Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today because today the Democrats will present a discharge petition to force a vote in this House on something that so many Americans know to be absolutely essential, which is comprehensive immigration reform.

The Senate has weighed in with 78 ``yes'' votes. This is a Senate where you don't get 78 votes for just about anything--bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform.

The reason I rise today, Mr. Speaker, is because yesterday in Financial Services we had a very interesting hearing on why debt matters. We talked a lot about what we need to do to continue to put our country on a sustainable path and to help this recovery be stronger.

We had David Cote, CEO of Honeywell; Alice Rivlin of Brookings; Doug Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum; and Jared Bernstein from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They agreed on one thing enthusiastically: that one of the most important steps we can take to spur growth in our economy, and to help our fiscal situation and balance our budget, would be to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The Senate has done so. It is time for this House to do the same and stand up for the economy and American families.

Mr. Speaker, had I been present for the vote on the Previous Question, rollcall vote 93, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, had I been present for the vote Agreeing to the Resolution, rollcall vote 94, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, had I been present for rollcall vote 95 on passage of H.R. 938, I would have voted ``aye.'' I am proud that my colleagues on both sides of the aisle came together in support of continuing our nation's strong relationship with Israel and promoting Israel's right to defend itself against threats and unprecedented challenges in the Middle East.

Mr. Speaker, had I been present for the vote on the Motion to Recommit with Instructions, rollcall vote 96, I would have voted ``aye.''

Mr. Speaker, had I been present for the vote On Passage of H.R. 4118, rollcall vote 97, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speakers, had I been present for rollcall vote 98 on passage of H.R. 2126, I would have voted ``aye.'' I am proud of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for coming together in support of much-needed energy savings measures.

Personal Explanation

Mr. Speaker, I rise briefly just to salute the leadership of Representative McKinley and my good friend from Vermont, Peter Welch, for a bill which does some spectacular

things. Specifically, it really enshrines the idea that the cheapest and cleanest energy that we have is that energy which we conserve and don't use, that we make available for the future.

This--and I draw on my history now of building affordable housing in a green fashion--is a real win-win. It means that people are paying lower utility bills if they employ the methods that will be encouraged by this bill. It means that we are putting less carbon in the atmosphere, and this coming from somebody recently down from Connecticut where we have experienced, in the last several years, climate problems unlike any that we have ever seen. And of course, we are doing the right thing by the future.

This is also, in a challenging time for this Chamber, a remarkable example of Democrats and Republicans working together to achieve something that will benefit not just the people in this Chamber, but will benefit the country and future generations. This is something we should build on. There is so much more we can do with respect to reconfiguring our economy and our industry and our residences so that they are clean and driven by cheap, sustainable, American energy.

So, Mr. Speaker, I close now just as I opened, by thanking Representative McKinley and Representative Welch for their tremendous leadership and say that I very much look forward to supporting this bill later on today.

Mr. Chair, on February 5, 2014, I was unable to cast my vote for the amendment offered by Representative Napolitano to H.R. 3964, rollcall vote No. 42. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Amendment No. 2 Offered by Ms. Matsui

Mr. Speaker, President Barack Obama has awarded Mary Servino of Bridgeport, Connecticut, the annual Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

Ms. Servino is a science teacher at Interdistrict Discovery Magnet School in Bridgeport, where she has taught for nine years. During that time, she has instilled in her students an impressive curiosity and passion for science. Ms. Servino told a Connecticut newspaper that her students ``are constantly discovering new ways to help them explain what is in our world and how things impact their lives.'' It is this academic curiosity that will help inspire the next generation of scientists, inventors, and innovators who will drive our economy and keep America competitive in the 21st century.

Congratulations to Ms. Servino on receiving this prestigious award. Ms. Servino exemplifies the type of teaching that will turn the students of today into the leaders of tomorrow. This recognition is a testament to her long-standing commitment and dedication to her students, and I want to thank Ms. Servino for her service to the community of Bridgeport and to the future of our city and our nation.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from Alabama for yielding me time, and my friend from New Jersey and Mr. Huizenga for the sponsorship and leadership on this bill.

I rise in strong support of H.R. 2274.

We spend a lot of time in this Chamber talking about the American Dream, and of course in many cases the apex of the American Dream is when that entrepreneur who started a bunch of restaurants or car washes or a local retailer or a local service organization, after working hard over a period of a lifetime, has the opportunity to reap

the rewards of that labor, to sell that business, and to really achieve that success an individual worked a lifetime to do.

Of course, if you have run car washes or restaurants or retail operations, you probably know very little about the very complicated task of selling a small business. There is no reason in the world why that transaction, which again is at the very apex of the American Dream, should be overburdened by regulatory costs that don't make sense.

At the end of the day, the M&A brokers that we are talking about here are not selling stocks to retail investors. They are not marketing mortgages. They are doing a very technical transaction that, again, is so important to wealth creation in this country.

So I thank my colleagues on the other side.

I don't want to let the moment go by without reminding my good friend from New Jersey that, as he blanket condemns regulation today on the floor, there are 300,000 people without drinking water in West Virginia today, in the greatest country on Earth, not because there is too much regulation, but because the regulations weren't good enough.

Years ago in west Texas, a fertilizer train blew up, killing 15 people and injuring 160 people, not because there was too much regulation, but because there was poor regulation.

In the area of our expertise, financial services, this economy was also devastated, not because there was too much regulation, but because there was effectively no regulation under derivatives--complicated, large instruments that brought down institutions like AIG and others because, before Dodd-Frank, you could go into a neighborhood and sell somebody a mortgage without asking for their income.

We succeed and the economy succeeds because we do exactly this, because we find the right balance. We acknowledge that good regulation can save lives in Texas, drinking water in West Virginia, and prevent the destruction of $17 trillion of American's wealth as occurred 5 years ago.

Again, I celebrate and thank my good friend from New Jersey and promise to continue this dialogue on how we don't condemn all regulation, but seek a balance that allows our economy to thrive as it always has.

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

I, once again, thank Chairman Garrett, chairman of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, for his support and leadership on this bill. I particularly thank my cosponsors on this bill: Mr. Womack, with whom I have worked before; Mrs. Wagner; and Mr. Delaney. Additional cosponsors of the bill are Mr. Polis, Mr. Quigley, and Mr. Renacci. I thank them for their hard work.

This is a rare example of a wise bipartisan bill that will achieve something important, which is to basically undertake a technical fix to the JOBS Act, passed into law in April of 2012, which allowed banks to put off becoming public until they reached a threshold of 2,000 shareholders. That sounds like a small and technical point, but it put a tremendous burden on banks that perhaps were not ready to go public with more than 500 shareholders at the time.

The legislation did not directly specify that savings and loans would also receive the same treatment. It was, I believe, the intent of Congress that that be the case. So H.R. 801 goes back to seek to remedy this issue.

The Holding Company Registration Threshold Equalization Act, a rather awkward name for H.R. 801, extends the shareholder registration thresholds to savings and loan holding companies. This bill will ensure that savings and loan institutions operate under the same rules as banks, trying to create a more uniform and simple regulatory apparatus.

This will help these institutions raise capital so that they have the resources to make the loans which drive the economic growth--the businesses, the colleges, the mortgages, the purchases that drive the economic growth of this country.

Madam Speaker, again, I thank Mr. Garrett for his support. As we seek creative solutions to the Nation's job crisis, we should do everything we can to stimulate the consumer demand that we know drives so much of this economy. This bill is one small, commonsense step we can take in that direction.

Again, I thank Mr. Womack, Mrs. Wagner, and Mr. Delaney for their leadership.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Schneider), my colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to just close by thanking you for our partnership and our work on this bill. I hope we can do more of the same.

I thank Mrs. Wagner and Mr. Delaney, cosponsors of this bill, and Chairman Garrett for pushing this through.

As we have said, H.R. 801 is a good idea, a bipartisan idea, and something that I hope we can see the Senate take up.

Mr. Speaker, I urge support of H.R. 801 and yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, now that the notorious problems with the ACA Web site healthcare.gov appear to be largely behind us, it is important that we cut through the partisan noise and look at some facts.

One fact is that in 2 days--Sunday and Monday alone--almost 30,000 Americans have gone to healthcare.gov to sign up for health insurance. Many of these families are families with preexisting conditions that would have no way to get health insurance other than healthcare.gov and the ACA.

In my own State of Connecticut, with less than 1 percent of the American population, 22,000 families have signed up for health insurance.

Mr. Speaker, from the President down, we were concerned by people losing their health care plans in the rather small individual market. But it is important for the American people to understand that when they hear the word ``repeal,'' they need to understand that repeal means that the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, the millions of Americans who will get insurance because of the ACA will lose it.

Millions of Americans will lose their new-found insurance if this word ``repeal'' ever becomes law. That is not right; and on that, I think we should agree.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my friend from Massachusetts for the time and Ranking Member Waters for being willing to hear different perspectives on this bill from our side.

I want to start by saying that Dodd-Frank, which I think I can say I contributed more than my share to, was, on balance, a very good and very important thing. The dragging of derivatives into the light of day, trading on exchanges, clearing through clearinghouses, the creation of the CFPB, taking steps to eliminate too big to fail, there is lots of stuff in Dodd-Frank which is important and good.

But not everything in Dodd-Frank is important and good. Like all other works of mortals, there are things in this that are probably unintended and perhaps overreaching. I happen to believe that the requirement that private equity funds register with the SEC is one of those areas.

Why is that?

First, private equity funds, as has been pointed out on the floor today, were a million miles from the bad mortgages from Fannie Mae, from Freddie Mac, from the subprime mortgages, from all of those things that caused the failures in 2008. They weren't anywhere close.

Secondly, investor protection is important, but, by law, the only people who can invest in these funds are accredited investors or institutional investors who don't just sign up. They hire attorneys to negotiate partnership agreements. They negotiate with these private equity funds for disclosure, for the terms, and all of those sorts of things. So we are not talking about retail investors here.

Finally, the issue of leverage. We have finally gotten to the point where people acknowledge that these are not large leverage funds. The point is made that the leverage is at the investment company level. That is true. Private equity firms do buy companies, invest in them, and then those companies take on leverage. The average leverage across the entire universe of private equity-sponsored companies is less than 3 to 1. It is not 30 to 1, but 3 to 1. It is less than 3 to 1. By way of comparison, hedge funds, on average, are leveraged 15 to 1. Lehman Brothers, when it went down, was leveraged in excess of 30 to 1. We are talking about companies which are assuming the same kind of debt that any other small business assumes out there, less than 3 to 1.

What we have happening right now is we have examiners and the intention and the resources of the SEC, which has terribly important missions around real estate and mortgages and derivatives and finding the next Bernie Madoff, going to $175 million funds and

examining these funds on behalf of the sophisticated investors. That does not make sense.

Dodd-Frank exempted venture capital funds from this registration requirement. Venture capital funds do the exact same thing with the exact same investors that private equity funds do; they just do it in an earlier stage in the company's history. The only reason for that exemption is that we like venture capital funds more than we like private equity funds. They sound better. They make nice things in garages in Palo Alto. Private equity sounds more ominous; therefore, they have been subjected to registration.

Mr. Speaker, we exempted venture capital funds from the Advisers Act of 1940 registration. The same set of investors, same types of investing. Actually, a more risky asset class than private equity. We exempted them for no other reason than that we like venture capital better than we like private equity. That is fine. But in statute and in regulation, we should be consistent.

So I think that you can argue that venture capitalists should be subject to the same kind of registration requirements that private equity is or you can argue, as I do, that probably both types of funds don't need to be registered under the Advisers Act of 1940, but you can't support Dodd-Frank and say venture capitalists are exempt and private equity is not and be consistent in policy.

So I urge my colleagues, in the interest of balancing a very good piece of legislation, to support H.R. 1105.

Mr. Speaker, since this Congress convened, it has done nothing to help create jobs. In fact, through ill-advised and overenthusiastic cutting, the sequester, the shutdown, the threat to our full faith and credit, this Congress has destroyed jobs.

Mr. Speaker, what if I told you there was a jobs bill just sitting waiting to be passed that would add almost $1 trillion to our economy in a 10-year period? What if I told you this jobs bill would create 121,000 new jobs every single year for 10 years? What if I told you that this would also make us a more humane Nation that would stop the breakup of families and the deportations of moms and dads, of Dreamers? What if I told you that this jobs plan got 68 votes in the United States Senate, a divided United States Senate.

Of course, I am describing the comprehensive immigration bill, which the Speaker of this House refuses to bring up. There is no principled, no logical objection to this thing. There are just scare tactics that people with funny accents and names you can't pronounce will come and take your job. That is not true. It is time to pass that jobs bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Engel for yielding.

I would like to thank the chairman and the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee for the bipartisanship with which they led this bill and which I think we will accomplish some very good things tomorrow.

The figures around this program speak for themselves: the millions of lives saved, the orphanages which are no longer full, the many pregnant women who will not transmit a deadly virus to their children. These things speak for themselves.

Without question, PEPFAR and the Global Fund are two of the most effective foreign aid programs ever conceived in this Chamber. But Americans might ask in good faith, Why spend money in places like Africa, Asia, and in the Caribbean when the needs are so intense right here at home? And the answer to that question could not be clearer.

Africa and Asia, where PEPFAR and the Global Fund do the most good, are areas of great instability but of great promise, where countries like China are buying up commodities, are exerting their influence, and are throwing their weight around.

We have the opportunity through the continuation of programs such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund to win for generations the hearts and minds of people who will think back on American assistance as the reason that their family had continuity, as the reason that their country continued to develop.

So the question we are answering when we think about continuing these programs and our involvement and our taxpayer dollars should really be, Are we a country that offered the opportunity to continue to save lives? Will we do that? Do we want to save lives, if we can? Do we want to be known just for our economic and military strengths, or do we want to also be known as an unqualified force for good in this world?

I would say that at this point in our history our ability to say that it is not just about economic and military power, but it is about a quality of mercy that we all cherish. And this is a wonderful opportunity for us to say who we are by supporting this legislation.

I want to thank Mr. Scott for yielding the time.

Mr. Speaker, derivatives are complicated things. They are probably one of the more complicated things that we deal with in this Chamber, so it is worth describing in simple terms what H.R. 992 does.

It abides by principles that I think we can all agree make some sense, which are those things which contributed to the meltdown of 2008--the terrible mortgages, the derivatives that were based on those mortgages, the proprietary trading. Those things that contributed to the meltdown of 2008 should be either made unlawful or should be much more closely regulated than they were in the past; but those things that were not related in any way, shape, or form and that did not contribute to the meltdown of 2008 we should take a little lighter hand on.

H.R. 992 says that those derivatives--the currency derivatives, the commodity derivatives, the equity swaps, all of these complicated things that weren't anywhere close to the meltdown of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and the challenges at Citibank and at JPMorgan Chase-- will not be subject to a very aggressive measure saying that banks cannot trade in those derivatives.

Now, banks trade in derivatives because they support their clients and trade. I emphasize ``trade'' because one of their clients will borrow $100 million to build in Japan. That exposes him to yen risk. Maybe I don't want to take yen risk, and maybe the same guy who lent me the money can help me offload that risk. That is the idea.

H.R. 992 in no way allows for the risky derivatives--the collateralized bond obligations, all of those real estate derivatives-- to come back into the banking environment, and it in no way permits, as the chairman has said a number of times, a bailout of banks because of derivatives.

Even though we have spent a lot of time on this today, it makes sense to spend a second on the history of this bill:

Section 716 requires the full push-out of derivatives. Regulators recognize that this is dangerous, and they are very vocal about it. Then-Ranking Member Barney Frank takes a suggestion from then- Representative Nan Hayworth to repeal section 716. The then-ranking member says, Let's not repeal it. Let's allow for the plain vanilla, common derivatives to remain in the banks and push out the dangerous ones. The Democratic staff helps draft this amendment, and I am personally asked to offer this amendment to Nan Hayworth's bill. She accepts it. A voice vote is passed, and the bill is passed in the last Congress. The minority views supported it. We all supported it. This year, exactly the same bill comes before us, and we have ginned up the press, and we have ginned up the bloggers. This has become a gift to Wall Street.

What is different? What is different from what passed happily and in a bipartisan fashion in the last Congress relative to this Congress-- the London Whale? JPMorgan claims that they were hedging. Hedging is permitted whether we pass this or not. The London Whale has nothing to do with this.

Mr. Speaker, what has changed is that we no longer do the hard work of finding finely balanced regulation like we do in water or in air. In financial services--in Dodd-Frank today--we have a morality play: either you repeal Dodd-Frank in its entirety because it is awful or you may not touch a word in the law.

Folks, we are about finding that balance. In as much as we go in front of each other and say that this is a giveaway to Wall Street, that doesn't help explain whether we should allow commodity swaps or not. What that does is impugn our motives as individuals, and it does not inform the debate. This is well-balanced regulation that passed overwhelming bipartisanly. Let's get away from this morality play and do our jobs by finding finely balanced regulation.