Floor Statements

The Senator from Massachusetts is correct. Size and involvement in providing credit or liquidity alone should not be determining factors. The Banking Committee intends that only a limited number of high-risk, nonbank financial companies would join large bank holding companies in being regulated and supervised by the Federal Reserve.

Capital Requirements

I concur with Senator Collins and Senator Shaheen. Section 171 of this legislation came from an amendment that Senator Collins offered on the Senate floor, and I truly appreciate the constructive contribution she has made to this legislative process. My understanding also is that the capital requirements under paragraph 7 are intended to apply only to insured depository institutions, depository institution holding companies, and nonbank financial companies supervised by the Board of Governors. I thank my friends from Maine and New Hampshire for this clarification.

Insurance Company Definition

Yes, that is correct. It is intended that a mutual insurance holding company organized and operating under State insurance laws should be considered an insurance company for the purpose of title II of this legislation. I thank the Senator from Nebraska for this clarification.

Independent Representatives

Mr. President, I agree completely with Senator Lincoln's analysis and with the need to address this issue to ensure that uninsured U.S. branches and agencies of foreign banks are treated the same as insured depository institutions under the provisions of section 716, including the safe harbor language.

End Users

I agree with the Chairman's assessment. There is no authority to set margin on end users, only major swap participants and swap dealers. It is also the intent of this bill to distinguish between commercial end users hedging their risk and larger, riskier market participants. Regulators should distinguish between these types of companies when implementing new regulatory requirements.

I thank the Senator. Pursuant to negotiations during the conference committee, it was my desire that the SEC write rules to exempt certain family offices already in operation from the definition of investment adviser, regardless of whether they had previously received an SEC exemptive order. It was my intent that the rule would: exempt family offices, provided that they operated in a manner consistent with the previous exemptive policy of the Commission as reflected in exemptive orders for family offices in effect on the date of enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act; reflect a recognition of the range of organizational, management and employment structures and arrangements employed by family offices; and not exclude any person who was not registered or required to be registered under the Advisers Act from the definition of the term ``family office'' solely because such person provides investment advice to natural persons who, at the time of their applicable investment, are officers, directors or employees of the family office who have previously invested with the family office and are accredited investors, any company owned exclusively by such officers, directors or employees or their successors-in-interest and controlled by the family office, or any other natural persons who identify investment opportunities to the family office and invest in such transactions on substantially the same terms as the family office invests, but do not invest in other funds advised by the family office, and whose assets to which the family office provides investment advice represent, in the aggregate, not more than 5 percent of the total assets as to which the family office provides investment advice.

I agree that this position should be raised in a corrections bill and I look forward to working with the Senator towards this goal on this point.

Mr. President, I thank my friend, the Senator from California, for her support and for all the work we have done together on this important issue. Her understanding is correct.

The purpose of the Volcker rule is to eliminate excessive risk taking activities by banks and their affiliates while at the same time preserving safe, sound investment activities that serve the public interest. It prohibits proprietary trading and limits bank investment in hedge funds and private equity for that reason. But properly conducted venture capital investment will not cause the harms at which the Volcker rule is directed. In the event that properly conducted venture capital investment is excessively restricted by the provisions of section 619, I would expect the appropriate Federal regulators to exempt it using their authority under section 619(J).

Captive Finance

The gentleman is correct in his description of the language.

Event Contracts

I do agree and thank my colleague for raising another important point of clarification. I believe the bill is clear that an end user does not become a swap dealer by virtue of using an affiliate to hedge its own commercial risk. Senator Collins has been a champion for end users and it is a pleasure working with her.

Mr. President, I would like to clarify the intent behind one of the provisions in the conference report to accompany the financial reform bill, H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Section 204(d) contemplates that the FDIC, as receiver, may take a lien on assets of a covered financial company or a covered subsidiary. With respect to assets of a covered subsidiary that is an insurance company or a direct or indirect subsidiary of an insurance company, I believe that the FDIC should exercise such authority cautiously to avoid weakening the insurance company and thereby undermining policyholder protection. Indeed, any lien taken on the assets of a covered subsidiary that is an insurance company or a direct or indirect subsidiary of an insurance company must avoid weakening or undermining policyholder protection. As a result, the FDIC should normally not take a lien on the assets of such a covered subsidiary except where the FDIC sells the covered subsidiary to a third party, provides financing in connection with the sale, and takes a lien on the assets of the covered subsidiary to secure the third party's repayment obligation to the FDIC. I understand that the FDIC intends to promulgate regulations consistent with this view.

Mr. President, I would also like to clarify the intent behind another of the provisions in the conference report to accompany the financial reform bill, H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Section 1075 of the bill amends the Electronic Fund Transfer Act to create a new section 920 regarding interchange fees. This is a very complicated subject involving many different stakeholders, including payment networks, issuing banks, acquiring banks, merchants, and, of course, consumers. Section 1075 therefore is also complicated, and I would like to make a clarification with regard to that section.

Since interchange revenues are a major source of paying for the administrative costs of prepaid cards used in connection with health care and employee benefits programs such as FSAs, HSAs, HRAs, and qualified transportation accounts--programs which are widely used by both public and private sector employers and which are more expensive to operate given substantiation and other regulatory requirements--we do not wish to interfere with those arrangements in a way that could lead to higher fees being imposed by administrators to make up for lost revenue. That could directly raise health care costs, which would hurt consumers and which, of course, is not at all what we wish to do. Hence, we intend that prepaid cards associated with these types of programs would be exempted within the language of section 920(a)(7)(A)(ii)(II) as well as from the prohibition on use of exclusive networks under section 920(b)(1)(A).

Mr. President, I want to clarify a provision of the conference report of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, H.R. 4173. Section 1012 sets forth the executive and administrative powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, and section 1012(c)(1)--Coordination with the Board of Governors--provides that ``Notwithstanding any other provision of law applicable to the supervision or examination of persons with respect to Federal

consumer financial laws, the Board of Governors may delegate to the Bureau the authorities to examine persons subject to the jurisdiction of the Board of Governors for compliance with the Federal consumer financial laws.'' This provision is not intended to override section 1026, which will continue to define the Bureau's examination and enforcement authority over insured depository institutions and insured credit unions with assets of less than $10 billion. The conferees expect that the board will not delegate to the Bureau its authority to examine insured depository institutions with assets of less than $10 billion.

Throughout the development of and debate on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, I have insisted that the legislation meet three requirements--independent rule writing, independent examination and enforcement authority, and independent funding for the CFPB. The CFPB, as established by the conference report, meets each of those requirements. I want to speak for a moment about section 1017, which establishes the independent funding mechanism for the CFPB.

The conference report requires the Federal Reserve System to automatically fund the CFPB based on the total operating expenses of the system, using 2009 as the baseline. This will ensure that the CFPB has the resources it needs to perform its functions without subjecting it to annual congressional appropriations. The failure of the Congress to provide the Office of Federal Housing Enterprises Oversight, OFHEO, with a steady stream of independent funding outside the appropriations process led to repeated interference with the operations of that regulator. Even when there was not explicit interference, the threat of congressional interference could very well have served to circumscribe the actions OFHEO was willing to take. We did not want to repeat that mistake in this legislation.

In addition, because many of the employees of the CFPB will come from existing financial regulators, the conferees take the view that it is important that the new entity have the resources to keep these high quality staff and to attract new equally qualified staff, and to provide them with the support that they need to operate effectively. To that end, the conferees adopted the employment cost index for total compensation of State and Federal employees, ECI, as the index by which the funding baseline will be adjusted in the future. This index has generally risen faster than the CPI, which was the index used in the Senate bill. However, the ECI has typically risen at a more gradual rate than the average operating costs of the banking regulators, which was the index proposed by the House conferees.

In the end, the conferees agreed to use the ECI and provide for a contingent authorization of appropriations of $200 million per year through fiscal year 2014. In order to trigger this authorization, the CFPB Director would have to report to the Appropriations Committees that the CFPB's formula funding is not sufficient.

Section 1085 of the legislation adds the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CFPB, to the list of agencies authorized to enforce the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, ECOA--15 U.S.C. Sec. 1691c(a)(9). The legislation also amends section 706(g)--15 U.S.C. Sec. 1691e(g)--to require the CFPB to refer a matter to the Attorney General whenever the CFPB has reason to believe that 1 or more creditors has engaged in a ``pattern or practice of discouraging or denying applications for credit'' in violation of section 701, 15 U.S.C. Sec. 1691(a). The general grant of civil litigation authority to the CFPB, in section 1054(a), should not be construed to override, in any way, the CFPB's referral obligations under the ECOA.

The requirement in section 706(g) of the ECOA that the CFPB refer a matter involving a pattern-or-practice violation of section 701, rather than first filing its own pattern-or-practice action, furthers the legislation's purpose of reducing fragmentation in consumer protection and fair lending enforcement under the ECOA. The Attorney General, who currently has authority under section 706(g) to file those pattern-or- practice ECOA actions in court on behalf of the government, receives such pattern-or-practice referrals from other agencies with ECOA enforcement responsibilities and will continue to do so under the legislation. By subjecting the CFPB to the same referral requirement, the legislation intends to avoid creating fragmentation in this enforcement system under the ECOA where none currently exists.

Title XIV creates a strong, new set of underwriting requirements for residential mortgage loans. An important part of this new regime is the creation of a safe harbor for certain loans made according to the standards set out in the bill, and which will be detailed further in forthcoming regulations. Loans that meet this standard, called ``qualified mortgages,'' will have the benefit of a presumption that they are affordable to the borrowers.

Section 1411 explains the basis on which the regulator must establish the standards lenders will use to determine the ability of borrowers to repay their mortgages. Section 1412 provides that lenders that make loans according to these standards would enjoy the rebuttable presumption of the safe harbor for qualified mortgages established by this section. These standards include the need to document a borrower's income, among others. However, certain refinance loans, such as VA- guaranteed mortgages refinanced under the VA Interest Rate Reduction Loan Program or the FHA streamlined refinance program, which are rate- term refinance loans and are not cash-out refinances, may be made without fully reunderwriting the borrower, subject to certain protections laid out in the legislation, while still remaining qualified mortgages.

It is the conferees' intent that the Federal Reserve Board and the CFPB use their rulemaking authority under the enumerated consumer statutes and this legislation to extend this same benefit for conventional streamlined refinance programs where the party making the new loan already owns the credit risk. This will enable current homeowners to take advantage of current low interest rates to refinance their mortgages.

There are a number of provisions in title XIV for which there is not a specified effective date other than what is provided in section 1400(c). It is the intention of the conferees that provisions in title XIV that do not require regulations become effective no later than 18 months after the designated transfer date for the CFPB, as required by section 1400(c). However, the conferees encourage the Federal Reserve Board and the CFPB to act as expeditiously as possible to promulgate regulations so that the provisions of title XIV are put into effect sooner.

I would like to clarify that the conferees consider any program or initiative that was announced before June 25 to have been initiated for the purposes of section 1302 of the conference report. I also want to make clear that the conferees do not intend for section 1302 to prevent the Treasury Department from adjusting available resources that remain after the adoption of the conference report among such existing programs, based on effectiveness.

Mr. President, I also wish to explain some of the securities-related changes that emerged from the conference committee in the conference report.

The report amends section 408 to eliminate the blanket exemption for private equity funds and replace it with an exemption for private fund advisers with less than $150 million under management. The amendment also requires the SEC in its rulemaking to impose registration and examination procedures for such funds that reflect the level of systemic risk posed by midsized private funds.

Section 913 has been amended to combine the principle of conducting a study on the standard of care to investors in the Senate bill with a grant of additional authority to the SEC to act, such as is contained in the House-passed bill. The section requires the SEC to conduct a study prior to taking action or conducting rulemaking in this area. The study will include a review of the effectiveness of existing legal or regulatory standards of care and whether there are regulatory gaps, shortcomings or overlaps in legal or regulatory standards. Even if there is an overlap or a gap, the Commission should not act unless eliminating the overlap or filling a gap would improve investor protection and is in the public interest. The study would require a review of the effectiveness, frequency,

and duration of the regulatory examinations of brokers, dealers, and investment advisers. In this review, the paramount issue is effectiveness. If regulatory examinations are frequent or lengthy but fail to identify significant misconduct--for example, examinations of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC--they waste resources and create an illusion of effective regulatory oversight that misleads the public. The SEC, in studying potential impacts that would result from changes to the regulation or standard of care, should seek to preserve consumer access to products and services, including access for persons in rural locations. In assessing the potential costs and benefits, the SEC should take into account the net costs or the difference between additional costs and additional benefits. For example, it should consider not only higher transaction or advisory charges or fees but also the return on investment if an investor receives better recommendations that result in higher profits through paying higher fees. After reporting to Congress, the SEC is required to consider the findings, conclusions, and recommendations of its study.

New section 914 requires the SEC to study the need for enhanced examination and enforcement ``resources.'' The study of resources should not be limited to financial resources but should consider human resources also. Human resources involves whether there is a need for enhanced expertise, competence, and motivation to conduct examinations that satisfactorily identify problems or misconduct in the regulated entity. For example, if examinations fail to identify misconduct due to insufficient staff expertise, competence, or motivation, the study should conclude that there is a need for more effective staff or better management rather than merely more financial resources devoted to hiring additional staff of the same caliber.

New section 919D creates the SEC Ombudsman under the Office of the Investor Advocate. The Ombudsman can act as a liaison between the Commission and any retail investor in resolving problems that retail investors may have with the Commission or with self-regulatory organizations and to review and make recommendations regarding policies and procedures to encourage persons to present questions to the Investor Advocate regarding compliance with the securities laws. This list of duties in subsection (8)(B) is not intended to be an exhaustive list. For example, if the Investor Advocate assigns the Ombudsman duties to act as a liaison with persons who have problems in dealing with the Commission resulting from the regulatory activities of the Commission, this would not be prohibited by this legislation.

Title IX, subtitle B creates many new powers for the SEC. The SEC is expected to use these powers responsibly to better protect investors.

Section 922 has been amended to eliminate the right of a whistleblower to appeal the amount of an award. While the whistleblower cannot appeal the SEC's monetary award determination, this provision is intended to limit the SEC's administrative burden and not to encourage making small awards. The Congress intends that the SEC make awards that are sufficiently robust to motivate potential whistleblowers to share their information and to overcome the fear of risk of the loss of their positions. Unless the whistleblowers come forward, the Federal Government will not know about the frauds and misconduct.

In section 939B, the Report eliminated an exception so that credit rating agencies will be subject to regulation FD. Under this change, issuers would be required to disclose financial information to the public when they give it to rating agencies.

In section 939F, the report requires the SEC to study the credit rating process for structured finance products and the conflicts of interest associated with the issuer-pay and the subscriber-pay models; the feasibility of establishing a system in which a public or private utility or a self-regulatory organization assigns nationally recognized statistical rating organizations to determine the credit ratings of structured finance products. The report directs the SEC to implement the system for assigning credit ratings that was in the base text unless it determines that an alternative system would better serve the public interest and the protection of investors.

The report limits the exemption from risk retention requirements for qualified residential mortgages, by specifying that the definition of ``qualified residential mortgage'' may be no broader than the definition of ``qualified mortgage'' contained in section 1412 of the report, which amends section 129C of the Truth in Lending Act. The report contains the following technical errors: the reference to ``section 129C(c)(2)'' in subsection (e)(4)(C) of the new section 15G of the Securities and Exchange Act, created by section 941 of the report should read ``section 129C(b)(2).'' In addition, the references to ``subsection'' in paragraphs (e)(4)(A) and (e)(5) of the newly created section 15G should read ``section.'' We intend to correct these in future legislation.

The report amended the say on pay provision in section 951 by adding a shareholder vote on how frequently the compare should give shareholders a ``say on pay'' vote. The shareholders will vote to have it every 1, 2, or 3 years, and the issuer must allow them to have this choice at least every 6 years. Also in section 951, the report required issuers to give shareholders an advisory vote on any agreements, or golden parachutes, that they make with their executive officers regarding compensation the executives would receive upon completion of an acquisition, merger, or sale of the company.

The report required Federal financial regulators to jointly write rules requiring financial institutions such as banks, investment advisers, and broker-dealers to disclose the structures of their incentive-based compensation arrangements, to determine whether such structures provide excessive compensation or could lead to material losses at the financial institution and prohibiting types of incentive- based payment arrangements that encourage inappropriate risks.

In section 952, the report exempted controlled companies, limited partnerships, and certain other entities from requirements for an independent compensation committee.

Section 962 provides for triennial reports on personnel management. One item to be studied involves Commission actions regarding employees who have failed to perform their duties, an issue that members raised during the Banking Committee's hearing entitled ``Oversight of the SEC's Failure to Identify the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi Scheme and How to Improve SEC Performance,'' as well as circumstances under which the Commission has issued to employees a notice of termination. The GAO is directed to study how the Commission deals with employees who fail to perform their duties as well as its fairness when they issue a notice of termination. In the latter situation, they should consider specific cases and circumstances, while preserving employee privacy. The SEC is expected to cooperate in making data available to the GAO to perform its studies.

In section 967, the report directs the SEC to hire an independent consultant with expertise in organizational restructuring and the capital markets to examine the SEC's internal operations, structure, funding, relationship with self-regulatory organizations and other entities and make recommendations. During the conference, some conferees expressed concern about objectivity of a study undertaken by the SEC itself. We are confident that the SEC will allow the ``independent consultant'' to work without censorship or inappropriate influence and the final product will be objective and accurate.

The report also added section 968 which directs the GAO to study the ``revolving door'' at the SEC. The GAO will review the number of employees who leave the SEC to work for financial institutions and conflicts related to this situation.

The report removed the Senate provision on majority voting in subtitle G which required a nominee for director who does not receive the majority of shareholder votes in uncontested elections to resign unless the remaining directors unanimously voted that it was in the best interest of the company and shareholders not to accept the resignation.

The report added the authority for the SEC to exempt an issuer or class of issuers from proxy access rules written under section 971 after taking into account the burden on small issuers.

In section 975, the report added a requirement that the MSRB rules require

municipal advisors to observe a fiduciary duty to the municipal entities they advise.

In section 975, the report changed the requirement that a majority of the board ``are not associated with any broker, dealer, municipal securities dealer, or municipal advisor'' to a requirement that the majority be ``independent of any municipal securities broker, municipal securities dealer, or municipal advisor.''

In section 978, the report authorized the SEC to set up a system to fund the Government Accounting Standards Board, the body which establishes standards of State and local government accounting and financial reporting.

The report added section 989F, a GAO Study of Person to Person Lending, to recommend how this activity should be regulated.

The report added section 989G to exempt issuers with less than $75 million market capitalization from section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 which regulates companies' internal financial controls. This section also adds an SEC study to determine how the Commission could reduce the burden of complying with section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxle Act of 2002 for companies whose market capitalization is between $75 million and $250 million for the relevant reporting period while maintaining investor protections for such companies.

Section 989I adds a follow-up GAO study on the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley section 404(b) exemption in section 989G of this bill involving the frequency of accounting restatements, cost of capital, investor confidence in the integrity of financial statements and other matters, so we can understand its effect.

The report added section 989J, which provides that fixed-index annuities be regulated as insurance products, not as securities. This provision clarifies a disagreement on the legal status of these products.

In section 991, the report changed the method of funding for the SEC so that it remains under the congressional appropriations process while giving the SEC much more control over the amount of its funding. The report also doubled the SEC authorization between 2010 and 2015, going from $1.1 billion to $2.25 billion, which will provide tremendous increase in SEC financial resources. These resources can be used to improve technology and attract needed securities and managerial expertise. However, the inspector general of the SEC and others have reported on situations where SEC financial or human resources have not been used effectively or with appropriate prior cost-benefit analysis. While the SEC is receiving more resources, we expect that it will use resources efficiently.

Mr. President, Senator Dorgan wishes to be heard, which pretty much will end the debate. I will take a minute or so to conclude, and then the votes will occur around 2 o'clock.

I ask unanimous consent that even though time may be expired, at least 10 minutes be reserved for the minority to be heard.

How much more time would my colleague require?

I think it follows more naturally that way.

Briefly, I thank my colleague from North Dakota. He has been an outspoken advocate on behalf of working families in the time we have served together. The concerns he has expressed consistently in this process are ones I appreciate very much. We did have a couple of disagreements over how to proceed, but that is the normal process of doing business. It was done with civility during the debate and consideration of the legislation. But I am deeply grateful to him for his contributions and those of his staff. He made some good suggestions, and I thank my friend.

Mr. President, let me again say to my great friend, we have served here a long time together, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan and I. He does a remarkable job as chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the Governmental Oversight Committee, which he also handles as well.

I am not sure my colleague was here, but I pointed out yesterday that the hearings the Senator held just prior--I am sure people think we orchestrate all these things; we look more organized than we usually are around here, but the fact is, the Senator from Michigan went off and had planned the hearings for months. The amount of work he and his staff did for months in preparation for those hearings threw a tremendous amount of light and great clarity on the subject so that the average citizen in this country could actually see--not just read something but see--a moment occurring during those 2 days when the exposure of what had occurred was so vivid and so clear. Then, frankly, it was a matter of days after that when we were on the floor considering the legislation.

As I said, I would love to tell people that was a highly organized set of events. It was purely coincidental the way it occurred. Again, those hearings that occurred publicly involved weeks and months of preparation before they were actually conducted.

So I say to my friend from Michigan, I thank him immensely for his work, for his contribution to this bill as well, not for just the set of hearings but then working to include the provisions that are a part of this legislation. The Senator has made a very valuable contribution and has highlighted a very important point.

It was fascinating to me, by the way, as to the number of former chief executive officers from major financial firms in the country who strongly endorsed what the Senator was doing. This was not merely a suggestion coming from consumer groups or labor organizations

or others that one might associate with the Senator's idea. But people who literally had spent their careers in the financial services sector were strongly recommending the contributions the Senator made to the bill.

I do not think that was said often enough, that this was a significant contribution endorsed by those who understood, had worked, had earned livelihoods in this industry, who had watched an industry change dramatically over the years which subjected this country to the exposure that we are suffering from today.

So I thank my friend from Michigan.

Mr. President, I thank my friend.

We are about to wrap up this long journey, now going back a long ways.

Let me mention a couple things. First of all, yesterday I included the names of the Senate Banking Committee staff who have made such a difference in the bill. I am not going to go back over all their names. They are arrayed in the Chamber. A couple of them are sitting next to me on the floor. Others are in the back. They are led by Eddie Silverman, who worked with me 20 years ago, as I arrived in the Senate. He spent decades with me and then left Senate service and went off and did other things in his life. At my request, he came back for the last year or so to be a part of this effort. So I thank a great personal friend, Eddie Silverman, for the job he did.

I thank Amy Friend, who was also deeply involved in this legislation. If I start down the list, I am going to miss somebody. That is always a danger. But I thank all of the Members for the tremendous work they have contributed to this legislation.

I thank Harry Reid, the majority leader. Again, I know I have talked about him on a couple of occasions. But if we do not have someone to help bring this all together, it does not happen.

I see my colleague from the State of Washington. I do not know if she cares to be heard. I was sort of filling in time for the next few minutes.

Let me thank the Senator. She has been an advocate with great passion on these issues. She brought a great deal of knowledge. She is someone who has spent a career herself in the area of financial services and understands this issue beyond just the intellectual and theoretical standpoint but has lived it. She saw the successes of it and the failures of it. So she brings a great wealth of information and ability to the issue.

I yield to my colleague.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Washington. Again, I thank her for her contribution.

Mr. President, we have arrived at that moment. Let me make a parliamentary inquiry. There are two votes, as I understand it. One is on the waiver of the budget point of order, and the second vote that will occur will be on adoption of the conference report. Is that correct?

Mr. President, have the yeas and nays been ordered on the waiver of the budget point of order?

Have the yeas and nays been ordered on adoption of the conference report?

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on the adoption of the conference report.

The PRESIDING OFFICER? Is there a sufficient second?

There is a sufficient second.

Mr. President, in conclusion, I express my thanks to all. I want to thank the floor staff as well, both on the minority and majority side. We have spent a lot of time together over the last year, and I am deeply grateful to them for the orderly way in which they conduct their business and how fair and disciplined they are about making sure the floor of the Senate runs so well. So I thank them immensely for their work.

I urge my colleagues to waive the point of order and to support this historic landmark piece of legislation that we hope will set our country on a course of financial stability and success in the generations to come.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the conference report was agreed to and to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I will not take long at this moment. I just want to compliment our colleague from Oregon--as well as other members of the committee--for his work on this historic piece of legislation. This was a long time in putting together a comprehensive, complicated piece of legislation dealing with financial reform. There are many people who deserve credit for the product of this legislation, not the least of which is Senator Merkley of Oregon, a new Member to this body but a very active and vibrant member of the Banking Committee who added substantially to the product that is now before us.

So I appreciate having the opportunity to hear his observations about the bill and look forward to further comments today and tomorrow by others on this product. At a later point today, we will go into greater length about the bill. But I would urge my colleagues to support this legislation. I am very grateful to all who have been involved--both Democrats and Republicans--in trying to make this as strong and as good a bill as we possibly could.

I have listened with some interest today to the comments of others about this legislation, with some amusement, I might add, in terms of observations about how we got to where we did. But, nonetheless, that is the nature of this institution, I suppose.

With that, I again thank Senator Merkley for his fine work.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Begich.) Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. President, I want to spend a couple of minutes, a few minutes this evening, if I can, talking about the Wall Street reform, the financial reform bill. I want to begin by thanking the Presiding Officer who, while not a member of the committee, played a very active role during the consideration of the legislation on the floor of this body a number of weeks ago.

There will be a debate again, I know, tomorrow before we actually vote on final passage of the bill. A lot of this I will talk about this evening I have discussed in the past over many weeks and months that have brought us to this particular moment, where within the next 24 hours we will make a final decision as to whether this body is prepared to endorse the efforts to reform our financial system in this country so that we never ever again subject the American people to what they were subjected to in the fall of 2008 where the Congress of the United States, along with President Bush, asked the American taxpayer to write a check for $700 billion to bail out financial institutions which, through their own misfeasance and malfeasance, as well as those of regulators who failed to act, put this country and in fact the globe at financial risk.

I shall never forget as long as I live the meeting in mid-September in the offices of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with Democrats and Republicans, and their respective committees in Congress, where the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and the Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush announced to all of us that if we did not act within a matter of days, and I am literally quoting the Federal Reserve Chairman and the Secretary of the Treasury, that if we did not act within several days, the entire financial system of this country and maybe a good part of the world would melt down, were their words.

So we acted over the next several weeks. There are a number of Members here who were deeply involved in that effort. The country reacted with great outrage over how we had ever gotten to that position and what steps we were going to take to see to it that we would never ever again subject our Nation not only to the cost of bailing out these firms but also the cost that has ensued as a result of the financial collapse to jobs and homes, retirement accounts, ability of families to educate their children, all of the effects that have been visited upon the American people and many others as a result of events that began to transpire years ago, culminating in the difficulties we saw in the fall of 2008.

Before I begin any remarks about the bill itself and what we have tried to achieve, I want to begin by thanking my colleague from Arkansas, Senator Blanche Lincoln, who chairs the Agriculture Committee. She shared a responsibility with me in this bill, and while the bulk of the titles came out of the Banking Committee bill, a very critical piece of this legislation involved the participation of the Agriculture Committee. She and Saxby Chambliss, my colleague from Georgia, along with their colleagues on the committee, worked very hard and I thank them and their staffs for the work they have produced in order to make this a stronger and a better bill.

I want to thank my House counterpart, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who chairs the Financial Services Committee of the other body. He, along with Chairman Peterson of the Agriculture Committee, did a very good job in pulling together the House version of this bill. They actually completed their work back in December of last year. The House moved more quickly for all of the reasons that Members are aware of, the rules of the institution and others that facilitate the rights of the majority to basically move along through the underbrush without the nuances that the Senate provides for in terms of the consideration of legislation.

I sat, along with my Senate colleagues from the Banking Committee and the Ag Committee, for 2 long weeks, almost 70 hours in a conference committee. For those who wonder what a conference committee is, very simply it is when the Senate acts on a bill and the House acts on a bill, and you need to resolve the differences between the two, we meet in what is called a conference committee.

The leadership of both Chambers appoints conferees to represent the interests of the respective Chambers, as you then sit down and try and iron out those differences. Chairman Barney Frank chaired that conference committee. There were 42 of us, Members of the House and the Senate, who got together for that lengthy period of time, including one all-night session, to produce what is in front of us today, and that is this. This is the conference report that reflects the work of both bodies over many months in trying to craft a series of ideas and proposals that would minimize, if not all together prohibit, the tragedy we have been through over these last several years.

I would also be remiss at this juncture if I did not thank the members of the Senate Banking Committee who spent a lot of time together over the last number of years. I became chairman of this committee about 30 months ago, in January of 2007. My great friend and colleague with whom I served for so many years from Maryland, Paul Sarbanes, retired from the Senate. The ranking member, Senator Shelby, was chairman of the Banking Committee for about 4 years prior to January of 2007. So on the seniority system, I reached the elevated status to become chairman of this committee at a critical moment when obviously the bottom began to fall out of our economy. Since January of 2007, our committee has had around 80 hearings on this subject matter alone that has produced the ultimate product before us here this evening and tomorrow.

I want to begin by thanking my Democratic colleagues on the committee and the members of their staffs. Tim Johnson of South Dakota, who has done a wonderful job, has been deeply involved in a number of critical issues before the committee.

Jack Reed of Rhode Island is a very valued member of the committee, spent a lot of time working with Senator Gregg on the derivative section in this bill.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, extremely knowledgeable about financial matters, has been invaluable in understanding the nuances and the difficulties, as well as understanding this institution very well, and I want to thank him for his service.

Senator Bayh of Indiana, who, along with myself, will be retiring at the end of the year, has been a strong member of the committee, brought a good perspective on the needs of American business and industry as we worked our way through the legislation; Bob Menendez of New Jersey, tremendously helpful as well.

Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, again a knowledgable businessman in his previous life, comes to the Senate with a lot of strong ideas and contributed to this bill.

Dan Akaka of Hawaii also added considerable financial literacy. This has been a subject matter he has long been interested in, and seeing to it to how we might elevate the knowledge and understanding of consumer responsibility when it comes to financial matters.

Sherrod Brown of Ohio. We serve together on two committees involved in both the Health, Education and Labor Committee, which the Presiding Officer also serves on. He is a member of the Banking Committee, and again was tremendously helpful and interested in the subject matter.

Jon Tester of Montana did a very good job as well and was invaluable on rural America, the interests of small banks, the financial needs of more rural aspects, more rural areas of our Nation.

Jeff Merkley who played a critical role, along with Carl Levin, on a major part of this bill dealing with proprietary trading, the so-called Merkley-Levin rule, which was debated at length over many weeks and is part of this bill.

Mark Warner of Virginia is a new member of this body, a former Governor of Virginia, and a person who has spent a good part of his life working in the area of financial services. I cannot begin to say enough about Mark Warner's involvement with this bill. He was invaluable in terms of helping to understand and bring together various people from disparate points of view on resolution mechanisms, as well as winding down of financial institutions and how they ought to work. And while a junior member of the committee, his involvement, his participation, was that of any senior member--in fact, more so. So I thank him.

Then, of course, Michael Bennet of Colorado, as well who comes from a varied background, including financial services, understands it well.

So I thank my Democratic colleagues on the committee for their work.

Senator Shelby, the Republican ranking member, and I have been great friends for many years, served in the other body and this body together for a number of years. And while we have differing points of view on this bill, and he is not a supporter of it, the Shelby-Dodd amendment, which was offered at the outset of the debate on the floor of this Chamber, put aside I think for most Members once and for all the issue of a bailout, too big to fail. I thank him for that and his involvement in the process as we moved forward.

Bob Bennett of Utah, tremendously knowledgeable, played a very important role on the Banking Committee over many years.

Jim Bunning, the nemesis of the Federal Reserve, was never shy at expressing his concerns about the conduct of the Federal Reserve Board. I thank him for that.

Mike Crapo of Idaho is very knowledgeable, worked with Chuck Schumer on corporate governance issues. He contributed to this bill. A number of amendments we adopted were Crapo amendments that strengthened the legislation.

Bob Corker, worked with Mark Warner. I thank Bob Corker. I listened to his remarks earlier today. We have a different point of view on the evolution of this bill, but, nonetheless, I thank him for his work on titles I and II of the legislation. Along with Senator Warner, I think they made a significant contribution--and his staff as well.

Mike Johanns of Nebraska again has strong interest in the legislation; Senator Vitter of Louisiana; Senator DeMint of South Carolina; also Senator Hutchison. A number of amendments were adopted. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas was deeply interested in regional banks, the Reserve banks, and played an important role.

Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, again a retiring Member at the end of this Congress, while we have had some differences on this bill, which you will no doubt hear more of over the next 2 days, Judd Gregg played such a pivotal role in the fall of 2008 in trying to put together a proposal that would restore some stability to the financial institutions in our country. While we have our disagreements, I have great respect for him. He is a knowledgeable Member, one who brings a great deal of passion to his beliefs and views. There are a lot of matters in which I could point to Judd Gregg's involvement. I thank him as well.

Those are the members of the Banking Committee. So before beginning any substantive discussion of the bill itself, I wanted to thank the leadership of the House, the Financial Services Committee, and my colleagues on the Banking Committee, as well as, of course, Blanche Lincoln of the Agriculture Committee for their work.

At a later point in these remarks, I will go through and mention staff, people who played such a critical role as well. But I thought at the outset we need a recognition of these Members. Yesterday I spoke briefly about the role of the majority leader, Harry Reid. And again, while not involved on a daily basis in the production of this legislation, the majority leader played such an important role in making sure the institution provided the time and the space and the procedures for the consideration of a matter such as this. As I mentioned earlier, he could have very easily decided to truncate the debate. We ended up taking 4 weeks of the time of this body, considering, as I mentioned earlier, some 60 amendments on the floor, open-ended debate. There were only one or two examples where a supermajority was required. There was only one tabling motion, I believe, of any of those amendments.

A significant number of amendments were adopted that were offered by the minority to this bill, as well as amendments that were offered on a bipartisan basis. In fact, of the 60 amendments that were adopted in the consideration of this bill, 30 of them, one-half, came from the minority as well as a bipartisan combination of amendments that were offered by both a Democrat and Republican together.

So one-half of the product that was adopted on the floor of this Chamber is a reflection of the work of Members from both sides of that political spectrum. And while Members may not want to crow about that, I do, because I think it is a reflection of the determination to make sure that this bill would be available for amendment and consideration.

No one is guaranteed success with their ideas, but you ought to be guaranteed an opportunity to be heard, and what we did in the consideration of this bill is provide that guarantee, and far beyond the guarantee. As I said, one-half of all the amendments adopted over 4 weeks were successfully offered by the minority or on a bipartisan basis, Democrats and Republicans. So the process has been an open one, one in which regardless of whether you like or support the bill, I would hope it would become an example of how the Senate can conduct its business on a major legislative proposal.

Today and tomorrow, the Senate of the United States will have the opportunity to bring some closure to one of the most challenging times in our recent history with the passage of comprehensive financial reform. This bill was not written to reshape our economy, the most powerful economy the world has ever known. Nor was it written to hinder innovation in our financial sector, the spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship that has made our economy the envy of the developed

world, still is strong and vibrant, and I think enhanced by what we have done with this legislation.

As tempting as it would be to let the cries of protest from the worst offenders of the large financial institutions serve as an argument for passage, this bill was not written to punish Wall Street, despite the desires of many.

Our reform legislation does not have an agenda of its own. I would like to point out what we are trying to achieve with this legislation. Here you can see on the graph behind me--I will have several graphs to point to people--our job was--and you can look at various orders of matters on the graph--to end bailouts and too big to fail. Maybe more so than any other issue, this one is an issue which Members of the body were joined together in a common cause that never again did we want to see a bailout of a financial institution at the expense of the American taxpayer. So our first goal, in my view, was to end too big to fail and to end these bailouts.

Another is to grow jobs and create wealth. Obviously, you cannot without a vibrant financial services sector where credit becomes available, whether it is a small bank in Alaska or Connecticut, where credit can flow, capital can move, so businesses can grow and jobs can be created. And while this is not a jobs bill per se, in the absence of doing what we are doing, the idea of talking about long-term growth in our country without reforming the financial institutions would be a pipedream, in my view. So this legislation has as its goal to help create job growth in our Nation.

We want to empower consumers and investors. I will get into this in more detail, but the idea that there is someplace in our Nation where a group of people get up in the morning, not as a second or third afterthought, worrying about what happens to the consumer of financial institutions, whether it be a credit card, a student loan, a home mortgage, a car loan, whatever, an insurance policy--when you get up that morning, your primary obligation is to make sure that average consumer in this country who needs and depends every day on financial services will have someone watching out for them, to see to it that they are not going to be abused, defrauded, and taken advantage of. For the very first time in our Nation's history, we will have such a place because of this legislation. It is not perfect. It is not exactly what everyone was looking for. But I think allowing an agency like this, a bureau, to exist that will be able to focus its attention on that concern is a major contribution to this legislation.

Fourth, we have here the issue of putting tools in place to avoid these problems from growing as large as they did. One thing I think is very important to say about this bill. There is nothing in this legislation that will stop another economic crisis. It would be ludicrous to suggest we have. There will be other economic crises. The question we ought to be asking ourselves is, If there is one, can we minimize the effect of it or do we have a situation where a relatively small crisis can metastasize, much as a cancer might, across the economic spectrum in such a way that we find ourselves with job losses, foreclosures, and the like, that we have gone through?

We provided in the bill the tools to see to it that our regulatory agencies and others will have the capacity and the ability to identify, to spot early on problems that emerge both here at home and around the world. And I emphasize ``around the world'' because we have all painfully learned in the last number of weeks and months that a financial problem in a relatively small country some 10,000 or 12,000 miles from here can pose problems right in our own backyard. I speak, obviously, of the difficulties occurring in Greece and Europe as well. So it is very important that we have the capacity and the tools to address financial crises when they happen, as certainly they will.

Then lastly, of course, in this bill we rein in what we call the Wall Street enlarged bonuses that have so angered the American public, where people, even last year, in the midst of all this crisis and hardship-- $20 billion was handed out in bonuses in the major financial institutions in our country. Again, I believe people who do good work and work hard ought to be rewarded. But how do you explain to the person who lost their job, their home, their retirement, their ability to educate their children, that an institution that brought this country to near collapse is rewarding its members with bonuses of $20 billion? So our legislation gives shareholders and others the opportunity in corporations to decide what those remunerations ought to be, as they should as the owners of these businesses. It is not a radical idea. In fact, it is radical not to allow people who ultimately are the owners of these businesses, as well as those whose hard-earned money gets invested, to have some say in all of this.

So our proposal before you is a comprehensive solution. It is not encompassing. There are obviously areas we did not deal with for reasons I will address momentarily. But it is a comprehensive solution to a very complicated set of problems.

This bill is a response to the failure of our financial regulatory system to protect ordinary families from the consequences of others' bad decisions. This legislation is the change I think the American people deserve after all they have lost and been through.

The effects of the crisis on our financial system are being felt all around us, and they will continue to be felt for some time, even with the adoption of this legislation. I have repeated these statistics, I know, over and over, and I will try to do this briefly, but it is important once again that we understand the impact of what has occurred. Sometimes, just by saying the numbers we dilute the influence or importance of it.

Mr. President, 8.5 million of our fellow citizens have lost their jobs in this economic crisis. Our unemployment rate is dangerously close to double digits. The fact is, it hovers near 20 and 30 percent with lower income people. If you are making $30,000 to $40,000 a year, the unemployment rate is triple that number of 9.5 percent or 10 percent. If you are making more than $75,000 or $80,000 a year--and many do--the unemployment rate is about 4.5 percent or 5 percent. So when you talk about a 9.5 percent or 10 percent number, that is overall, but within income groups, the number is much higher among lower income workers and working families than it is for the national average. So the job loss has been significant.

I wish there were some way to convey the sense of loss this is for all of us, not just for those who lose their jobs, but what it means to our confidence and our trust and our optimism as a people is far beyond the cost of some financial impact. Again, these numbers hardly reflect the damage done to our country.

Mr. President, 7 million people in our country have lost their homes or entered foreclosure, and millions more are teetering on the brink of foreclosure. Again, I say in this area, for those of us who serve here, obviously, the idea of foreclosure is about as remote as anything we could think of. We are well compensated as Members of the Senate to be in this Chamber. But that notion of having to go home to your family because of a job loss, because of a bad mortgage--one you got into that you could not afford--all of a sudden having to let your family know that the home we live in, we dreamed about, that we got so excited about acquiring, no longer is ours; we have to move; we have to leave-- again, I do not know if you could begin to explain or describe what that means to an individual, to a family, to be through that.

So the 8.5 million jobs, the 14.5 million unemployed citizens in our Nation--a 55-percent increase, by the way, since the crisis began-- again, the number I have mentioned to you of 9.5 percent of unemployment--I mentioned the 7 million homes that have been in foreclosure since the housing crisis began. In the first quarter of 2010, half of the States saw an increase in the rate of homes entering foreclosure as opposed to a year ago.

So while we are on the brink, I hope, of passing this bill, let there be no doubt or illusions--that problems persist and this bill does not bring your home back. It does not bring a job back for you in the morning. It does not restore your retirement account. But hopefully it will see to it that we never have to see our country go through these kinds of difficulties again.

We have lost dozens of community banks over the last several years.

Thousands of small businesses have had to close their doors. Trillions of dollars in retirement savings and household wealth have evaporated as well.

Let me again just go through some of those numbers for you. The impact of the crisis on community banks: 90 banks in 2010 with assets totalling $75 billion through July 9 of this year have closed their doors, and 89 of the 90, by the way, held assets of less than $10 billion. These are small community banks that have had to close their doors as a result of the crisis. In 2009, there were 140 banks in our country with assets of $170 billion that also closed their doors, and 135 of the 140 that closed their doors had assets of less than $10 billion. So again, we have seen over the last 2 years the number here approaching 250 banks, the overwhelming majority being small banks.

The FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has on its watch list of institutions 700 banks that are shaky. Again, saying they are shaky does not mean they are about to close their doors. But there is a watch list that the FDIC pursues. Again, I would love to tell you that the passage of this bill is going to stop all of that from happening immediately. It does not. But it certainly minimizes the possibility of ever watching that happen again as a result of the circumstances we have been through.

Our work continued as Democrats and Republicans in the committee worked to put together a framework as far back as November. In fact, it goes back and predates earlier. But last November, my colleague from Alabama, the former chairman of the committee, Senator Shelby, announced--and I believe he was correct--that we had gotten about 80 percent of the way to a bipartisan consensus on this legislation. That is about where it ended, I guess, but nonetheless this bill does reflect at least strong measures in here that were crafted on a bipartisan basis.

On the Senate floor, we debated the bill for 4 weeks, carefully considering the ideas and concerns of our colleagues. Some 32 amendments were offered either by the minority or together with a Democratic and Republican author, of the 60 amendments. Half of the additions that were made to the bill over 4 weeks came from the minority, either alone or working with a majority member.

Then, for the first time in recent memory, we broadcast every minute of the almost 70 hours of the conference committee between the other body, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. This conference committee was on C-SPAN. There were no backroom deals because there was not a back room. Everything was done--all--every minute of that conference was reported to the American public--in fact, beyond. C-SPAN, picked up by satellite, was available literally around the world to monitor the events in the conference committee. We approved an additional 14 amendments by my Republican colleagues during the conference. We worked out our differences with colleagues in the House and produced a finished conference report that we have before us today.

So, again, this chart behind me reflects those efforts.

As I mentioned, in the conference committee we held eight public meetings over 2 weeks, for almost 70 hours, where the 42 of us gathered to resolve the differences between these two bills. We approved some 32 amendments in the conference committee. There were 79 votes held. Of the 32 amendments that were approved by the conference committee, 14 came from our Republican colleagues and 18 came from our Democratic colleagues. Almost an equal number were adopted offered by both the minority and majority in conference.

Again, almost an equal number were adopted here on the floor of the Senate. Of the 60 amendments we debated here, 32 were, again, either minority amendments or done in conjunction with a Democratic colleague. We held some 39 rollcall votes on the floor of this body to consider the bill over the 4 weeks we debated the legislation.

I do not want to dwell on all of that, but I think it is important because, as I pointed out earlier, we went through a health care debate. I was very involved in that because of the tragedy, the loss of my great pal and friend from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy, who chaired the HELP Committee. With his illness, I was asked to take over the acting chairmanship of that committee. We all know what a painful process it was to come to a conclusion on the health care debate. Again, I regret, I am sorry it went through that process--not exactly a textbook version of how a bill ought to become law--but nonetheless an important contribution to our country.

This bill, by contrast, is a model in many ways of how a bill ought to become law. We did it under an open process. We had a conference that was open, amendments were offered, and Members could be heard. I am not suggesting that is a reason solely for someone to support this bill or oppose it, but I do think it is important in how this body conducts its business as a model of what can be done to restore some civility to a process that is sorely lacking in it on too many occasions as we try to resolve the matters that our constituents have sent us here to work out.

So I talk about the number of votes cast, the time spent, the openness of the process because it ought to be rewarded to some degree. If, in fact, there is no different conclusion, the same roadblocks are offered, and whether or not we have a closed process much as the health care debate was, or as open a process as the financial services bill was, and at the end of the day you are still faced with the same obstruction in trying to pass a bill, why would you bother going through all of this? It seems to me there ought to be a reward for a process that is as involved and as inclusive as this one has been.

So throughout this debate we have heard the same arguments, of course, coming from the opposers of this legislation: Slow down. Don't overreach. Let's let the market work things out. Let's wait for another day and start over. I keep hearing that argument over and over, and as infuriating as that can be to hear from some of the very same people who caused this mess to begin with, we have taken great pains to listen to all sides and included their ideas and proposals in this conference report that is before us. What we haven't heard is an alternative plan to fix the gaping loopholes in our system. Indeed, the alternative is to maintain the status quo. That is all I can conclude because there is no other option, nor has there been placed on the table, that which allowed this process to happen. A status quo that was dangerous 2 years ago, it is even more so tonight.

If we let this opportunity to reform our financial system go by, we will find ourselves, tragically, someday far too soon, in an even deeper hole financially, facing even more of a mess, and needing to write an even bigger bill to clean it up. I would predict that another generation or two would pass before such another historic effort as we have crafted here would come before this body if we fail to accomplish what is before us tomorrow. We cannot afford to let that happen. We must not let that happen. This is truly a strong and historic piece of legislation. It puts a permanent end to too big to fail, to taxpayer bailouts--gone.

Allow me to remind my colleagues of what is in this historic bill, along with the too-big-to-fail concept and ending the bailouts that have too often persisted in the past. Wall Street firms understand if they gamble with their own risks, it is one thing. Gambling with others is a flaw that we will not tolerate. The American people deserve this assurance, and we provide it in this bill. They were put on the hook, of course, for an unprecedented emergency action that we had to take to save our economy from completely collapsing. They were and still are angry that they had to pay for the greed and recklessness of others, and they were and are still today even angrier that their generosity didn't seem to motivate Wall Street to change its culture, as banks continue to lavish large bonuses on executives while Main Street Americans lost their homes, their jobs, their retirement, and their wealth.

As I mentioned earlier, this bill creates a consumer protection agency with authority and independence. It ends too big to fail; it establishes an advanced warning system for financial threats; and it provides new transparency and accountability for derivatives and other exotic financial instruments. It makes public companies and

executives more accountable to their shareholders, and it gives regulators powerful authorities to protect investors and depositors. This legislation, I say to Wall Street, with its outright ban on any future too-big-to-fail bailouts, is the other shoe dropping.

Our bill also establishes, as I mentioned, a consumer financial protection bureau, the very first-of-its-kind watchdog. It will have one job and one job only; that is, to protect and empower American consumers and their financial decisions. American families shouldn't have to have an advanced business degree to plan for their financial future, and they shouldn't have the fear that they will get ripped off by a shady lender or a scam artist as too often has been the case.

For too long they have been on their own because the seven different agencies that were supposed to be looking out for them were distracted by their other sometimes conflicting missions.

Americans need to know this new consumer protection bureau would not make decisions for them. The new bureau will make sure consumers have the information they need to make good decisions about their home mortgages, their student loans, their home equity loans, their credit cards, and other financial matters. It will protect them from being trapped by unfair or deceptive or abusive lending practices, and if they do encounter a problem, there is a single toll-free number to call and get help.

By the way, let me just add to this last point about consumer protection: I have heard some Members suggest we don't deal with underwriting standards for home mortgages. I am looking to staff here, but I think there are some 40, 50, 60 pages of this bill, pages and pages alone dedicated to underwriting standards when it comes to residential mortgages. We spent a great deal of time in seeing to it that no longer would we have these no-doc loans, no requirements, no information, nothing at all that too often led to the financial difficulties we are in.

I urge my colleagues and others to read the bill or read the sections. There is a whole area of this bill, a significant part of it, dealing with underwriting standards for residential mortgages.

This bill will provide an early warning system to sound the alarm should large institutions or new financial products or practices threaten the stability of our financial system. Most Americans were completely unfamiliar with innovative financial instruments such as credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities until those very instruments sparked a crisis that put millions of people out of work. I noted with some interest just yesterday, I believe it was, that the former Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson--I don't want to exaggerate his comments, but I think I concluded that he thought this bill was a good bill. He identified specifically this early warning system in our legislation as one of the important provisions that had not existed earlier on, not just last year but going back to 2004, 2005, as he rightly points out, when the problems began to emerge, that this problem that we have gone through never would have happened to the extent it has.

So one of the highlights of this bill is that we have far more than just one set of eyes now looking over the landscape both at home and abroad, including State regulators who I think can bring a valuable contribution to the oversight responsibilities when it comes to determining whether institutions themselves or product lines or practices are so risky that they endanger our financial system. Then they have the power to respond to that as well, to see to it that those practices can be brought to a stop before they cause the problems that the last crisis did in so many other areas of our economy.

Our legislation contains strong provisions that bring the $600 trillion derivative market out of the shadows and into the sunlight. Let me repeat that number. This is an area where we went from $60 billion, I think it was--a $60 billion to $90 billion industry of the derivatives market to $600 trillion--that is with a ``t''--globally, just a massive market, operating in the shadows. Again, our legislation shines the bright light of sunshine on these transactions so we have far more transparency in this area.

Let me quickly point out that there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with derivatives. In fact, quite the contrary. Derivatives are vitally important if utilized properly in terms of wealth creation and growing an economy. But what was once a way for companies to hedge against sudden price shocks has become a profit center in and of itself, and it can be a dangerous one as well, when dealers and other large market participants don't hold enough capital to back up their risky bets and regulators don't have information about where the risks lie. AIG was the classic example, of course, where that happened.

Derivatives should help companies manage their risks. That is why they are valued, so they can continue to grow their businesses, hire workers, and improve the quality of our economy. But during this crisis, panic and confusion in the derivatives market led to job losses. Derivatives traders lost sight of the impact their actions were having on the real economy in our Nation.

With this bill, companies can continue, obviously, to use derivatives to hedge their commercial risks, but they must do so in a much safer and transparent way that would not put our whole financial system at risk.

Meanwhile, of course, this bill includes reforms to executive compensation and corporate governance that will make corporate executives more accountable to the owners of their businesses--the shareholders in these companies--and new protections for investors.

Despite the wild protestations of some on Wall Street who, given their actions in the lead-up to this crisis, have little standing to lecture us about keeping our financial system healthy, this bill is good for the financial sector as well. Our bill rewards creativity and innovation without the pressure to take outrageous risks or to deal unfairly with consumers. Honest firms can focus on competing for business by serving their customers better, and for community banks reform means stronger core funding, fair deposit insurance premiums, a stronger insurance fund, and a far more level playing field. These banks will get to keep their Federal regulator, and they would not be charged assessments by the new consumer protection bureau.

For retailers, this reform bill means freedom from inflated interchange fees and for consumers. I wish to thank Richard Durbin, our colleague from Illinois, the majority whip, whose insistence on this language in the bill provoked significant debate and discussion. I didn't mention him earlier, but I wish to thank Senator Durbin for his involvement, and I thank retailers and others across the country who strongly supported this provision in this bill. Fifteen million retailers today will be able to earn more and charge their customers less because of these provisions in the bill.

For seniors and veterans and minorities, reform means protections against some of the most hideous scams targeted at these populations in our country. Again, I point out--I don't know if we have this up, but here was the headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: ``Big Win for Small Banks in Overhaul.'' That certainly is the case. There are 8,000 of them in this country. The Independent Community Bankers Association, while not endorsing the whole bill, sent a memorandum to every Member of this body, I think this morning or yesterday afternoon, outlining why the major provisions in this bill are very good for our small banks in this country. I have enumerated just a couple of measures.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this juncture the memorandum from the ICBA, if I may.

Mr. President, the ICBA memorandum highlights all of the things done in this bill that warrant the headline in the Wall Street Journal about how the overwhelming majority of the 8,000 small banks in this country do well under this bill. I thank the ICBA for stepping up and making that case for us. The American Bankers Association had been vehemently opposed to this legislation and tried to convince people they represented all banks in the country. The ICBA took great offense at this suggestion and hence the memo sent around to all Members.

I wish to thank other colleagues as well--I didn't mention this earlier--regarding the small business provisions. Particular thanks go to our colleague from Maine, Senator Snowe, who chairs, along with Senator Landrieu, the Small Business Committee. They paid particular attention to how small businesses would be affected by this bill and made a number of suggestions which we adopted as part of the bill on the Senate floor and again preserves them in the conference committee. These are not minor suggestions. They were significant ones and added great value to this bill.

We all talk about small business, but if we are not careful, too often they get lost in the debates around here. Senator Snowe and other colleagues--I see my colleague from North Carolina, Senator Hagan, as well--expressed interest as to what would happen to small banks and small businesses and our desire to reform a system to make sure they were not going to be overly burdened with regulations and other things that would make it difficult for them to operate.

So there are other provisions in here, particularly with regard to consumer protection, where the needs and concerns of small businesses must be addressed before rules are promulgated. That would not have happened except for the contribution of my colleague from Maine.

I would be remiss, as well, if I didn't mention--I didn't discuss it here--the capital requirements in this bill. There was a lot of discussion about that. It was the amendment of Susan Collins, our colleague from Maine as well, who, along with working with the FDIC and Sheila Bair, came up with a very strong provision in this bill that is a very workable and flexible provision but helps us avoid one of the major problems that contributed to this crisis, which is the capital standards that raised the risks and caused so many of our institutions to get into the trouble they were in. Senator Collins made other suggestions to the bill that were important as well. But I think those particularly dealing with capital standards contributed very much to this, and I am grateful to her, as well as her colleague from Maine, Senator Snowe, for her contributions.

I mentioned earlier we talked about trying to get this right on the question of proprietary trading, the so-called Volcker rule that was raised by the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Again, I thank Paul Volcker for his contribution, his tireless effort. He has long since left public life, and he could have sat back and offered general commentary on everything, but he decided, at his young age, to get back involved and engaged in this bill. He made a strong contribution to the concept of proprietary trading, where depositors' money should not be put at risk when banks are making choices that involve risk. It is one thing to risk your own money, but to risk your depositors' money is another matter. But it is more complicated than the two sentences I have just uttered.

I thank Scott Brown of Massachusetts, because this was not merely a parochial interest out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There is the whole issue of the de minimis participation, where banks literally have to hedge to protect depositors' money against interest rates. There are a number of legitimate areas where that is required and necessary. As a result of Senator Brown's involvement and work, we took note of that, and it reflects his ideas and thoughts in this bill as well. It is a stronger bill as a result of his involvement.

These areas of small business, capital standards, and de minimis participation were all significant contributions

to our legislation. I thank them all for their work. There are many other aspects. I thank Senator Lugar and Ben Cardin of Maryland for their proposal dealing with extraction of natural resources, and requiring that companies that are public that do so have to say in their public filings with the SEC how much they are paying the mostly developing countries for the right to extract these natural resources. I am told by those who follow these issues that that provision alone could have a huge impact when it comes to the ability of developing countries to understand what has happened to their natural resources and some of the corruption that exists in their country.

I note the presence of my friend from Minnesota. I mentioned earlier, when he was presiding, his contribution on rating agencies. This was a subject matter we debated and discussed endlessly, trying to figure out how to get greater accountability out of the rating agencies, greater due diligence, so that when the institution or person making the decision to purchase a securitized product that had been rated as AAA, or AA, or B, or whatever that label is on there--for years people have relied on that. You saw that AAA and you didn't have to know much more. It didn't get any better than that.

We learned painfully that those ratings were not based on due diligence by the rating agencies but on the information of those purchasing the ratings from the departments who were relying exclusively on the very entity being rated. In a sense, it was fundamentally false to suggest that the rating agency had drawn the conclusion that a particular product, whether a securitized mortgage or others, was actually of the value that the rating would indicate.

Our colleague from Minnesota, of course, played an important role in suggesting an alternative idea that has been incorporated in the bill. I am deeply grateful to him for his involvement. I mentioned earlier some of the provisions.

Jeff Merkley is a member of our committee.

One of my dearest friends during my service here in the Senate is my colleague Carl Levin. We don't serve on committees together. He is chairman of the Armed Services Committee and also chairman of the Government Operations Committee--the names change; I still believe that is the name of the committee--which has broad jurisdiction, but he held a critical hearing days before we brought this bill to the floor of the Senate, highlighting many of the problems that have persisted in the financial services sector. Working with our colleague from Oregon, Senator Merkley, Senator Levin and he crafted a proposal to deal with proprietary trading--the Volcker rule, which I mentioned a moment ago. It was due to their involvement that those ideas were incorporated into the bill.

When you have a 2,500-page product--I see my colleague from Michigan; I didn't know he was here. I thank him for what he did in this bill. I have spent a lot of time here, but I suspect that over the next 24 hours or so there will be more discussion about it.

Again, I have been asked: Do you disagree with anything in the bill? Of course I do. This is a bill crafted by a committee, working with our colleagues in this Chamber, and with the 435 others in the other Chamber, working with the White House, the regulators, and the stakeholders in trying to fashion a bill that would reform our financial system. I wrote a bill back in November that I would have preferred. But you don't get to write your own bill. You can do that, but that may be where it begins and ends. We serve in a legislative body, so it takes compromise and working together to try to achieve the best results we can, recognizing that, in the end, you have to produce the votes. A good idea that doesn't have the votes is just that--an idea. But we bear responsibility of more than just coming up with ideas. The American public expects nothing less of us than to fashion proposals that will minimize great risks to them. None of us lost a job or a home in the last 2 years. None of us has watched our retirement account evaporate overnight. None of us will worry whether our children can get a higher education. That all happened to the people we represent across the country. They are asking that we do our best. They don't ask for perfection. They know we have not solved every problem, and that we are not going to bring back their homes and their jobs; but they expect us to respond to the situation that brought us to the brink of financial disaster. This is our best effort to do so. It is not perfect, I know that. It is not exactly what I would write on my own, nor is it what anybody else would have written. But it is our best judgment on what we can do.

We won't know the full results of what we have done until the very institutions we have created, the regulations we have suggested and provided for are actually tested. We can't legislate wisdom or passion. We cannot legislate competency. All we can do is create the structures and hope that good people will be appointed who will attract other good people--people who will make careers and listen and see to it that never again do we go through what we have been through. That is not our job. Ultimately, that is dependent upon what happens after this bill becomes law--if it does. We need to see to it that the human leadership that makes up these bodies who will be responsible for regulating the activities in these financial areas does its job. None of us has the power to guarantee that. All we can do is provide them with the tools and the structure and the architecture that will allow them to do that job well. We have done our best to provide those very tools, and that structure, and that architecture, in a complicated time--in the midst of understandable anger and frustration. I cannot legislate anger and frustration. That is not our job here. As angry as we are, as mad as we may be at institutions and individuals, that cannot be our motivation in crafting the legislation that the American people expect.

Many have endorsed this bill, but not because they love every aspect of it. I am grateful to Sheila Bair at FDIC. She has been stalwart in her effort to seeing to it that consumers, small banks, and others would survive and do better. I am grateful to her and the staff of the

Mr. President, lastly, I think it is worth noting that in all the analysis that we did to root out the cause of the crisis, it was not the American people who were at fault. Their prosperity was built on hard work, entrepreneurship, and creativity. Those qualities are as strong now in the American people as they have ever been. We have seen a pattern of exploitation on the part of some executives and others in the financial sector, and a lack of wisdom on the part of too many Washington regulators. What we have seen is a lack of integrity on the part of some greedy individuals, who sought to get rich by ripping off the American families. What we have seen is a lack of compassion and competence on the part of those who were supposed to be watching out for the interests of consumers and investments.

As a result, there has been a deficit of trust in our markets, foresight in our regulatory system, and confidence in our economy.

The challenge we have faced all along is how do you restore those things? How do we restore trust? I can't put a number on that for you. I can't tell you the financial implications of the absence of trust or a diminution of it. How do we bring back confidence and optimism, which has been the hallmark of our Nation, even through the most difficult of times? You can't legislate trust or confidence or optimism. As I said, you cannot legislate wisdom or integrity, and we have not sought to do so in this bill.

There is nothing I or any other legislator or Senator can do to stop a banker from making a bad decision or a trader for putting profit over principle. Our system will always depend, in part, on human beings. So it will always include human error.

But our system also depends on institutions and those we can do something about. That is what this effort is all about. We can strengthen them to make our financial system more resilient to the shocks that occur and make our economy as a whole less vulnerable to the effects of those shocks.

If you ever played a board game called Jenga with your kids, it involves stacking a series of oddly shaped blocks, one on top of the other. But because the foundation on which the first block is laid never grows any broader, there is only one way to build, and that is up. As you build, the stack becomes more and more unstable, until someone places one fateful block in the wrong spot and the entire structure comes crashing down.

By allowing banks to shop for the most lenient regulators, in a similar fashion, by failing to put a strong cop on the consumer protection beat, by leaving the door open to taxpayer bailouts, we were building our wealth on a narrow and unstable Jenga foundation.

Yet by putting in place strong, clear rules, by giving regulators both the authority and the responsibility to enforce those rules, we can make our structures safer to invest in, safer to start a business in, and safer to participate in the economy of our Nation.

In short, this legislative proposal insists that we rebuild the foundation of our prosperity and, thus, restore the trust that allows us to prosper as a great nation.

This is one of my last acts as a Member of this body, in the legislative context. I am very proud of my colleagues and of this bill. I am proud of the work we have done over the past several years to make it as strong as we possibly could.

I thank my staff as well: Amy Friend sits next to me, our legislative counsel. I also thank Ed Silverman, the staff director. I also thank Jonathan Miller, Dean Shahinian, Julie Chon, Charles Yi, Marc Jarsulic, Lynsey Graham Rea, Catherine Galicia, Matthew Green, Deborah Katz, Mark Jickling, Donna Nordenberg, Levon Bagramian, Brian Filipowich, Drew Colbert, Misha Mintz-Roth, Lisa Frumin, William Fields, Devin Hartley, Beth Cooper, Colin McGinnis, Neal Orringer, Kirstin Brost, Peter Bondi, Sean Oblack, Erika Lee, Abigail Dosoretz, Robert Courtney, Caroline Cook, Joslyn Hemler, Dawn Ratliff, and all of their families.

I thank our legislative counsels: Laura Ayoud, Rob Grant, Allison Wright, and Kim Albrecht Taylor.

I want to thank the Democratic floor staff: Lula Davis, Tim Mitchell, Tricia Engle, and Meredith Mellody.

These are remarkable people whose names will never enjoy the spotlight or get notoriety, but day in and day out and over weekends and around the clock, they made all the difference in seeing to it that we arrived at this moment. There are Democrats and Republicans and people who work off the Hill who contributed as well. There are too many names to mention.

I thank Chairman Frank and Dick Shelby, my Republican colleague, as well as Blanche Lincoln, who did such a great job along the way. It is a moment of some pride as well as success that we have come this far.

I ask unanimous consent that a list of staff on both sides of the Capitol be printed in the Record.

The final result depends on the votes of my colleagues and whether they decide it is better for us to move forward with these reforms as we have crafted them or to do nothing, in effect, and say that after all this time and effort, we have nothing to say about what brought us to this situation.

I have taken a long time. I apologize to my colleagues who want to be heard on this matter. I will be here all day tomorrow to listen to the debates and thoughts as we go forward. This is a moment in which we can take great pride as an institution, both in terms of what we produced and how we produced it. For that, I am deeply grateful to the membership of this institution.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Michael Adelman, Dylan Aluise, Tyler Blaser, Jeremy Bui, Michael Curto, Teddy Downe, Tim Fitzsimons, Sarah Flanagan, Oliver Hayes, Megan Keenan, Evan Kravitz, Alice Lu, Lena Peck, Mackie Reilly, Jamie Winchester, and Ben Yeo be granted floor privileges for the duration of the debate on the conference report to accompanying H.R. 4173, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Mr. President, very briefly, because the hour is late and we will have a longer time to engage in a debate about the conference report, I wish to begin this evening, as I will try to repeat during the next 2 days, with my deep appreciation to the majority leader, Harry Reid. While there were a lot of people involved in this process over the last several years who have brought us to this moment for us to consider this very important landmark piece of legislation regarding reform of our financial services, none of this ever happens unless you have a leader who makes it possible to happen.

While that is a simple enough sentence to say, there is so much that

goes into that sentence--the organization, bringing people together, seeing to it that the time is available, making sure the procedures that we will work under allow us to have a full-throated debate, as we were able to on this bill.

This bill went through almost a month of consideration on the Senate floor. We considered almost 60 different amendments offered by both parties, many of which were adopted to change the bill, added value to it. It then proceeded to a conference with the other body in which we spent another 2 weeks, well into the all-night session until June 25 in which another 60 or 70 amendments were considered, and then came back to this Chamber where we are now in the position of adopting the conference report. None of that happens without having leadership in a body that makes it possible for those events to unfold.

While there will be a lot of talk over the coming days about how this happened and what is in the bill, it is important that as we begin the conversation over the next several days, before we vote whether to accept this conference report, that I begin by expressing my gratitude to the majority leader and his staff and others who made it possible for us to arrive at this historic moment as to whether we will change the status quo and set up a regulatory structure that makes it possible for us to address future economic crises, as certain as they will occur, with the ability to deal with them early on, to avoid them becoming larger problems as this one did because we failed to have the regulatory process in place, we failed to have the kind of oversight, we failed to have the kind of protections for consumers that this bill drafts and provides for.

I thank the majority leader for his leadership. While he was not directly involved day to day, there wasn't a single occasion when I could not pick up that phone or walk into his office, cite a problem I had on how to get from point A to point B in which he didn't stop everything he was doing to make sure we could work our way through those difficulties. A lot goes on unseen on how we operate in this Chamber. But, again, when this bill is adopted, as I hope it will be, there are many people who deserve gratitude and expressions of thanks. We ought to begin by thanking the majority leader for making it possible. To him and to his staff and others, I say thank you. I look forward over the next 2 days to the debate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of reauthorization of the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Drug Reporting Act, NASPER, program critical to combating the abuse of prescription drugs in our Nation. I am proud to once again join my colleagues Senators Dick Durbin, Jeff Sessions, and Sherrod Brown on this important legislation which would reauthorize the NASPER program.

In 2008, over 15 million Americans abused prescription drugs and nearly 2 million of those Americans were between the ages of 12 and 17. Further, the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health found that last year more than 1 in 10 high school seniors used a narcotic for nonmedical purposes. These statistics are simply unacceptable. We must do more to address the issue of prescription drug abuse in this country.

When used under the supervision of a medical professional prescription drugs can be life saving but when they are abused they can become life-threatening. NASPER will help prevent unnecessary deaths by allowing credentialed professionals access to key information regarding prescriptions for many controlled substances. This access will help prevent doctor shopping and will help health professionals to more closely monitor the prescriptions being issued to their patients.

NASPER is a valuable tool available to states to help detect and prevent abuse of prescription drugs. Reauthorization of this program will allow states to establish, maintain, and grow their own electronic prescription drug monitoring programs. Beyond this it will help states establish linkages to surrounding states so that information can be more easily shared, making doctor shopping across state lines more difficult.

I am proud of the work that is going on in my own state of Connecticut around this issue. Our Drug Control Division within the Department of Consumer Protection has worked tirelessly to build a successful prescription drug monitoring program. This program has helped to not only prevent abuse of prescription drugs but it has helped to detect and prevent abuse of critical programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. In one case, an investigation of a pharmacist fraudulently billing Medicaid and Medicare resulted in a settlement with the government for $340,000.

As you can see NASPER is an important tool we cannot afford to lose and I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this important legislation.

Mr. President, I rise today in support of reauthorization of the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Drug Reporting Act, NASPER, program critical to combating the abuse of prescription drugs in our Nation. I am proud to once again join my colleagues Senators Dick Durbin, Jeff Sessions, and Sherrod Brown on this important legislation which would reauthorize the NASPER program.

In 2008, over 15 million Americans abused prescription drugs and nearly 2 million of those Americans were between the ages of 12 and 17. Further, the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health found that last year more than 1 in 10 high school seniors used a narcotic for nonmedical purposes. These statistics are simply unacceptable. We must do more to address the issue of prescription drug abuse in this country.

When used under the supervision of a medical professional prescription drugs can be life saving but when they are abused they can become life-threatening. NASPER will help prevent unnecessary deaths by allowing credentialed professionals access to key information regarding prescriptions for many controlled substances. This access will help prevent doctor shopping and will help health professionals to more closely monitor the prescriptions being issued to their patients.

NASPER is a valuable tool available to states to help detect and prevent abuse of prescription drugs. Reauthorization of this program will allow states to establish, maintain, and grow their own electronic prescription drug monitoring programs. Beyond this it will help states establish linkages to surrounding states so that information can be more easily shared, making doctor shopping across state lines more difficult.

I am proud of the work that is going on in my own state of Connecticut around this issue. Our Drug Control Division within the Department of Consumer Protection has worked tirelessly to build a successful prescription drug monitoring program. This program has helped to not only prevent abuse of prescription drugs but it has helped to detect and prevent abuse of critical programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. In one case, an investigation of a pharmacist fraudulently billing Medicaid and Medicare resulted in a settlement with the government for $340,000.

As you can see NASPER is an important tool we cannot afford to lose and I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this important legislation.

If I may, before my colleague speaks--I will yield to him right away.

Before my neighbor from Massachusetts leaves the floor, let me commend him for his comments here without getting into details of the bill he has offered but, more importantly, the general thrust of what he has expressed. As he is a newly arriving Member of this body and may be here for many years, I am wrapping up three decades of service. But I hope people will listen to what he has to say.

People come to the Chamber and to this institution with the idea of getting things done for our country. That is so critically important. What he has suggested, what I have heard others talk about today, is making this institution functional so we can actually come to terms. It is not easy. We represent different constituencies and different interests. But if the spirit expressed by Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts in these brief remarks he has made this morning can carry forward in all the debates and discussions we have, we will find a lot more solutions. I want to say thank you.

Madam President, I should have noted, I will be leaving with my friend and colleague from Illinois as well. He has been a wonderful addition to this institution. He has done a very fine job representing the people of Illinois. I regret we didn't get to serve more years together, that he didn't get a chance to come here earlier. He made a good contribution in the short time we have been here. Had the Senator been here longer, I think he would have made a significant contribution over the years. I thank the Senator for the time he has served and the manner in which he served as well.

Wall Street Reform

I rise this afternoon to spend a few minutes to talk about a most important piece of legislation facing this body and, more importantly, our country, and that is the Wall Street reform bill. In fact, the Presiding Officer has had a deep interest in the subject matter and in her previous life actually worked in the area of financial services. She not only brings an interest from the State of North Carolina, one of the fine States that has a significant involvement in the financial services of our country, but has also a knowledge about these institutions, how they work, and how the financial system works. I am very grateful to her for her thoughts and suggestions as we have been through this rather long journey over the last couple of years in the wake of the financial crisis that befell our Nation most dramatically in the fall of 2008.

I think all of our colleagues here know what is at stake. We do not need to spend a lot of time talking about the circumstances over the last couple of years. We know it, and more importantly, and more poignantly, our constituents know it, because they are living it.

All of us have jobs here. We are fairly well compensated, to put it mildly, by any standard. We have good health care. We own our homes or are not worried about whether we can afford the rent in the places we live--whatever the circumstances. We are in some ways insulated from the day-to-day agonies our fellow citizens go through and have gone through over these last couple of years.

But I also have a deep appreciation of the fact that my colleagues, despite not personally going through these terrible times as their constituents are, understand the importance of this issue. I am deeply grateful to each and every Member of this Chamber over the last 2 years and almost everyone in this Chamber has been involved in this debate or discussion to one degree or another. The fact is we have come as far as we have in this bill because there is that interest and because there is that concern that we need to address the architecture, the financial structures of our Nation so as to avoid the kind of problems we have seen our Nation go through over these last several years.

Again, the numbers have been repeated so often I am almost hesitant to repeat them this afternoon. Certainly we will know better tomorrow. I guess the unemployment numbers will come out again.

But well over 8\1/2\ million jobs have been lost. Frankly, I think that number is an underestimation of what has happened. Some people have found part-time work, falling back in and out of it. But the number, 8.4 million, is used. It is certainly no less than that and, I suspect, as I said, far more than that.

Seven million of our fellow citizens have had their homes fall into foreclosure. Every time I say that sentence it seems it is so brief to cite the number. But imagine, as we must, that moment when, despite all of your efforts, that dream house you have acquired for your family, because of a lost job, the lost retirement, the closed business, all of a sudden that which you had hoped and dreamed for that has brought stability to your family, a great sense of joy and hope, dreams fulfilled, is all of a sudden closed, foreclosed, lost.

Imagine coming home that night when all of the efforts to hold on to that home are gone and facing your family and telling them the house you have lived in--where you have played, you have eaten, you have dreamt, you have laughed, you have cried, you have done all of the things that building enshrines in the American family--is no longer yours. For 7 million of our fellow citizens that night has happened. Many more face the prospect of that occurring in the months ahead, despite the efforts to get our economy moving again. Retirement incomes, of course, have vanished in a flash, watching the markets decline. Literally years of building security for those retirement years, to contribute to a child's higher education costs, to blunt the costs of a health tragedy to hit your family, all of those rainy days that retirement or savings account can provide to weather those storms have been eliminated.

So there has been a shocking loss of wealth in our Nation as well. Trillions of dollars are gone, incomes that will never be made up. As I mentioned, lost home values, even if you have been able to hold on to your home, home values, on average, have declined about 30 percent. So that equity you might have built up in that dream house, where you have raised your family over the last 10, 15, 20 years, you paid one price for it maybe 20 years ago and had the full expectation that property value, while it may not skyrocket, would increase in value over the years.

So as you became that empty nester as your kids went on to college or marriage or jobs on their own, the hope that you would be able to sell that home to another hopeful buyer and come out of it with some equity that would then provide for that security that you needed to contribute to your family's well being has been totally gone in many cases, even if you have held on to your home.

Well, the bill I briefly want to talk about does not do anything about what has happened. I would love to tell you if we passed this bill that you could get your job back; that passing this financial reform bill would give you your job back. I would love to be able to tell you that when we pass this bill you would get your home back or that somehow you would be able to magically replenish that retirement account or savings account.

This bill does not do any of those things. All this bill does is to say that when the next crisis comes--and surely it will as night follows dawn, as tomorrow follows today we will have another economic crisis. I never suggested this bill was going to stop that. What I hope we are able to do with this bill is minimize the effects of that crisis when it occurs so that it does not metastasize. That may be the best word to use in this case, much as a cancer does.

When an economic crisis hits, if you are able to handle it when it happens, much as you are able to handle a cancer when you discover it before it contaminates your entire body--the crisis that will happen if we can control it, identify it early enough, begin to address the problems that it poses, then we might avoid the kind of catastrophic effect this present economic catastrophe has caused, the most significant in almost 100 years, since the Great Depression more than 80 years ago.

So I want to briefly talk about not only the process we have gone through over the past year and a half, but also what this bill is trying to do. Let me be the first to acknowledge and admit that it does not do everything I would like it to do. I am not overly enthusiastic about every provision in this bill. There are measures that I objected to that are in the bill.

But we serve in a body of our fellow colleagues, the 100 of us who serve here, who work with those who work down the hall from this Chamber where 435 of our colleagues serve, with an administration and regulators, not to mention financial institutions and their employees and all that are involved in the financial network of our Nation, all are impacted and affected by this bill. So it is difficult to try to fashion a piece of legislation that accommodates the various interests and allows us to move forward. But that is what we have tried to do.

Process is important. I will not dwell on this point, but as someone who has spent three decades of my life at this very desk--and it is the only desk I have ever sat at since the day I arrived. This desk was planted over in that far corner as the 100th Senator in the body up until I--some 20 years ago when, through seniority, you get to move your desk around. I ended up in this seat, this spot about 20 years ago, next to this remarkable man whose life we are going to celebrate and are celebrating those days, Robert C. Byrd. He has been my seatmate for the last two decades.

As I said the other day, I was an 8-year-old child sitting in the galleries of the other body watching my father, on January 3, 1953, and a 35-year-old new Congressman from West Virginia be sworn in as newly minted Members of Congress. Some 6 years later, I sat in that gallery up here, in the family gallery, watching my father be sworn in as a Senator from Connecticut, along with a new Senator from West Virginia named Robert C. Byrd, never imagining, as a 7- or 8-year-old or as a 14-year-old, that I would spend 20 years of my life at a desk next to the man who has served longer than any other human being in the history of our Nation.

Process meant a lot to Robert C. Byrd. The Constitution meant a great deal. I carry with me, and every day I have for 20 years, the Constitution that Robert C. Byrd gave me and autographed to me. It is rather threadbare and worn today, but he revered this document. He could absolutely quote it verbatim. He gave me a copy, as he did to all new Members when they arrive, and the importance of understanding the role of this body in our constitutional framework.

He was such a great advocate of the civility and the respect for each other as we try to fashion answers to our Nation's problems. We have been through two major bills in the last Congress. There have been a lot of other bills to consider, but the health care debate and the financial reform debate, I would argue, are the two largest in this Congress, and they are two models of how an institution can operate.

Even though I am glad we prevailed with the health care debate and are going to finally end up dealing with cost and access to our health care system and making it more available to people as a result of our actions taken, it was not a pretty process. Anyone who watched it, let alone those of us who were involved in it, certainly would have preferred that we arrive at the conclusion in a manner differently than what we went through. Maybe not everyone would agree with that. I feel that way.

The second model, if you will, is the one we just went through on financial reform, which was about as open a process as you could ever have. We went through literally months of listening in our committee, the Banking Committee which I chair, to hundreds--and I am not exaggerating--hundreds of experts who came and briefed us either formally or informally, literally dozens and dozens of formal hearings to dissect what had happened, how we got into this mess, who caused it, how was it caused, and what steps we should be taking to see to it this problem, another economic crisis, would not explode as broadly as this one has.

I invited my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to be involved in all of those meetings, to see to it that they would be present, even at White House meetings, to talk about what we needed to do. We laid out our first ideas together a year and a half ago, even before marking up anything close to a bill.

I presented our first discussion draft of this legislation in November of last year, and it was a discussion draft. After that draft was put forward, I assigned bipartisan working groups to attack the major issues in the bill. In March of this year, I unveiled a new bill that incorporated many of the bipartisan ideas that the working groups

had produced. In fact, what I asked to be done in our committee, in the Banking Committee, was divide up the labor between Democrats and Republicans on certain large, complicated subject matters. And to their credit, they worked very hard. It did not always come up with a final answer in various areas, but they contributed significantly to the product we now have before us in the form of a conference committee report coming to this body, coming to the Senate.

So I am grateful to Richard Shelby, who is not supportive of the bill, but was my ranking member and was the chairman of the Banking Committee for 4 years before I took over the chairmanship in January of 2007.

I will not go down the list and mention all of the members, but the committee members worked very hard. Even though we ended up disagreeing with what we finally produced, I am grateful to them for the efforts they put into the legislation. Beyond that, I have worked every day to keep my colleagues informed every step of the process, at least I have tried to, and if not them directly, their staffs, so there was that sense of inclusion, the model that everyone ought to be able to have a role and participate in the debate of a significant bill.

So the point I am making is, this bill was the product of collaboration of many of my colleagues before the debate even began on the floor of the Senate. On this floor, the debate lasted almost a month, one of the longest debates in many years in the Congress of the United States. Nearly 50 votes were cast by Democrats and Republicans over a 4-week period.

One of the many that passed was the very second one, I think. Senator Boxer of California offered the first amendment that said taxpayers should never again be asked to pay for a bailout of a financial institution. I think that passed unanimously. Then Senator Shelby and I offered an amendment where we reached a bipartisan agreement on measures to end all bailouts of financial institutions once and for all, one of the most contentious areas of the bill.

From that point forward, over the next 4 weeks, with almost 60 amendments back and forth, we ended up passing the legislation by the thinnest of margins, overcoming the procedural votes we needed to in order to reach financial passage of the bill.

The last time the Banking Committee held a conference on any legislation was 7 years ago. So I took my committee product, the Senate product, and we went to what is called a conference. The House had passed its bill in December. We had passed our bill in May. So what normally has happened in the past is they never meet, or if they do meet they met in closed-door sessions to work out the differences. Then they would come back with a product.

The last time the Banking Committee had been to a conference with the House of Representatives on any bill was more than 7 years ago. Those meetings were held mostly in private; the public was never even invited into the room, let alone the press, to observe and to cover the event. We changed all of that. Our conference committee, the 42 members of both Chambers who met, again, for a 2-week period, almost 70 hours that we met, we considered 180 amendments in 70 hours. And 54 amendments were offered by Senators, 34 of which were offered by my Republican colleagues in the conference, 20 by the Democrats.

So combined, between the number of amendments we debated on the floor of the Senate and the number of amendments we debated in conference as Senators--forget the House Members and their amendments--there were over 100 amendments by Democrats and Republicans to the financial reform bill. C-SPAN and the press sat there and watched every minute of the conference and covered every second, gavel to gavel, of the proceedings that went on for almost 70 hours over a 2-week period. My point is, this model of conducting our business, listening to each other, debating and deciding what ought to be in this bill, stands in stark contrast to how we went through the health care debate.

What is the point I am trying to make? If at the end of this process it appears as though we still face a procedural objection to going forward, what difference did it make, then, which course we followed if at the end of the process it did not make any difference?

The motion to invoke cloture is a strange phrase that I suspect most Americans do not have the vaguest idea of its meaning, or very few do. It sounds like something a doctor may do if you are ill, to get a cloture or something. That is what I thought it was when I first arrived here.

Briefly, cloture is a method by which you end a filibuster. In this Chamber, under our rules, we respect the rights of the minority, including a minority of one.

Members can talk as long as they can stand up, under most circumstances, and continue. Robert C. Byrd, in fact, held one of the records. It wasn't the record--Strom Thurmond holds the record, a former Senator I served with from South Carolina--but Robert C. Byrd conducted a filibuster for more than 14 hours. We can do that in this Chamber. But if we want to end the filibuster, we have to invoke cloture. That takes 60 votes--more than a simple majority--to say: We have had enough debate. The process has been fair. It is now time to vote. So we invoke cloture. If we don't think the process has been fair, that we haven't been given a chance to express ourselves, that we have been denied the opportunity to offer amendments or contribute to the debate, then we vote against invoking cloture.

There have certainly been many circumstances when that has been warranted, but I don't know how anyone could make a case that a filibuster on procedural grounds is warranted on this financial reform bill such as we have been through. I don't know what else I could have done to make every Member of this Chamber feel more included in the debate on the reform of Wall Street. If there is something else I could have done to say to a Member: You would have had additional rights or opportunities, I would like to hear it. I don't think I could have. You can't spend 4 weeks in this Chamber through almost 60 amendments, 54 more in a conference, virtually allowing unlimited debate on almost anything that came up, and tell me you think you have been denied the opportunity to fully vent your feelings, to be heard, to offer your ideas and thoughts.

As a departing suggestion of one about to leave in 5 or 6 months, there ought to be some value to the process we have gone through. I have heard this morning already concerns expressed because the institution, in the minds of some, is dysfunctional. I don't want to believe that. I want to believe it is still a functional institution. But if, at the end, this process of what I have tried to lead on the banking bill causes people to believe that it doesn't make any difference, we are still going to vote for procedural roadblocks to this bill because we don't like some of the provisions in it or don't like the bill, then I do despair in some ways for whether this institution can ever function. If, at the end of all of that, we end up with the same kinds of procedural roadblocks as we had on the health care debate, where I would argue there was more legitimacy to invoking those procedural roadblocks, then I think the institution is in a lot more trouble than I would like to believe. I mention the process because it ought to be important to people, seeing to it that we have a chance to go forward.

At the end of that conference, we came up not only with the compromises necessary for a bill but also how to offset the cost of this bill. The House rules require that we demonstrate that the cost of the bill to the overall Treasury of the United States is not going to leave it in deeper debt than would otherwise be the case. We had to come up with offsetting costs for the bill.

The first proposal was not met warmly. It was assessments on large institutions primarily. But there were strong objections expressed, and two or three of our colleagues, who have been very helpful on this bill in offering ideas that would strengthen the bill and made significant contributions, expressed their concerns to me that this was an unacceptable offset, in their minds. So I took the extraordinary step of reconvening the conference. We met yesterday to change the offsets. We did so by two things. One we kept the same, and that was by making permanent the insurance fund in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,

making it permanent at $250,000. That requires an assessment increase in order to meet those obligations. That was already in the bill. The Congressional Budget Office scores that as providing about $8.5 billion in revenues over the next 10 years. That was there.

The second piece we did is end TARP. That is something all of us have wanted to see since the inception of the program. Can we bring this thing to a close? Under our alternative offset, we end TARP immediately, except for its current obligations. The Congressional Budget Office--and I will provide letters from the CBO confirming these numbers--scored that at about $11 billion over 10 years in savings. That money goes into deficit reduction. This is an offset; it is not a pay-for. What do I mean by that? If the budget of our Nation was $100 and the cost of a program was $10, you would have to make up that $10. It doesn't go directly to pay for those programs, but it provides the offset for the cost of those programs.

The third piece of this to make up the difference was by increasing the reserve ratio at the FDIC, which was supported by the chairperson of the FDIC, to go from 1.15 percent to 1.35 percent but to hold harmless all financial institutions or banks that have assets under $10 billion and to do that not over 4 or 5 years but over the next 10 years until 2020. That provides an additional $5.7 billion.

The CBO has thus scored the entire bill as providing an additional $3.2 billion in deficit reduction because the amounts we will be bringing in exceed the cost of the bill.

So, for my colleagues, ending TARP and complying with what the Chairman of the FDIC has said is a far better suggestion.

I would be remiss at this juncture if I did not specifically thank my colleagues from Maine, Susan M. Collins and Olympia J. Snowe. It was Ms. Collins who said this is a better idea to look at as an offset. I am grateful to her, as I am to her colleague from Maine and my colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Brown, who expressed his concerns about the assessment approach. Again, I will let them speak for themselves on these matters.

But it is important that colleagues know that, going back to a few moments ago talking about process, it was at the suggestion of Democrats and Republicans that changes were made to the bill, including the extraordinary step yesterday of opening the conference. There are those who wanted me to go forward anyway with it. Why would I do that if, in fact, Members have said: I can't be supportive under the present circumstances. The opportunity to make a correction in the bill and therefore come up with a better idea that was more acceptable to more of our colleagues seemed the appropriate step to take. That is exactly what we did. That is how we have offset the cost of this bill.

I will provide additional data. If I have misspoken on the numbers, I will correct my own statement for the record. But I believe I am approximately correct.

Again, none of this is easy. I know there is a temptation at times like this for emotions to rise, passions to find expression. I have great respect for all of my colleagues in the efforts they made. There are moments of frustration when you are trying to pass a major bill, seeking cooperation from your colleagues to get the job done. But this is a complicated piece of legislation. More than 2,000 pages are included in the bill. There are provisions that are not ones I would write myself, but this is the legislative process.

I introduced a bill last November, the one I would have preferred, but in the months since, many Members have had their opportunities to make changes. Some changes I liked; some I didn't. But it should not be that because you don't like one or two or several provisions of a bill, that ought to become more important than the total impact of what you are trying to achieve. There are those who don't like the bill, any part of it at all or very few parts of it. Again, I understand that. Those people are going to vote no. But when someone tells me there is one provision or two they don't like and as a result they are going to vote against everything, that I don't understand, candidly.

We have had our debate. We voted on hundreds of individual provisions between the House and this body. There will be procedural votes. I have made my case that at some point, a process that is as open as this one has been, as inclusive as this one has been, as hospitable as I could possibly make it, as civil as I could possibly make it--if the procedural roadblocks are no different than the legislation that was conducted without any civility, without any of the cooperation and inclusiveness of this, then what is the lesson? What is the lesson for the next major bill if, in fact, going through all of that gets you no further in the process than what we have been through?

This bill doesn't bring back your home, your job, your retirement income. What it does do is to try to see to it that the next crisis will not cause the deep problems this one has.

Let me briefly identify the two or three or four things that are major in the bill. In the absence of these, if we defeat the bill, all of this is gone and we are right back to September of 2008, right back where we were when this body voted, with less than 40 days to go before a national election, to ask the American taxpayer to write a $700 billion check to bail out and stabilize financial institutions. If you reject this effort we have been involved in for almost 2 years in the week when we come back, then we are exactly where we were in the fall of 2008, with all of the vulnerabilities we saw our country experience as a result of not reforming the structures to our financial system.

This bill will end taxpayer bailouts by making it tough for companies to engage in the kind of irresponsible behavior that threatened the economy. It sets up a way to shut down the giant, dangerous companies that failed, through bankruptcy or through a resolution mechanism that lays all of the cost and pain on them, not on the American taxpayer. That is a major achievement.

We also include for the first time institutions that are financial institutions that have operated in the shadow economy of the Nation--no regulation, no one moderating their behavior. This bill brings them all in. They will now be regulated and controlled, so they can't engage in the kind of wildcat behavior that brought our Nation to the point we have been.

The bill creates a consumer financial services protection bureau. I get people acting as if this was the most radical idea in America. If you buy a faulty product--a toaster, a car, a television set--and it is a crummy product, you have a place to go to get some sort of redress. In fact, they are required to recall the products under the Consumer Product Safety Commission and others. If you get a crummy mortgage, a crummy insurance policy, you get a crummy piece of stock because someone lied about it, where do you go? Whom do you call? You get a lawyer--I guess that is the answer--if you have the resources. This bill sets up, for the first time in our history, a place where the average consumer of financial services might be able to get a redress of their grievances.

I know people are acting as if this is some wild socialistic idea, some crazy leftwing notion, after what the country has been through, that we could end up having a place where the average American citizen, who wants to have faith and trust in our economic system, can go to get some relief. God forbid they are treated as they have been in too many instances in the past. That is part of this bill.

This bill will create an advanced warning system. Instead of one set of eyes that, frankly, were closed most of the time, we now have what we call sort of a risk assessment council made up of the various Federal agencies that have prudential responsibility over financial institutions to be meeting and looking at what is going on in the economy, not only here in our Nation but abroad as well. Are there things occurring within companies, within interconnected companies, within countries that could pose a financial risk to our Nation? Spotting them early enough to put a stop to them, to break them up, as a last resort, or to insist that certain things be done to avoid these metastasizing events that have contaminated every aspect of our life because no one stood up early enough to stop them when they first spotted them.

The bill further brings transparency and accountability to the derivatives

market, a $600 trillion--that is not misspeaking; that is not a million, not a billion--a $600 trillion market. It is a phenomenal market. Basically, it has been unregulated and out of control.

We have central clearing exchange trading with new margin and capital requirements for large bank dealers and major swap participants. These safeguards will ensure taxpayers are not left on the hook for Wall Street's bets, particularly with depositors' money, as we saw happen, or an AIG circumstance.

The bill has the so-called Volcker rule to prohibit banking organizations from engaging in proprietary trading and strictly limiting their sponsorship and investment in hedge funds and private equity funds. Again, if they want to risk their own money, that is one thing. Risking your money ought to be something else. We have expanded the Volcker rule, with balance to it. We don't totally eliminate the ability of a bank to hedge on things that are critically important for them. We believe it is an important rule. Without it, we are right back where we were before.

The bill brings transparency to the Federal Reserve. I thank Bernie Sanders of Vermont and others who have insisted on greater auditing and accountability out of the Federal Reserve System which under our bill will bring transparency to it with audits of the so-called 13(3) emergency lending that took place during the financial crisis, and a requirement that the Fed disclose who these so-called counterparties are and information about the amounts they are putting at risk and, in turn, for the American taxpayer, setting conditions on how that money can be used, putting real limitations on it, and giving this body, the Congress of the United States, a chance to respond if, in fact, they exceed their authority.

Further, the bill limits the emergency Fed lending through 13(3) so it can no longer be used to prop up an individual company, as they did with AIG.

The bill requires people to have skin in the game, requiring companies that sell products like asset-backed securities to retain at least 5 percent of the credit risk, so there is no longer an incentive to sell garbage and junk loans to people who could never pay them back thus exposing our economy and our country to further abuse.

These are all things in the bill. If we scrap it, we are right back without any of these protections. I will tell you, it will be a generation before the Congress comes back to deal with these issues again because in the absence of the crisis we have been in, we would not have gotten to this. The crisis gave us an opportunity to respond. These were not new issues. These issues had been lingering around. But the financial resources behind many of these operations are totally resistant to the changes we are talking about because there is too much money to be made for them and too much risk for the American consumer to absorb, and it was not going to have the same kind of concerns and interests brought to the bargaining table when these issues and this legislation was drafted.

The bill gives shareholders, the owners of public companies, a say on executive pay and so-called golden parachutes. We require public companies to take back compensation awarded based on phony financial statements. Shouldn't the owners of public companies have some say in these matters?

Further, the bill encourages whistleblowers with a new program at the Securities and Exchange Commission to encourage people to report securities violations. Ask the victims of Bernie Madoff whether that kind of provision might have made a difference, when we had the whistleblowers writing and begging the Securities and Exchange Commission to take note of what was happening with the Madoff scam. No one was willing to do a darn thing about it. Literally thousands of people were wiped out because no one bothered to listen to a whistleblower who identified the problem.

This bill changes that. It is not to say there will not be additional scam artists. I promise you, there will. But instead of denying the existence of a whistleblower standing up and telling a regulatory body their responsibilities, this bill requires them to take note and to act.

Additionally, because of the size and the complexity of this bill, it is almost certain there will have to be a bill with technical corrections in the future.

So when we take the sum total--obviously, I am describing five or six provisions in a 2,000-page bill--we have a product that I think restores financial security and trust. Let me mention just this point on trust because there is no financial number I could put on trust. But it may be the most important element of all. Put aside all of those individual provisions and titles of the bill, the one thing that has been so severely damaged that is the most important to restore is the trust of the American people in our financial system. Today that trust has been shattered by what has happened.

In the absence of people trusting that the financial system is fair and equitable, then I think we are in deeper trouble than any fix I can write into a bill. People understand when they deposit a paycheck in a bank, there is an assumption of risk that ought to be very little. When they buy an insurance policy, it is a different assumption of risk. When they buy a stock, there is an even further assumption of risk. There are no guarantees it is going to give a great return. In fact, it may fail.

But we ought to be able to trust the system; that it is not going to deceive us and defraud us; that it is not going to send people out to lure us into situations they know we cannot afford and they know they can sell off quickly and make a fast buck on. That trust in our financial structure, which was so important for so long, has been severely damaged over what has occurred in these last several years.

More than any other provision of this bill, more than anything else any of us can write into a piece of legislation, is whether we are going to regain the confidence and the optimism and the trust of that hard-working American family to believe that when they deposit that paycheck, there is not going to be someone investing in a hedge fund or some risky venture with their money--that is prohibited in this bill-- or when they buy a stock there is not going to be someone out there who is actually scamming them in a kiting system which ruins them forever and their families, or when they get a mortgage on a home there is someone not sitting across the table promising to be their financial adviser when they are anything but in the process.

That trust has been so severely hurt that our hope is, more than anything else I have written into this bill, we will be able to bring us back to where Americans feel confidence and trust in our country's financial systems again. So nothing less than that is at stake.

This is a fundamental overhaul of the way our financial system is regulated. It is the greatest change to occur since the reforms which were invoked after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Beyond that, of course, it is important that what we have done could be harmonized with other nations. The American President, Barack Obama, went to Toronto a few days ago to a meeting of the G20. The conservative Prime Minister of Canada pointed to this legislation and said: This is an opportunity for America to lead in helping the rest of the world to harmonize its rules on financial services. Defeat this bill and someone else will set the ground rules, and we will have to harmonize with them.

If my colleagues think that is a better result, to let the European Union or someone else write what the standards are going to be, then have it and defeat the bill. But if my colleagues believe it is better for the United States to lead and provide the guidelines and the structures that the rest of the world can rally around, then get behind us and support this effort because nothing less than that is at risk, as well, in this legislation.

So no one is going to get everything they want in this bill. I certainly did not. No one ever does. I have never seen a bill in 30 years that ended up becoming the prerogative of one small group. This has been a collective effort--a truly inclusive, collective effort. Over 100 amendments have been offered and considered by my fellow colleagues to this bill in this Chamber in the most open process in decades. It is the only time I have ever seen a conference conducted with the public viewing every single second of it, with 42 Members from the House and Senate

participating almost 70 hours in a 2-week period, not to mention the month we spent on the floor of this Chamber.

So I have done everything I know how to do in trying to accommodate my colleagues to make this as fair and as balanced and as thoughtful as we possibly could. But now is the time to act.

I wanted to take a few minutes today before we, tomorrow, participate in the solemn ceremony of celebrating the life of Robert C. Byrd in this Chamber. It will be a historic moment. I know it was a desire of his when he was alive that at the time of his passing he be recognized in this Chamber. Then, on Friday, many of us will travel to his home State of West Virginia, which he served so remarkably well over the 58 years of his service, to participate at his funeral services. Then we will be gone for a week over the Fourth of July break. Shortly after we come back, based on the schedule set by the majority leader and the minority leader, we will vote on the financial reform package and bill.

So today I wanted to take a few closing minutes to say to my colleagues, I do not know what else I could have done to make this more inclusive, to provide more balance and sense to all of this, to respond to the concerns my colleagues have raised in what we have done.

I urge you, I plead with you to give us the vote on this bill and to understand the process we have gone through and to set a template to say that a process followed by which everyone gets a chance to participate ought to be the model of how the Senate conducts its business. I hope my colleagues will not underestimate the value and importance of that approach we have taken with this bill.

I have taken a long time, and I apologize to my colleagues. But I wanted to explain the process of what we have done in conference. Again, I thank the majority leader. The majority leader does not get thanked enough. He is the captain of our Senate, as the majority leader was under Howard Baker and Bob Dole and Bill Frist and Tom Daschle and George Mitchell and Robert C. Byrd. Without his willingness to make sure we are here to conduct that debate, it would not happen.

So I would be terribly remiss, at the conclusion of these remarks, if I did not express a special thank-you to Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, for making it possible and being supportive of this open process we have been through. Without his willingness to allow that to happen, it would not have happened. I am deeply grateful to him and his staff and others for making it possible for us to come to the moment we are in; that is, to vote for this important piece of legislation.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise today to reintroduce legislation to jump-start the chances for success of low-income children entering school. Today, I am introducing the Sandy Feldman Kindergarten Plus Act of 2010.

The Kindergarten Plus Act will provide children below 185 percent of the poverty line with additional time in school during the summers before and after the traditional kindergarten school year to ensure more children enter school ready to succeed.

Too many low-income children enter school unprepared because they have not had the same resources as their more affluent peers. As exhibited by the nation's achievement gap which is already well- established prior to kindergarten, it becomes difficult for them to ever catch-up.

We must do a better job of preparing less fortunate children for school. To do this, we should expose them to classroom practices, introduce them to critical educational concepts, and familiarize them with school activities such as story time or circle time. Ultimately, we need to provide them with a solid foundation that allows them to enter school with the skills necessary to become strong students.

Only 39 percent of low-income children, compared to about 85 percent of high-income children, can recognize letters of the alphabet upon arrival in kindergarten. Moreover, low-income children often have a more limited vocabulary. By the time they are in first grade, children in low-income families have on average 5,000 words in their vocabulary. In contrast, children from more affluent families enter school with vocabularies of about 20,000 words. These startling discrepancies should tell us that more needs to be done to help all children enter school with an equal opportunity for success. This legislation strives to provide these opportunities and to lessen the achievement gap by giving low-income children more support and exposure to quality education.

This legislation was named after Sandy Feldman who was a tireless advocate for children and public education. Her commitment to social justice and her focus on early childhood education led her to develop the concept for this legislation, and it was Sandy who spent countless hours developing the details to ensure this would be a high-quality initiative.

This bill is supported by the American Federation of Teachers. I urge my colleagues to join this effort and cosponsor this legislation. I encourage them to help give low-income children a jump-start on school success. .

Mr. President, 9 years ago I and many of my colleagues supported the No Child Left Behind Act because every American child deserves an education that opens up opportunities for success and prepares him or her for the 21st century economy.

Today, because the high hopes we had for this law have not been realized, I rise to reintroduce the No Child Left Behind Reform Act.

The objective of the law we passed nearly a decade ago was the right one. Students, parents, teachers, principals, and other stakeholders all agree that educators and schools should be held accountable for the results they are getting on behalf of our children.

But instead of rewarding excellence, No Child Left Behind has turned out to be a law that punishes our schools, further straining those that already were in need of help. At times, the law has been implemented rigidly and with little regard for what is actually going on in schools. The previous administration's repeated failure to live up to funding promises has robbed our efforts to improve our education system of the resources that would make success possible.

We can have accountability without a regime of draconian punishments for schools that fall behind. What we cannot have is an inflexible and unfunded mandate that fails school districts, teachers, and, worst of all, the very students whose futures are at stake.

Although the legislation I am introducing today does not deal with the issue of funding, I do want to note that it simply will not work if we treat education as anything less than an urgent budget priority. This administration has made a solid commitment to education funding, and I was pleased to see that commitment bear fruit in the form of funding through the Recovery Act.

I am also heartened to see that the administration supports comprehensive reform of No Child Left Behind. Reform does not mean repeal. The fundamental aim of the law was right. Accountability is as important now as it was when we passed the law.

The two main reforms my legislation makes are designed to enforce accountability with measures that accurately reflect student performance and to encourage better teacher performance without the imposition of mandates that make it harder to ensure that students are taught by qualified and dedicated educators.

First, my legislation will allow schools to be given credit for performing well on measures other than test scores when calculating student achievement.

Test scores are important measures of what students know. But they are not the only, or even necessarily the best, measures of how much progress a school's student body has made. Dropout rates, participation in advanced placement courses, individual student improvement over time--these are metrics that can tell us not just where students are, but how far they have come.

Unfortunately, current law only allows these measures to show how schools are failing, not to reflect how schools are succeeding. When more kids are taking advanced courses or fewer are dropping out, a school is doing something right--and it should receive credit for doing so.

Second, my legislation reforms the teacher certification process.

The next student, parent, or, indeed, teacher I meet who does not believe educators should be highly qualified will be the first. But under the current law, ``highly qualified'' is poorly defined.

For instance, a high school science teacher could be required to hold degrees in biology, physics, and chemistry to be considered highly qualified. In small schools where there may be only one 7th or 8th grade teacher teaching all subjects, these teachers could similarly be required to hold degrees in every subject area.

The result is a shortage of teachers and a surplus of confusion.

My bill will allow states to create a single assessment covering multiple subjects for middle school teachers and allow states to issue a broad certification for science and social studies.

No Child Left Behind was supposed to challenge our schools to do better. Instead, it has become an obstacle to progress, a struggle that often distracts from the business of education. As we reauthorize the law--and we should--we must reform it so that it encourages students, educators, and school administrators to do better instead of punishing them when they fall behind.

Every American child deserves to be taught by a great teacher in a great school. Until we reach that goal, we must always dedicate our time and resources towards helping students succeed. Until our laws are moving us towards that goal, we must continue to reform them.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this important legislation.

Mr. President, today I rise to introduce the Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010, which will help promote positive youth development for children.

Approximately 17.6 million young people, which is nearly half the population between ages 10 and 18, live in situations that put them at risk of not living up to their potential. Without intervention by caring adults, these young people could make choices that undermine their future as well as the economic and social well-being of our Nation.

Mentoring programs that provide youth with support, advice, friendship, positive reinforcement, and constructive examples have proved to be a powerful tool for enhancing positive development among youth. I, myself, was a mentor in the Big Brother Program in Connecticut, and I saw first-hand the impact these programs have on the children involved. Research has found that mentored youth have fewer school absences, better attitudes towards school, less drug and alcohol abuse, fewer incidents of hitting, better relationships with their parents, and more positive attitudes towards helping others. Mentored youth are also more likely to graduate from high school and go on to higher education. Thus, mentoring invests not only in the individual child, but our Nation's future success. However, approximately 14.6 million young people are in need of mentors; they are part of what we call our nation's ``mentoring gap.''

The Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010 amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 ESEA, in order to strengthen the mentoring program is several ways. First, it will update the purpose of the program to include character education and school connectedness, which has been found to reduce school absentee rates and improve academic performance. This bill broadens the scope of mentoring to include special populations such as indigenous youth, delinquent and neglected populations, and programs targeting middle and high school migrant youth. All of these special populations are at increased risk of not reaching their potential.

The Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010 also provides training and technical assistance to grantees, tracks student outcomes, and improves the sustainability of grant recipients. Finally, it strengthens the research related to school-based mentoring to help inform future mentoring programs in order to best meet the needs of our youth.

Mentoring plays a key role in improving the lives of youth, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is critical that we invest in our youth and help provide them with the opportunities to reach their potential. Thus, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010. Together we can invest in the lives of our youth and improve the future of our nation.

Mr. President, I rise today to reintroduce legislation to jump-start the chances for success of low-income children entering school. Today, I am introducing the Sandy Feldman Kindergarten Plus Act of 2010.

The Kindergarten Plus Act will provide children below 185 percent of the poverty line with additional time in school during the summers before and after the traditional kindergarten school year to ensure more children enter school ready to succeed.

Too many low-income children enter school unprepared because they have not had the same resources as their more affluent peers. As exhibited by the nation's achievement gap which is already well- established prior to kindergarten, it becomes difficult for them to ever catch-up.

We must do a better job of preparing less fortunate children for school. To do this, we should expose them to classroom practices, introduce them to critical educational concepts, and familiarize them with school activities such as story time or circle time. Ultimately, we need to provide them with a solid foundation that allows them to enter school with the skills necessary to become strong students.

Only 39 percent of low-income children, compared to about 85 percent of high-income children, can recognize letters of the alphabet upon arrival in kindergarten. Moreover, low-income children often have a more limited vocabulary. By the time they are in first grade, children in low-income families have on average 5,000 words in their vocabulary. In contrast, children from more affluent families enter school with vocabularies of about 20,000 words. These startling discrepancies should tell us that more needs to be done to help all children enter school with an equal opportunity for success. This legislation strives to provide these opportunities and to lessen the achievement gap by giving low-income children more support and exposure to quality education.

This legislation was named after Sandy Feldman who was a tireless advocate for children and public education. Her commitment to social justice and her focus on early childhood education led her to develop the concept for this legislation, and it was Sandy who spent countless hours developing the details to ensure this would be a high-quality initiative.

This bill is supported by the American Federation of Teachers. I urge my colleagues to join this effort and cosponsor this legislation. I encourage them to help give low-income children a jump-start on school success. .

Mr. President, 9 years ago I and many of my colleagues supported the No Child Left Behind Act because every American child deserves an education that opens up opportunities for success and prepares him or her for the 21st century economy.

Today, because the high hopes we had for this law have not been realized, I rise to reintroduce the No Child Left Behind Reform Act.

The objective of the law we passed nearly a decade ago was the right one. Students, parents, teachers, principals, and other stakeholders all agree that educators and schools should be held accountable for the results they are getting on behalf of our children.

But instead of rewarding excellence, No Child Left Behind has turned out to be a law that punishes our schools, further straining those that already were in need of help. At times, the law has been implemented rigidly and with little regard for what is actually going on in schools. The previous administration's repeated failure to live up to funding promises has robbed our efforts to improve our education system of the resources that would make success possible.

We can have accountability without a regime of draconian punishments for schools that fall behind. What we cannot have is an inflexible and unfunded mandate that fails school districts, teachers, and, worst of all, the very students whose futures are at stake.

Although the legislation I am introducing today does not deal with the issue of funding, I do want to note that it simply will not work if we treat education as anything less than an urgent budget priority. This administration has made a solid commitment to education funding, and I was pleased to see that commitment bear fruit in the form of funding through the Recovery Act.

I am also heartened to see that the administration supports comprehensive reform of No Child Left Behind. Reform does not mean repeal. The fundamental aim of the law was right. Accountability is as important now as it was when we passed the law.

The two main reforms my legislation makes are designed to enforce accountability with measures that accurately reflect student performance and to encourage better teacher performance without the imposition of mandates that make it harder to ensure that students are taught by qualified and dedicated educators.

First, my legislation will allow schools to be given credit for performing well on measures other than test scores when calculating student achievement.

Test scores are important measures of what students know. But they are not the only, or even necessarily the best, measures of how much progress a school's student body has made. Dropout rates, participation in advanced placement courses, individual student improvement over time--these are metrics that can tell us not just where students are, but how far they have come.

Unfortunately, current law only allows these measures to show how schools are failing, not to reflect how schools are succeeding. When more kids are taking advanced courses or fewer are dropping out, a school is doing something right--and it should receive credit for doing so.

Second, my legislation reforms the teacher certification process.

The next student, parent, or, indeed, teacher I meet who does not believe educators should be highly qualified will be the first. But under the current law, ``highly qualified'' is poorly defined.

For instance, a high school science teacher could be required to hold degrees in biology, physics, and chemistry to be considered highly qualified. In small schools where there may be only one 7th or 8th grade teacher teaching all subjects, these teachers could similarly be required to hold degrees in every subject area.

The result is a shortage of teachers and a surplus of confusion.

My bill will allow states to create a single assessment covering multiple subjects for middle school teachers and allow states to issue a broad certification for science and social studies.

No Child Left Behind was supposed to challenge our schools to do better. Instead, it has become an obstacle to progress, a struggle that often distracts from the business of education. As we reauthorize the law--and we should--we must reform it so that it encourages students, educators, and school administrators to do better instead of punishing them when they fall behind.

Every American child deserves to be taught by a great teacher in a great school. Until we reach that goal, we must always dedicate our time and resources towards helping students succeed. Until our laws are moving us towards that goal, we must continue to reform them.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this important legislation.

Mr. President, today I rise to introduce the Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010, which will help promote positive youth development for children.

Approximately 17.6 million young people, which is nearly half the population between ages 10 and 18, live in situations that put them at risk of not living up to their potential. Without intervention by caring adults, these young people could make choices that undermine their future as well as the economic and social well-being of our Nation.

Mentoring programs that provide youth with support, advice, friendship, positive reinforcement, and constructive examples have proved to be a powerful tool for enhancing positive development among youth. I, myself, was a mentor in the Big Brother Program in Connecticut, and I saw first-hand the impact these programs have on the children involved. Research has found that mentored youth have fewer school absences, better attitudes towards school, less drug and alcohol abuse, fewer incidents of hitting, better relationships with their parents, and more positive attitudes towards helping others. Mentored youth are also more likely to graduate from high school and go on to higher education. Thus, mentoring invests not only in the individual child, but our Nation's future success. However, approximately 14.6 million young people are in need of mentors; they are part of what we call our nation's ``mentoring gap.''

The Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010 amends the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 ESEA, in order to strengthen the mentoring program is several ways. First, it will update the purpose of the program to include character education and school connectedness, which has been found to reduce school absentee rates and improve academic performance. This bill broadens the scope of mentoring to include special populations such as indigenous youth, delinquent and neglected populations, and programs targeting middle and high school migrant youth. All of these special populations are at increased risk of not reaching their potential.

The Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010 also provides training and technical assistance to grantees, tracks student outcomes, and improves the sustainability of grant recipients. Finally, it strengthens the research related to school-based mentoring to help inform future mentoring programs in order to best meet the needs of our youth.

Mentoring plays a key role in improving the lives of youth, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is critical that we invest in our youth and help provide them with the opportunities to reach their potential. Thus, I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the Mentoring America's Children Act of 2010. Together we can invest in the lives of our youth and improve the future of our nation.

Mr. President, I see my friend from Tennessee. I presume we are kind of going back and forth. The Senator is in leadership. I do not want----

I thank my colleague. I will not be long.

Mr. President, are we in morning business? Is that correct?

Mr. President, let me begin by expressing my deep sorrow and my condolences to Robert C. Byrd's family. And that family includes, obviously, not only his direct, immediate family but obviously the literally legions of people who worked for Robert C. Byrd--worked with him in both the House of Representatives and this body for the more than five decades he served in the U.S. Congress.

I suspect I am one of a handful of people left who remember the day when I was 7 years old, in the gallery of the House of Representatives, watching my father be sworn in as a new Congressman, watching my father and a young 34-year-old West Virginian named Robert C. Byrd to be sworn in as a Member of the House on January 3, 1953. Seven years later, at the age of 14, I was in the gallery of this Chamber when I watched my father and his great friend be sworn in together on January 3, 1959, as Members of the Senate. Two years later, as a 16-year-old sitting on the very steps where these young pages sit today, in the summer of 1961, I worked with Robert C. Byrd. In fact, with his departure and his death, he is now the last remaining Member of the Senate who was there that day when I first arrived as a page in the summer of 1961 when all these chairs were filled by 100 Senators. For the last 25 years, I have sat next to him at this very seat to be the recipient of his good counsel, his advice, his humor, his contributions in so many ways to me, as he was to so many others with whom he served during his tenure in the Congress.

So this is a very poignant day, one that begins, in a sense, a sense of bookmarks to me and a sense of public life. It won't be the same for the remaining 6 or 7 months of my tenure here to not have this wonderful human being, Robert C. Byrd, as my seatmate in the Senate.

So I rise today to mark the passing and to celebrate the prolific life of Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. As I have said to his family and to his staff, and, of course, to the people of West Virginia, for whom he has been such a champion throughout his public life, Robert Byrd loved three things above all else during the 30 years we spent together in this Chamber. He loved his wife Erma, he loved the State of West Virginia, and he loved deeply the Senate. I might say that each in turn loved him back.

Our sadness at his passing is tempered by our joy that he now joins his beloved Erma. What a love story it was. They met in grade school. They married in 1937, well before I was even born. They spent nearly 70 years on an incredible journey together, and even after passing a few years ago, his love for her was apparent in everything he did.

In 1946, when Robert Byrd first ran for office, West Virginia ranked at the bottom in nearly every economic indicator you could possibly think of. It was a bleak landscape pockmarked by coal fields and populated by hard-working people from hardscrabble backgrounds and communities struggling to make ends meet.

Then a young grocer from the town of Sophia arrived on the scene, asking his neighbors in those communities around Sophia for their votes in his race for the West Virginia House of Delegates. As the Washington Post noted in its obituary this morning, Robert C. Byrd met nearly every person--I would suspect every person--in his district, campaigning alone, with no one else, talking about the issues he cared about and those that would affect and did affect the people he wanted to represent; and when all else failed, wowing potential voters with his fiddle prowess.

He won that election, as he would every single election--every single election for which he ever ran. The people of West Virginia never could say no to Robert C. Byrd, and he could never say no to them. As a State legislator, a Congressman, and as a Senator, Robert C. Byrd fought for West Virginians, and our Nation, I might add, at every single turn.

If you travel the State of West Virginia today, you will see his name on schools and bridges and highway signs. You will perceive his influence when you see the government buildings and research laboratories he brought to West Virginia--investments that contributed both to the State and to our national economy and to our Nation. But don't just look for his name on the sides of buildings or overpasses. Listen for it in the appreciative words of his constituents, his extended family, and of a grateful nation for his service.

No State has ever had such a deep appreciation for the Senate Appropriations Committee because no State has ever had such an effective appropriator and fighter. Robert C. Byrd came to Congress with my father, as I pointed out, in January of 1953, and they both arrived on the same day as they had in the House, on January 3 of 1959. In the summer of 1961, I mentioned I was a Senate page sitting on the Senate floor. I still remember the eloquent speeches of the freshman Senator from West Virginia.

It is incredible to imagine that he was once a freshman Senator. Even then, he had the same gentlemanly manner; he was kind to pages, as I recall, the same knack for triumphant oratory, and the same respect for the rules and traditions of the Senate. But he soon became a fixture and a mentor to new Senators as well. I expect that over the next few days many Senators will take this floor with a Constitution in their pockets, as I do, that they received from Robert C. Byrd. Here is my tattered and rather worn copy signed by Robert C. Byrd: ``To my friend, Chris Dodd, with great personal esteem. Sincerely, Robert C. Byrd.'' I have carried this with me every day of my life for the last quarter of a century, given to me by my colleague in this Chamber, along, I might add, with a stern but kind lecture about Senate protocol. I have mine right here, as I said. It is a tattered and withered copy, after this many years.

For the past quarter of a century I have occupied some prime real estate on the floor of the Senate. This desk right next to me today, adorned with these flowers and this black cape, marks the seat Robert C. Byrd sat in for many years. As have all of us, I have been awed by his deep knowledge of this institution and his deeper commitment to preserving its place in our legislative system.

So, in many ways, Robert Byrd's story is one of constancy, of preservation, and of tradition. You could define his life by longevity, I suppose--his 69 years of marriage, his 52 years of service in the Senate, his 64 years of public service to the people of West Virginia. But he wouldn't have wanted it that way. This country has changed over

the many years in which Robert C. Byrd helped to lead it and to shape it, and he grew and changed with it, I might add. His story in so many ways parallels the American story over these many years--the story of a nation on a long and difficult journey, always trying to seek that more perfect union that our Founders described more than two centuries ago.

He wouldn't have wanted us to forget about the positions and affiliations that marked the early part of his life and career, and he did not as well. We should learn from our mistakes, as he did, draw inspiration from his journey, and credit him, I might add, for being willing to admit wrong and embrace right when he had the opportunity to do so, because, like our country, Robert C. Byrd grew wiser as he grew older.

So we can remember him not only as a tremendously effective legislator, not only as a powerful speaker, not only as a parliamentary wizard, but also as a human being who fought for equality with the true sense of urgency of a convert. He was a man unafraid of reflection, a man who voted to make Martin Luther King's birthday a Federal holiday because, as he put it--I remember him saying it so well--``I'm the only one who must vote for this bill.''

Here was a man unafraid of progress, a man who, in one of his final acts in the Senate, voted to overturn the don't ask, don't tell rule in our military. Here was a man unafraid of conscience, a man who, as the guns of war prepared to fire in 2003, delivered one of history's most courageous and memorable pleas for peace.

So let us not remember Robert C. Byrd for how much he stayed the same throughout his life. Let us remember him for how the years changed him, and how he changed America for the better through so many years of his service.

Let us remember him as West Virginia's greatest champion, the Senate's gentlemanly scholar, Erma's husband, and above all, a true friend to each and every one of us who knew and loved him so well.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.