.

So I thank my colleague from Missouri for pointing that fact out. This is related. If our economy does not begin to improve or at least not get worse, as the President has accurately pointed out, the problems only become more pronounced, more difficult to resolve in the coming weeks and months. So our economic future depends upon each of these pieces in place that will allow us to begin to turn that corner, see credit begin to move, borrowing occur, lenders lending, and activity economically in this country begin to move in the direction we need for recovery. So I thank her immensely for her comments. She identified exactly what needs to be done and explained it to our citizens.

This is not an idle effort just to secure some spending. It is absolutely essential if we are going to produce the kinds of jobs that are necessary, contribute to economic growth, and make a difference for our country. That is the reason I thought on this bill--it is a stimulus bill--of requiring to be set aside $50 billion of the TARP money in the next tranche to be dedicated to the rising number of foreclosures of residential properties in our Nation. If you are losing 20,000 jobs a day, you don't need to be a degreed economist to know that with every one of those people who loses a job, the greater the likelihood they will lose their home.

We need to do everything we can to try to stop that erosion in the job market and simultaneously do what we can to make it possible for people to stay in their homes. There is a direct correlation between the stimulus effort and TARP regarding mitigation of foreclosures. That is why I will ask my colleagues to be supportive of that effort tomorrow.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I rise to speak in support of the nomination of Timothy Geithner to serve as our Nation's Treasury Secretary. I believe most Americans, regardless of political persuasion or how they voted in November, would agree that we are living in probably the worst economic crisis of their lifetime. You would have to have been alive in the 1920s to remember days that even resemble the ones we are in today. So this afternoon, in the moments before we are about to vote on this nomination, I rise to express my views.

I know Tim Geithner. I wouldn't ask my colleagues to support his nomination because I know this person, respect and admire him and think he is qualified to serve as Treasury Secretary. I am asking my colleagues to support him because he is one of the most talented people I have met in the area of financial services and in understanding the regulatory architecture that not only exists today but the one that we must create in order to get our country back on its feet again. While there are certainly issues raised, including the one raised a moment ago about back taxes--and I don't minimize that--it is also extremely important that we keep this nomination in perspective and that we understand the issues at hand. While I have served here for the last quarter of a century, I can only count on less than one hand the number of nominations I voted against in Democratic and Republican administrations. Not because I have agreed with all of them but because I happen to believe that administrations that are elected deserve to have the official family they choose, barring disqualifying concerns about a nominee's ability to serve. To be sure, a nomination to the President's Cabinet is worthy of congratulations, and I congratulate Mr. Geithner. But with our economic trouble so severe and our future so uncertain, this nomination deserves less our congratulations than our very best wishes and commitment to work in partnership.

Mr. Geithner's arrival at Treasury could not come at a more critical moment for our Nation. It comes on the heels of excessive unchecked financial practices that have brought our economy and the world's economy to its knees. Next to the President himself, no single individual will bear more of a responsibility to steer our Nation out of this crisis than the new Treasury Secretary. Charting a course of recovery requires understanding the causes of the crisis in the very first instance. As chairman of the Banking Committee, I have convened more than 80 hearings and markups in the last 24 months to help diagnose and remedy our Nation's economic troubles. It is not a responsibility I sought, nor one which I relish. Certainly, I would much rather be talking about how to grow our economy than how to save our economy, but that is where we are today.

We have an obligation, all of us, regardless of party or ideology, not only to determine how we got into this situation, but also--and more importantly, in many ways--what is needed to get us out of it.

It is by now beyond dispute that the current crisis threatening our economy started several years ago in a relatively discrete corner of the credit market known as subprime mortgage lending. Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, previous Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and many other individuals have all agreed on that fact. There is no dispute about it. Mortgage market participants from brokers to lenders to investment banks to credit rating agencies exploited millions of unsuspecting, hard-working Americans seeking to own or refinance a home. It is clear that greed and avarice overcame sound judgment and prudent lending. But what makes this crisis different from others was the abject failure of regulators to adequately police the markets. Regulators resisted the call to regulate new markets and financial instruments, even when they had the tools to do so.

The Federal Reserve, for example, ignored a power granted by Congress over 14 years ago to regulate mortgage markets, State-chartered and federally chartered lending institutions. Not a single regulation was ever promulgated under the Bush administration until the problem was well out of hand. This wasn't a matter of there not being enough laws on the books--quite the contrary--but, rather, a matter of regulators failing to enforce the ones they had been given. What resulted was a regulatory failure of historic proportions.

Of the many lessons learned from this crisis, the most revealing is that the failure to enforce consumer protections can lead to the failure of the entire financial system. For decades, ideology prevented regulators from acknowledging this fact. It takes a crisis, unfortunately, of global scale to understand the dangers of failing to protect consumers. It is now painfully clear that when American households are preyed upon in such systemic and abusive ways, our entire financial system is threatened. Never again should we allow financial regulators to treat consumer protection as a nuisance or of secondary importance to safety and soundness regulation. Never again should we permit the kind of systemic regulatory failures that allowed reckless lending practices to mushroom into a global credit crisis.

The safety and soundness of our financial system depends upon the well-being of the customers and investors who use that system every day. Unfortunately, most of the Government actions taken in recent months have largely ignored this fact and have addressed the symptoms of the credit crisis rather than its root causes. For nearly 2 years now, I have urged, along with others, forceful and definitive action to reverse the rising tide of foreclosures that began to chip away at American households in 2007. In fact, it was exactly 2 years ago next week, I had chaired the Banking Committee for only one month, when we held the

very first hearings on the mortgage credit crisis, in February of 2007. For 2 long years, we had hearings and meetings and countless efforts to try and convince the administration of the seriousness of what was happening in the residential mortgage market. Not until last summer did we finally get some recognition, but it was far too late at that point.

All of my colleagues can recount in great detail the events that cascaded since July through the fall of this past year. Noted economists and analysts from across the political spectrum have also sounded the alarm, including such distinguished individuals as former Carter and Reagan Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, former Reagan chief economic adviser Martin Feldstein, and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Alex Pollack. These and other experts agreed that the key to our Nation's economic recovery is recovery of the housing market and that the key to recovery of the housing market is, of course, reducing foreclosures, of which nearly 9,000 occur every day.

Without addressing the cause of this crisis as swiftly, aggressively, and decisively as we have tackled the symptoms of the crisis, home prices will continue to fall. The value of assets based on mortgages-- trillions of dollars of which are on the books of our major financial institutions--will continue to be virtually unknowable. The longer we allow foreclosures to erode family wealth, tear apart neighborhoods and freeze our markets, the longer our economy will take to recover from this crisis. However hard our regulators work, the result will be a continuation of volatility and paralysis in our economy. If ever there was a time that called for new thinking, this is that moment. As Tim Geithner takes the helm of the Treasury, he will be responsible for leading administration efforts to revitalize the credit markets and restore confidence and integrity in our financial system. It is a tall order, to be sure. No one could assume that one individual is going to solve all of this. But in my view, we can achieve these results for the American people through four key steps.

First, Mr. Geithner and the rest of the administration's economic team must develop and clearly communicate a long-term, comprehensive plan, a framework for using TARP funds to support the financial system and communicate effectively to the American people so they understand exactly where we are, how we got here, and what the intended steps are to move us out of it. The previous administration's piecemeal lurching intervention from one side to the next in the financial system contributed to the confusion and the volatility that has dragged down consumer and investor confidence. Outlining a clear direction as to how the Government will use taxpayer money going forward would provide families and businesses with the clarity and assurance they need to make important economic decisions.

Second, we must safeguard the use of taxpayer money through increased transparency and strengthened taxpayer protections. Instead of lending money to consumers and small businesses, TARP recipients have effectively been given a free pass to hoard taxpayer funds and pay lavish bonuses to senior executives and handsome dividends to shareholders. In order to provide meaningful taxpayer protection, I believe at least the following conditions are necessary: stricter limits on executive compensation, additional limits on executive compensation, including restricting the payment of bonuses to executives; strictly limit dividends, prohibit the payment of dividends to shareholders beyond de minimis amounts; establish appropriate lending targets for recipients of TARP funding and the means of monitoring them; limit acquisitions, prohibit the use of TARP funds to purchase healthy institutions; increase transparency and accountability, require that TARP recipients submit regular reports no less than quarterly specifying how they are using TARP funds or otherwise furthering the purposes of the emergency economic stabilization law and how they are complying with these TARP conditions. These reports should include information about consumer and commercial loans, details about acquisitions, and the number and type of loan modifications. We must implement measures to prevent foreclosures, which I should have listed at the top of the list, require recipients of TARP funds that service or own mortgages to take measures to mitigate preventable foreclosures and use TARP funds to establish or support foreclosure prevention programs.

The Obama administration is already committed to making these changes and is working on a more detailed strategy. I look forward to reviewing that plan and to continuing the committee's close and detailed oversight of the implementation of this program. That is why I intend to hold hearings on the TARP in the coming weeks and to ask the very questions I am raising this afternoon.

Third in this list is to apply the same sharp and urgent focus to help individual homeowners whose plight is the root cause of this crisis. Stopping foreclosures must be our top priority, putting a tourniquet on this hemorrhaging that is occurring across the country. Failing to do so will have devastating consequences for the economy.

Finally, to fix the failures in the regulatory system that led to this crisis, if we are going to regain the confidence of investors, consumers, and businesses at home and around the world, we must have assurances that our financial institutions are properly capitalized, regulated, and supervised.

The Senate Banking Committee has already begun an ambitious schedule of meetings and hearings to understand the strengths of our regulatory system and to address forcefully its weaknesses. Senator Shelby and I welcome diverse parties and points of view. I am guided by several core principles: Regulators must be strong cops on the beat rather than turn a blind eye to reckless lending practices; regulators must stop competing against each other for bank and thrift ``clients'' by weakening regulations; regulators must be able to identify and, if necessary, take action against risks at the institutions they supervise; regulators and market participants need more transparency so they understand the risks present in the financial system and to prevent trillion-dollar markets from operating in the dark.

Each one of these steps--communicating a long-term plan for Government assistance, strengthening transparency and taxpayer protections, preventing avoidable foreclosures, and fixing regulatory failures--will help not only our economic recovery but also help restore, most importantly, the confidence of the American people. You cannot enumerate confidence, but it is critical. I can not tell you exactly the mathematical formula that will get you there, but in the absence of these steps, I do not believe confidence will be restored, and that is the intangible quality more than any other that we need to regain for investors and for the American people, who have been the driving force for our Nation's innovation and productivity.

I commend Tim Geithner for taking on this extraordinary responsibility. In many ways, you wonder why he is willing to do it, considering the incredible problems we face. But we are fortunate to have a talented individual who is willing to step up and assume this responsibility. Rather than decrying it and lambasting him, we ought to be thanking him. None of us are perfect. Every one of us has made mistakes along the way, and to suggest that Tim Geithner is unqualified for this job or should not be confirmed because of his tax issue is to fail to understand the value his nomination is to our country.

My hope is my colleagues will do what I have done over the years. I have been highly criticized by people in my party. When I voted for John Ashcroft to be the Attorney General, I was highly criticized. When I voted for John Tower to be the Secretary of Defense, I was highly criticized. But I happen to believe Presidents deserve their teams to be in place to do their job.

Tim Geithner is the kind of individual we need. He will listen to people. He will pay attention to different points of view. And he can make a difference for our country. In an hour such as this, we ought not to be divided in this Chamber, but to stand united, to give this young man a chance to get a job done for our Nation at one of the most critical periods in our history.

We have a lot of work to do, and we ought to get about the business of

doing it, not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans. I urge my colleagues to support this nomination. At this moment, communication, cooperation, and consultation are not only preferable as we steer our country through these tough times, they are absolutely essential.

I look forward to Tim Geithner's confirmation and to working with him, as I do my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, along with our new President. This is a defining moment in our history, and restoring our economy is our defining challenge. I believe Tim Geithner is the right person to begin this effort.

Madam President, I urge the confirmation of Tim Geithner, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak about an issue of fundamental economic fairness--an issue that affects the dignity and the security of millions of Americans: the right to equal pay for equal work.

Before I begin, let me thank Senator Kennedy, the chairman of the HELP Committee, and Senator Mikulski, for their tireless work on this important issue.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act goes a long way toward ensuring that right to equal pay. In a perfect world, of course, we could take that right for granted--we could take it for granted that the value of work lies not in the race or gender of the person who is doing it but in a job well done.

Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. We know that, even now, some employers cheat their employees out of equal pay for equal work.

That's what happened to Lilly Ledbetter. For almost two decades, from 1979 to 1998, she was a hardworking supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, AL.

And it is telling that she suffered from two types of discrimination at the same time. On the one hand, there was sexual harassment, from the manager who said to her face that women shouldn't work in a tire factory, to the supervisor who tried to use performance evaluations to extort sex.

And on the other hand, there was pay discrimination: by the end of her career, as the salaries of her male coworkers were raised higher and faster than hers, she was making some $6,700 less per year than the lowest paid man in the same position.

Now, the two kinds of discrimination faced by Ms. Ledbetter have a good deal in common. Morally, each amounts to a kind of theft--the theft of dignity in work and the theft of the wages fairly earned.

Both send a clear message as well--that women don't belong in the workplace.

But there is a clear difference between sexual harassment and pay discrimination. The former is blatant. The latter far too often stays insidiously hidden.

In fact, Lilly Ledbetter didn't even know she was being paid unfairly until long after the discrimination began. Absent an anonymous coworker giving her proof, she might be in the dark to this very day.

And that is hardly surprising. How many Americans know exactly how much their coworkers make? What would happen if they asked? At some companies, you could be fired.

Armed with proof of pay discrimination, Ms. Ledbetter asked the courts for her fair share. And they agreed with her: she had been discriminated against.

She had been cheated.

And she was entitled to her back pay.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled against her, and took it all away. Yes, she had been discriminated against--but she had missed a very important technicality.

She only had 180 days--6 months--to file her lawsuit--and the clock started running on the day Goodyear chose to discriminate against her.

Never mind that she had no idea she was even the victim of pay discrimination until years later. Figure it out in 180 days, the Court said or you are out of luck for a lifetime.

It is not hard to see how this ruling harms so many Americans beyond Ms. Ledbetter. In setting an extremely difficult, arbitrary, and unfair hurdle, it stands in the way of many, many Americans fighting against discrimination.

It also flatly contradicts what had been the standard practice of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, flies in the face of decades of legal precedent, and ignores clear congressional intent.

As Justice Ginsburg put it in her vehement dissent, the Court's Ledbetter ruling ignores the facts of discrimination in the real world. She writes:

Pay disparities often occur . . . in small increments;

cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only

over time. Comparative pay information, moreover, is often

hidden from the employee's view . . . Small initial

discrepancies may not be seen as meet for a federal case,

particularly when the employee, trying to succeed in a

nontraditional environment, is averse to making waves.

``The ball,'' Ginsburg concluded, ``is in Congress's court . . . The legislature may act to correct this Court's parsimonious reading.''

That is precisely what we are here to do today. With today's passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, employees will have a fair time limit to sue for pay discrimination. They will still have 180 days, but the clock will start with each discriminatory paycheck, not with the original decision to discriminate. After all, each unfair paycheck is in itself a decision to discriminate--it is ongoing discrimination. Employees like Ms. Ledbetter will no longer be blocked from seeking redress, through no fault of their own, except a failure to be more suspicious.

This is an important moment and important bill. I do wish we were also strengthening the remedies available to victims of pay discrimination under the Equal Pay Act.

For this reason we must also pass into law the Paycheck Fairness Act, authored by my friend and colleague in the Connecticut delegation, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, and championed in the Senate by Senator Hillary Clinton. Had paycheck fairness been law when Lilly Ledbetter decided to go to court, she may well have received just compensation for the discriminatory practices she endured. She certainly would have had a stronger case to make and a greater array of tools. So, as critical as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is, we certainly have more work to do.

Millions of Americans depend on the right to equal pay for equal work: to earn a livelihood, to feed their families, and to uphold their basic dignity. We ought to make it easier for Americans to exercise that right, not harder. We ought to get unfair roadblocks, hurdles, and technicalities out of their way. With passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, we take an important step toward eliminating these discriminatory roadblocks once and for all.

Mr. President, I once again come to the floor to discuss an issue that goes directly to who we are as a country and what we stand for.

Specifically, I want to comment on the executive orders President Obama signed today to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within a year, close secret prisons operated by the CIA, and review the procedures for detaining and trying accused terrorists. In so doing, he sends a long-overdue message not only to the world, but also to the American people here at home, reaffirming our values as Americans and our commitment to the rule of law.

As we speak, some 245 individuals are still being held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, and about 100 in secret prisons around the world, though we do not even know for sure. Several independent sources have alleged that these detainees have suffered from abuse.

All of the information we have indicates that most, if not all, of these people have engaged in a host of violent actions directed at the United States. They are not misguided innocents, but rather men committed to harming us. I rise today not to defend them and their actions in any way; they must be punished to the full extent of the law.

Rather, I rise to urge exactly that, the application of our great body of law for dealing with dangerous people intent on harming us. Indeed, some in our Government have failed to apply the law and failed to obey it.

According to a Red Cross report, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay were subjected to ``cruel, inhumane and degrading'' treatment that is ``tantamount to torture.'' FBI agents have reported that many of those held at Guantnamo Bay were chained to the floor in a fetal position for 18 hours or more, and were subject to 100-degree heat and freezing cold. The CIA's secret facilities have never been inspected, so we don't know how prisoners have been treated in them.

These abuses are not just morally wrong, they are violations of American and international law. They weaken respect for the rule of law abroad and subject American citizens to greater risks of unlawful detention and torture in foreign countries. And they weaken our security even as they undermine our democratic ideals.

Guantanamo and the CIA's secret prisons has been an international embarrassment, a symbol of abuse and the breakdown of law, which is why I and others have come to this floor so often to discuss our moral responsibility to close them.

To be absolutely clear, I repeat that those who are a threat to America, who are guilty of crimes, must and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. They must be tried and prosecuted. This decision is not about protecting those who wish to harm us.

Rather, this decision says, as President Obama did in his inaugural address this week, that the choice between security and liberty is a false choice, and we reject it.

As General George Washington answered when his soldiers asked him for permission to beat their prisoners, ``Treat them with humanity. Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example'' of our enemies.

And so, I am grateful and relieved that President Obama has acted so quickly to remedy this very damaging policy.

This is, of course, only the first step. We must remain vigilant in working with the administration to implement these orders. And there remain many issues to be decided, from when and how Guantanamo and other detention facilities are closed to ensuring the interrogation methods employed by U.S. personnel never again cross the line into torture.

But this is a critical first step toward restoring not only the rule of law and our Constitution but also our moral authority. Today, we remind the world and ourselves that everyone is subject to the law and no one, not you, not I, stands above it.

I am convinced that today's orders will better secure our Nation and allow us to more effectively prevent, detain, and prosecute those who would seek to harm us.

I applaud President Obama for his decision to act without delay on these most important issues.

Mr. President, today we are considering the nomination of Mr. Shaun Donovan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to become the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD.

Mr. Donovan, has been nominated for a job fraught with significant challenges yet, for that very reason, imbued with great opportunities.

For the past 3 or 4 years, the country has been facing a growing housing

problem that had its origins in the scourge of predatory lending that has resulted in record high foreclosure rates.

This housing crisis has been a primary cause of the deepening recession to which none of us are immune. Across the country, between 9,000 and 10,000 homeowners face foreclosure every day. Foreclosures in my State were up over 71 percent since last year, and it is expected that we will have more than 13,000 subprime foreclosures in the next two years. Nationwide, cities such as Bridgeport, which had inordinately high rates of subprime loans, are struggling to keep themselves afloat as those loans reset one-by-one and families find themselves with nowhere to turn.

I recently met with leaders in my State where I heard about the toll this crisis is taking on our minority communities. Some say this crisis will result in a net loss in homeownership rates for African Americans, wiping out a generation of wealth, gains and opportunities.

But let there be no doubt that this crisis today affects every American in one way or another. In all, by some counts, we can expect some 8 million homes to go into foreclosure absent some form of additional action.

Unfortunately, the previous administration was slow to acknowledge the housing problem, and when it finally did, timid in its response. Even as we witnessed foreclosures tear apart neighborhoods and wreak havoc upon our economy, the Administration refused to use the authority or funds we gave it in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to tackle the foreclosure crisis head on--despite the Congress's crystal clear intent in writing that law.

Surprisingly--and unfortunately, in my opinion--HUD has not played a central role in addressing the housing crisis. Frankly, it has been, to quote National Journal, ``at best, a second string player . . .'' following in the wake of other government departments with far less expertise in housing than the professionals at HUD (January 10, 2009).

Indeed, as the cover page of CQ Weekly says, ``The housing crisis remains at the core of the economy's woes . . .'' (January 12, 2009).

Put simply, we cannot address our economic crisis until we address the underlying housing crisis.

And to do that, we need an active, aggressive, and well-run HUD with leadership that is confident in its mission and unafraid to act. As President Obama has himself said, ``HUD's role has never been more important.''

Unfortunately, HUD has been mismanaged and ridden with scandal in the last several years. Let me be clear that these problems did not arise under the able leadership of our colleague, then-Secretary Martinez. I would also say that in recent weeks, Secretary Preston has made some improvements.

But fundamentally, HUD has been left adrift at a time when bold leadership and a clear direction were never more important.

Just a week or two ago, we learned about the Wrights--a middle-class family in Windsor, Connecticut in danger of losing their home. Like thousands of families across the country, the Wrights were lured into a mortgage they were assured they could afford but couldn't--not because they acted irresponsibly but because they became pregnant with their second child, and Mrs. Wright ran out of the paid sick time she was afforded as a teacher.

This is the kind of story being repeated in every community across America today. With the right leadership, I believe HUD can be an effective partner in helping families like the Wrights. That is the opportunity Mr. Donovan has--to restore HUD as a leading voice in addressing the crisis facing our country today.

I would say to my colleagues that Mr. Donovan is the most experienced nominee for HUD secretary that Senate has considered in my long experience. In addition to his degrees in architecture and public administration from Harvard, Mr. Donovan has run the multifamily program at the Federal Housing Administration and was, for a time, the Acting Housing Commissioner. He has worked in the private nonprofit sector as a housing developer and he has worked as a managing director of a large, multi-family mortgage company.

Since 2004, Mr. Donovan has been the commissioner of New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. In that role, he managed 2,800 employees and helped develop and manage Mayor Bloomberg's ``New Housing Marketplace Plan,'' one of the most ambitious local housing plans in the nation. The $7.5 billion plan calls for the creation or preservation of 165,000 units of affordable housing, about half of which has been accomplished to date.

Beyond the statistics and the numbers that so dramatically underscore Mr. Donovan's accomplishments, I want to welcome him for the kind of leadership and vision I am confident he will bring to the Department at a time when such leadership is needed so desperately.

For example, as early as 2004, long before most of the rest of the country was focused on the subprime crisis and the foreclosures they would lead to, Mr. Donovan told a Newsday reporter that he was worried about the coming ``flood of foreclosures'' and the impact it would have on homeowners and neighborhoods.

Mr. Donovan sees the role of HUD as being more than a caretaker for physical housing structures, or as a mortgage insurance company. He understands the danger of stove-piping within this arena, and sees HUD as the Federal Government's primary tool to help build communities--an agency that helps to provide housing opportunities for homeowners and for renters along a spectrum of incomes and ages. He understands the need to coordinate housing with transportation, including public transportation and transit, to improve access to jobs and other economic opportunities--and we need someone with that vision at the helm.

Finally, Mr. Donovan is a man of the utmost integrity who has shown a proven ability to work constructively with all interested parties. His nomination is being supported, enthusiastically, I want to add, by a wide variety of housing groups, from the Realtors, to the Homebuilders, to the Low Income Housing Coalition, to many nonprofit organizations and many, many others.

I want to express my thanks to Mr. Donovan for the leadership he will bring to this critically important department and, more importantly, the hope he will offer to millions of families at this uncertain moment.

I urge my colleagues to support the nomination of Mr. Donovan to be Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mr. President, today I rise in support of the nomination of our colleague, the junior Senator from New York, Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as our next Secretary of State.

It is a position to which I am confident she will be confirmed shortly--and in which I know she will serve extraordinarily well.

Before I speak about the qualifications that Senator Clinton brings to this most important position at such a crucial juncture in our history, I want say a few words about the spirit of openness and cooperation that she demonstrated throughout the confirmation process.

As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for more than a quarter century--having closely reviewed her nomination--Senator Clinton and her husband have taken unprecedented steps and gone above and beyond what we have asked of them. That she has speaks not only to Senator Clinton's personal integrity, but to her commitment to the office of Secretary of State.

Senator Clinton will serve during a period crucial to restoring America's moral authority--making clear to the world our virtue, our noble intentions and--as we were reminded by our new President, Barack Obama, yesterday--all that we still represent to so many around the globe.

As we all know, Senator Clinton has a history of redefining roles and inspiring people around the world. Certainly, she did when she first rose to the national stage as First Lady, taking on issues previously unfamiliar to that position, often in new ways--children's issues, healthcare, women's rights.

To those who had known her, none of that was surprising. Indeed, long before she became First Lady or Senator, she had been a tenacious legal advocate for children and families, fostering hope in a wide cross- section of the American people. Little wonder, then, that she gained that following of passionate supporters that we saw on the campaign trail last year.

For the last 8 years, Senator Clinton has represented the State of New York and has given her constituents a daring and tenacious advocate in Washington, putting a special focus on improving her State's economy--specifically that of upstate New York which is not only hit harder by recessions but often remains a bystander during times of economic expansion.

That she so naturally became this kind of advocate speaks volumes about her affinity for the less fortunate--her beliefs about the nature of public service and the kind of priorities she will bring as Secretary of State.

I have said that it also is a testament to President Obama that he nominated his one-time rival to such a critical post. But perhaps it says more about the nominee herself--about her commitment to bringing change to this country.

I have been privileged to serve alongside Senator Clinton. In assuming the position of Secretary of State, Senator Clinton assumes a responsibility--that of being our representative to friends and enemies alike. Her judgment and temperament will be critical to restoring international relationships which have been so badly tarnished in recent years.

So, let me join my colleagues in saying thank you to the junior Senator from New York. I know her tenacity and talent will serve our country extraordinarily well in the coming years, as it has throughout her lifetime. I urge my colleagues to confirm her and I wish her the best of luck.