Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the judiciary committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Res. 503 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions: S. Res. 515, S. Res. 516, S. Res. 517, S. Res. 518.

I ask unanimous consent the resolutions be agreed to, the preambles be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc, and that any statements be printed in the Record.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time; passed, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider Calendar Nos. 849 to and including 879 and all nominations on the Secretary's desk in the Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc; that no further motions be in order; any statements relating to the nominations be printed in the Record, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then resume legislative session.

I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 2 p.m., Monday, May 10; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day,

and the Senate proceed to a period of morning business until 3 p.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each; that following morning business, the Senate resume consideration of S. 3217, Wall Street reform.

Mr. President, I can announce that there will be no rollcall votes during Monday's session of the Senate.

If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it adjourn under the previous order.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I rise to speak for a moment again about my amendment No. 3746, of which I am delighted that the distinguished Presiding Officer is a cosponsor. I ask unanimous consent that Chairman Patrick Leahy, Senator Jim Webb, and Senator Bob Casey all be added as cosponsors to the amendment.

Just to recap it briefly, if you go around the country--

I will be glad to yield to the chairman.

Yes.

Mr. President, I was delighted to give the distinguished Senator from North Dakota a chance to clarify that.

I will speak just for a minute about amendment No. 3746, which I will not be calling up right now but which I intend to work with Chairman Dodd on to call up later.

I wanted to mention that this afternoon this amendment received the endorsement of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of dozens of national and State consumer groups that are working to help pass the critical legislation we are debating today.

In addition to the coalition as a whole, the amendment has been endorsed by individual members as well, including the AARP, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Action, Consumers Union, and on behalf of its low-income clients, the National Consumer Law Center.

These groups have sent a letter to each of my colleagues which reads in part:

On behalf of consumers, AFR strongly urges you to support

Whitehouse's Interstate Lending Amendment. By reinstating

protections that existed prior to the U.S Supreme Court's

decision in Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First

of Omaha Service Corp (1978), Congress will take a step in

the right direction toward protecting consumers and leveling

the playing field between national credit card companies and

their local and community oriented counterparts.

The Whitehouse Interstate Lending Amendment takes a strong

step towards restoring to each state the ability to protect

its citizens from lenders based in other states. We strongly

urge you to vote in favor of this Amendment and in favor of

the consumer protections this Amendment promotes. By leveling

the playing field between national banks and local lenders,

you will send a strong signal to Main Street that their

interests count. We urge adoption of this modest, yet

tremendously helpful amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this letter dated today from Americans for Financial Reform.

Mr. President, I know the membership of this organization that supports the amendment includes AARP, as I mentioned, that also supported it individually, the Center for Responsible Lending, Common Cause, Consumers Union, the NAACP, the National Association of Investment Professionals, the National Council of La Raza, and the Veterans Chamber of Commerce, in addition to a great number of other organizations.

This is an important amendment. It closes a loophole that was opened by the Supreme Court decision of 30 years ago, the decision to define the term ``located'' in the National Banking Act from way back in the Civil War era, 1863, as meaning the location where the bank is located, not the location where the consumer is located, so that when there is a bank in one State doing business with a consumer in another State, the laws of the bank's State govern.

There is nothing particularly wrong with that decision. The problem is that the banks figured out that they could go to States that had the worst consumer protections or go to States that would be willing to chuck their consumer protections in return for the influx of business. From those States which have the worst consumer protection laws, they could then market their products around to other States and undercut and dodge around the laws of Rhode Island, the laws of Minnesota, the laws of Connecticut, the laws of Iowa, the laws of Virginia--the laws of all the States that for more than 200 years, in the history of our Republic, had this authority to regulate interest and to protect our consumers.

This is an unintentional loophole. It has created grievous abuse of consumers who for the first time in the history of America are paying 30-plus interest rates under the law. When you and I were growing up, Mr. President, if a flier came in the mail that offered a credit card with a 30-percent interest rate, that would probably be a matter to bring to the attention of the authorities because it would be illegal. Now they market this stuff at will, and too many Americans, too many of our State residents, too many consumers are paying exorbitant and what would in that State be illegal interest rates because of that loophole. It is long past time to change it. This amendment would close it.

I urge the support of my colleagues, and I look forward to the chance to call up this amendment.

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

Madam President, I had planned to offer an amendment this afternoon. I have been informed by the managers that the amendment slots are full at the moment. I wish to speak about my amendment and then return to the floor at the earliest opportunity to offer it for a vote.

First, I say to the chairman of the Banking Committee that the bill we are currently debating would do great things to regulate an out-of- control Wall Street, to end the pernicious practice of too big to fail, and to provide for regular consumers an independent financial protection agency to look out for their interests against all the big sharks and lobbyists and lawyers who are ganged up against them on consumer debt. I appreciate the work Chairman Dodd and Chairman Lincoln have done, and I look forward to continuing to work with them on this important piece of legislation.

My amendment is cosponsored by Senators Merkley, Durbin, Sanders, Levin, Burris, Franken, Brown of Ohio, and Menendez, and we are continuing to solicit cosponsorships. We are also receiving endorsements from outside of this body.

The amendment would address an area that is not yet covered by the Wall Street reform bill; that is, runaway credit card interest rates. It would do so not by imposing new restrictions on lending but, rather, by restoring historic State powers--powers that were eliminated in the relatively recent past.

Madam President, when you and I were growing up, a credit card offer with a 20-percent or 30-percent interest rate might have been a matter to bring to the attention of the authorities. Such interest rates were illegal under the laws of most, if not all, of the 50 States. Laws against charging excessive interest rates go much further back than our youth, however. The Code of Hammurabi in the third millennium B.C. limited interest rates. Hindu laws of the second century B.C. limited interest rates. Roman law limited interest rates. So when America was established, there was already a long tradition of protecting citizens against excessive interest rates, and that tradition carried to the founding of the United States of America.

For the first 202 years of our Republic, each State had the sovereign power to enforce usury laws against any lender doing business with its citizens. During those two centuries, our economy grew and flourished, and lenders profited while complying with those laws.

Then, in 1978 came an apparently uneventful Supreme Court case. It was little noticed at the time it was decided. The case was called Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corporation. The Supreme Court there had to determine what the word ``located'' meant in an old statute, the National Bank Act of 1863-- whether it meant that the transaction between a bank in one State and a consumer in another State was governed by the law of the bank State or of the consumer State. The resolution was that the term ``located'' referred to the location of the bank and not the location of the consumer. This meant that in a transaction between a bank in one State and a consumer in another, the transaction would be governed by the State in which the bank was domiciled.

Well, it did not take long for the big banks to see the loophole this very narrow decision created. This loophole was never sanctioned by Congress, apparently never intended by the Supreme Court, but it was a significant loophole. It allowed banks to, for the first time in the Nation's history, avoid interest rate restrictions by the States of their consumers. It allowed them to get through that loophole by reorganizing as national banks and moving to States with comparatively weak consumer protection.

Once the banks figured out that loophole, what is called ``a race to the bottom'' ensued. Bank credit card centers moved to States with the worst consumer protections, and in some cases States made their consumer protections even worse in order to attract that business to their State. The result of that is that today the credit card divisions of major banks are based in just a few States. That deal with the bank State causes consumers in all other States to be denied their traditional, historic, lawful protection against outrageous interest rates and fees.

With millennia of interest rate protections behind us and hundreds of years of protection by the sovereign States of our Nation, the current system that has developed since that 1978 decision is the oddity in our history.

My amendment would do nothing more than reinstate the historic, longstanding powers of our sovereign States to protect their citizens against excessive usurious interest rates. Let me be clear about what this amendment would not do. It would not mandate anything. It would not even recommend interest rate caps. It would not impose any other lending limitations. It would just restore to our sovereign States the power they enjoyed for over 200 years from the founding of the Republic--the power to say: Enough. Thirty percent or 50 percent or 100 percent is too much interest to be charged to its citizens.

The current system is unfair to consumers, but it is also unfair to local banks--banks that continue to be bound by the laws of the State in which they are located. A small local bank has to play by the rules of fair interest rates. The gigantic national credit card companies can avoid having any rules at all. That is not fair. We need to level the playing field to eliminate this unfair and lucrative advantage for Wall Street banks against our local Main Street community banks.

To make sure lenders cannot find another statute to use to once again avoid State law, my amendment would apply to all types of consumer lending institutions and not just national banks. So no more changing your charter or your means of business to avoid limitations on gouging your customers.

My amendment gives State legislatures ample time to revise their usury statutes if they wish and gives lenders ample time to adjust. The amendment would not go into effect until 1 year

after the President signs the bill into law.

In the meantime, it is worth noting that most States' usury laws are around or above 18 percent. Presently, federally regulated credit unions do quite well under a Federal 18 percent interest rate cap. So there should not be a large shock when this amendment goes into effect as law. It is the 30-percent-and-over interest rates that are the recent anomaly, the historic peculiarity, the oddity, and cruelty to consumers that States have traditionally been able to defend against.

We should go back to the historic norm, the way the Founding Fathers saw things under the doctrine of federalism, and close this modern bureaucratic loophole that allows big Wall Street banks to gouge local citizens and compete unfairly with local banks.

I ask my colleagues for their consideration of this amendment and urge them to support it. I think it is a good amendment.

I see the distinguished majority whip on the floor. I yield back my time so that he may speak.

Mr. President, I thank the Senate majority whip for cosponsoring our legislation. I appreciate his support immensely. He has a wonderful way of making things clear and helping people understand how basic and simple and historic this amendment is. It takes us back to the way the country was through the vast majority of its history.

The ``greatest generation'' served in World War II, came home, and went to college and built the society we now live in under these rules. George Washington and his men at Valley Forge served under these rules. The Civil War took place and the Korean war took place under these rules. There are 202 years of solid history behind this issue.

I will close with an appeal to my colleagues to continue to show interest in this legislation, in particular my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. If you believe in States rights, this is a good piece of legislation.

If you believe in States as laboratories of democracy, as centers of innovation, as places where you multiply times 50 the chance of getting the right answer when you allow a little bit of innovation to take place, you should support this legislation.

If you take comfort in more than 200 years of solid American history proving that this is the right way to go, you should support this amendment.

If you want to protect consumers in your State from out-of-State banks that are out of control and have no restrictions on interest rates they can charge your consumers, you should support this amendment.

If you think the Federal Government has too much power and you want the States to have more say about what can take place with its own citizens, you should support this amendment.

I look forward to continuing to push for a vote on this amendment. I think it is an important one.

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

Will the Senator yield for a question?

First of all, I thank the Senator for her continuing efforts on this point. I had the privilege of joining her on the first day in moving some of these unanimous consents. She brought up 73, I think, in 1 day, to tee up all these names under the Senate rules that require that once a unanimous consent has been proposed, the identity of the Senator with the hold has to be divulged in 6 legislative days. As I understand it, the 6 legislative days run today.

Therefore, tomorrow is the day when one of three things has to take place. We can come to the floor and clear these folks by unanimous consent because there will no longer be a secret hold is option 1. Option 2 is a Senator would have stood up, filed the papers that the rules of the Senate require and admit to the secret hold, making this process transparent and open. The third is they will have done what Senator McCaskill and I have both called the switcheroo, and they will have gone quietly to some other Senator and said: I only have 4 days left; I don't want to hold it till 6. If you pick up my hold now for me, then you are after the unanimous consent request, and we think we can dodge the rules this way.

Is it the understanding of the Senator from Missouri that those are the three options we will discover tomorrow as to all of these 80 nominees, which category they are in?

With respect to the observation that the distinguished Senator from Arizona made that they had just, after this process, allowed four U.S. attorneys to be cleared, in the light of the fact that at this time in the Bush administration there were eight Bush administration officials who were the subject of Democratic holds, but it is more than 80 Obama officials who are now still the subject of

almost exclusively Republican holds, notwithstanding what is clear under the pressure of this initiative, we are actually down from over 100, but we are still holding at over 80 officials who are tangled up in secret holds.

Is it a fair statement of mine to put, ``Gosh, we released four'' into the context of, ``Yeah, but we are holding 84''? That is the way the ratio works right now; does it not?

Indeed, votes in favor by the Republicans on the committee.

Of those, if I may ask another question, who have been cleared, some have been allowed to come forward for votes on the Senate floor. The last was Judge Chin who had been held for a considerable period of time. We actually, if I recall correctly, had to file cloture and take more time. There is a process built around cloture so it burns up Senate floor time. We were forced to do that.

When the nomination was finally voted on in the Senate, is my recollection correct that he cleared the Senate 98 to 0?

Just by a process of elimination, unless one of the two absent Senators was the one who had the hold, whoever was holding Judge Chin actually ended up voting for him after months and months of having delayed the nomination.

That is the right of the Senator to do, so long as they do it publicly.

They can still do that even after the secret holds.

Madam President, if I may conclude, I thank the Senator for indulging me in these questions and allowing me to ask them and for her energetic and principled leadership on this issue.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that my statement be followed by a colloquy among the cosponsors of the amendment I will be discussing.

Madam President, I had actually planned to offer an amendment to the Wall Street reform bill this afternoon, but I have been informed that the open-amendment process does not begin until next week. I

will describe my amendment this afternoon and then return to the floor at the earliest opportunity to actually call it up.

Before I describe it, I wish to commend Chairman Dodd and Chairman Lincoln for their hard work in crafting a strong Wall Street reform bill. The collapse of the housing market in 2008 and the resulting recession, near depression, was painful evidence that our financial institutions were underregulated and that we were ill-prepared for the invention of complex, new financial products.

The legislation we are currently debating will strengthen and modernize our Nation's financial regulation and substantially reduce the chances for future market bubbles and collapses, with all the economywide collateral damage we have seen from this collapse.

My amendment is cosponsored by Senator Merkley, who is on the Senate floor--I am delighted he is here with me--Senator Durbin, Senator Sanders, and Senator Levin. It would address an area that is not yet covered by the Wall Street reform bill, and that is runaway credit card interest rates.

This amendment would address that issue not by imposing any new restrictions on lending but, rather, by restoring to our States historic powers that they held for hundreds of years and that were eliminated only in the relatively recent past.

Madam President, when you and I were growing up, a credit card offer with a 20-percent or 30-percent interest rate might well have been a matter to bring to the police. Such interest rates were illegal under the laws of most, if not all, of the 50 States.

Today, in contrast, credit cards routinely charge rates of 30 percent or even more, usually after they have trapped people into a late payment or some trick of some kind to get them away from the teaser rate with which they sold them the credit card. They end up with 30 percent interest or higher. These interest rates have spiraled out of control, and for reasons I will explain, the States, at least recently, have been powerless to do anything about it despite the historic power they had in this area.

Prior to 1978--indeed, for the first 202 years of our Republic--each State had the ability to enforce usury laws against any lenders doing business with its citizens. Our economy grew and flourished during these two centuries. These were not hard periods for the financial services industries, and lenders profited while complying with the laws in effect where they operated. Then in 1978 came an apparently uneventful Supreme Court case. It was little noticed at the time it was decided. In Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corporation, the Supreme Court interpreted one word--the word ``located''--in the National Bank Act of 1863. That word sat quietly in that statute for 102 years, but in 1978 they interpreted it as meaning the location of the business rather than the location of the customer-- where the bank was headquartered or domiciled rather than where their customer lived.

Well, it did not take long before big banks cottoned on to the opportunity this created--an opportunity never sanctioned by Congress nor apparently even intended by the Supreme Court. It was an inadvertent loophole, but they found it, and they realized they could avoid the interest rate restrictions by reorganizing as national banks and moving to States that had the weakest consumer protections. So what happened? A race to the bottom. The proverbial race to the bottom took place as a small handful of States eliminated consumer protections, eliminated interest rate caps in order to attract into their States lucrative credit card business and their related tax revenue.

Today, there is a reason the credit card divisions of major banks are based in just a few States, and it causes consumers in all of our other States to be denied the historic protection they enjoyed from outrageous interest rates and fees. My amendment would reinstate the historic longstanding powers of our sovereign States to decide which interest rate limits, if any, should be set to protect their own citizens.

Let me be clear about what this amendment would not do. It would not prescribe or even recommend any interest rate caps and it would not impose any other lending limitations. It would restore to the States the power they enjoyed for over 200 years, from the very founding of the Republic--the power to say ``enough,'' the power to say 30 percent interest or 50 percent interest or 100 percent interest is too much and we won't allow you to charge it to our citizens.

The current system is not just unfair to consumers who can't be protected by their own State's government and are vulnerable to predatory lending in States far from their home, it is unfair to local lenders and retailers that continue to be bound by the laws of the home State. They are still bound. So the home State bank is under the State law. It is the huge, gigantic out-of-State national bank that can come in and compete against those small banks with that disadvantage. The small local bank has to play by the rules of fair interest rates, but the gigantic national credit card companies can avoid having any rules at all. So we need to level the playing field to eliminate this unfair and lucrative advantage that Wall Street banks enjoy against our local Main Street community banks.

To make sure lenders can't find another statute to use to once again avoid State law, my amendment would apply to all types of consumer lending institutions, not just national banks, and that is for the purpose of forbidding them and preventing them from changing their charters to avoid limitations on gouging consumers.

One of the other factors in this bill is that you can't choose your regulator by changing your charter, and we have reached broadly with this to protect against exactly that. My amendment would give State legislatures ample time to revise their usury statutes, if they feel they need revision, and would allow lenders the time to adjust. The amendment would not go into effect until 1 year after the President signs the bill into law.

In the meantime, it is worth noting that most States' usury laws are around or above 18 percent, and that federally regulated credit unions do quite well under a Federal 18-percent interest rate cap. So the underlying interest rates that States tend to apply, when this power has not been stripped from them, really inadvertently, tend to be quite reasonable, as proven by the fact that our credit union industry operates under a Federal 18-percent interest rate cap and does quite well.

It is the 30-percent and over interest rates that are the recent anomaly, the peculiarity in our country's history. We should go back to the historic norm--the way the Founding Fathers saw things under the doctrine of federalism--and close this modern bureaucratic loophole; probably an inadvertent loophole, but one that the big Wall Street banks found to gouge local citizens and compete unfairly with local banks.

I ask my colleagues for their consideration on this, and I turn to the distinguished Senator from Oregon, Senator Merkley.

Madam President, I am grateful for my colleague's support.

I see Senator Sanders of Vermont has joined us on the floor, and I am delighted to welcome him to our colloquy.

Senator Sanders.

Madam President, I thank Senator Sanders and both my colleagues very much for their cosponsorship of this amendment and their advocacy of it. I would hope we could find support for this from the other side of the aisle.

I do not see this as an exclusively Democratic issue. If you look at the arguments that have been made by all of us on the floor just now for it--Senator Sanders spoke eloquently about the Judeo-Christian tradition that informs so much of our civilization and its horror of exaggerated exorbitant interest rates--for those of our colleagues who are attuned to those traditions, who take their religious principles seriously, they only have to harken back to sources of our Judeo- Christian tradition to find these kinds of limits are good and historic.

For those of us who are constitutional scholars and historians and are familiar with the doctrine of federalism and the role of the States in protecting their local citizens, the notion of States rights is one that has frankly been championed by colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Here is an opportunity to express their fealty to that doctrine and to that principle of States rights.

To those who think that 202 years of successful tradition of local regulation of interest rates has value, we can document that this is a recent anomaly. This is a peculiarity we are correcting. The great sweep of American history, over more than two centuries, is that the States protected their citizens properly and well. Anyone who cares for consumers in their States, local consumers up against huge credit card companies that keep you waiting on the phone for hours when you have to try to file a complaint, whose offices are in another State or in another country, sticking up for your local citizens is something I think we should all be prepared to agree to.

And finally, for those of us who have local banks, community banks, Main Street banks that are domiciled in our home States, why should they suffer the disadvantage of having to compete against these huge rapacious credit card companies and Wall Street banks and be subject to their State's law but have this loophole allow the monster banks, the gigantic banks to take advantage of consumers in this way?

I think you can look at this amendment from a whole variety of perspectives and the principles that it stands on are ones that many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have supported and championed over the years.

Let me thank Senator Sanders, who is a passionate and articulate consumer advocate, and Senator Merkley of Oregon, who has come to the Senate in the interests of his native Oregonians, trying to make sure they are well served. He has been remarkable at that.

I apologize to Senator Durbin. I know he wanted to come and join us as well, but the timing changed and he was unable to attend. I thank him for his cosponsorship of this amendment. I also thank distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Chairman Levin, for cosponsoring it. I am truly honored by their support. The distinguished Senator from Illinois, Senator Burris, tells me he wishes to cosponsor as well. So I am grateful to him and I thank him. He is a former banker so he understands these issues very well, and he understands the effect of backing in the local community. I am very gratified by his support.

The last thing I want to say before I close on this subject is that the system by which credit card companies get consumers into these high-interest rate predicaments is no accident. It is a system and it has been carefully designed by the credit card companies, beginning with the way they write the agreement.

When credit cards began, the credit card agreement was two or three pages long. I am looking at an array of young pages here in front of me. They are pretty soon going to be getting credit cards of their own. They won't know what it was like when I got my first credit card. They are going to get a first credit card contract that has 20 pages of fine print. And hidden in the fine print have been amazing tricks and traps.

One of my personal favorites, which we thankfully ended under the leadership of Chairman Dodd earlier, was that the credit card companies would declare the day was over at 10 in the morning and then they would open the mail at 11. So if you got your payment in on the day it was due, they didn't open the mail until they declared the day was over.

The day wasn't over. The Sun was still up, morning was not even over, but they had declared in the fine print of the contract that they could end the payment day at 10 in the morning and then open the mail later that day so your check was, guess what, late, and that put you into a late payment category so they could jack your interest rate.

As Senator Sanders' constituent and so many folks in Rhode Island have experienced, 1 day you are at 12.9 percent and the next day you are at 30 percent and you don't know what hit you. And once they have you there, it is very hard to unwind. It is very hard to pay it off and get out. Many consumers cannot pay off their credit card all at once so now they are trapped, and they are trapped in what Prof. Ronald Mann of Columbia University has called ``the sweat box.''

He has looked at how the credit card companies manipulate their consumers, and what they do is they set up all these tricks and traps and suddenly you build up a nice balance and it is at a reasonable interest rate but you fall into one of the traps. They catch you with one of the tricks. And bang, they have you. You are now at a 30-percent interest rate, you don't have the resources to pay it off all at once, and the charges begin to pile up--the fees, the exorbitant interest-- and pretty soon they have got you completely over a barrel.

It is systematized. It is done to extract the maximum amount of money and profit from consumers who are not aware of how sophisticated the machinery is that is out there trying to gouge them.

This is not just a question of exorbitant interest rates; it is also a question of pushing back against credit card companies that have developed a system, the sweat box system, that needs to be put to an end. And State regulation can help do it. Because if the State is not being paid off with tax revenues to look away from what the bank is doing, and if most of the damage is not being done in other States whose complaints are not as relevant in the home State, in the domicile State, then they get away with it.

They will not get away with it once federalism, States rights, and the American tradition of State protection of its citizens are restored and this inadvertent loophole is closed. My amendment would do that.

I hope colleagues who are listening to this will think about supporting the amendment. As I said, I think it ought to have bipartisan appeal and will certainly be good for people in our country who are at the business end of the credit card industry's machine.

I yield the floor.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 3739 be printed.

Mr. President, today I wish to honor a Rhode Islander who has devoted his life to improving the lot of others. For decades now, the name Henry Shelton has rung out as a clarion for social justice and equality in our Ocean State. He is and has always been a voice for the little guy--the homeless veteran, the hungry child, or the underpaid laborer.

Most folks in Rhode Island know Henry as the founder and coordinator of the George Wiley Center, a nonprofit antipoverty organization based in Pawtucket. But before that, Henry was a Catholic priest for 16 years, during which he began organizing needy Rhode Islanders in Providence to elect leaders responsive to their needs. In 1973 he left the church to marry his beloved Carol, a former nun who shared his passion for advocacy.

Ever since then, Henry has been ``raising hell,'' as he might say, and fighting for Rhode Island's overlooked and underpaid. In 1974 he started the Coalition for Consumer Justice and in 1981 founded the George Wiley Center. Over the years Henry has organized sit-ins, battled budget cuts, fasted to get clothes for children on welfare, advocated to keep electricity rates down for low income residents, and even been arrested for disorderly conduct--a fact which may amuse those who know Henry as a peaceful and gentle man.

And last year, Henry fought through his toughest battle yet. Just before the New Year, Henry suffered a serious stroke which landed him in the hospital. Anyone with a friend or family member who has experienced a stroke knows that the recovery is often a slow and painful process, but none of this stopped Henry. In fact, the headline in the Providence Journal following his hospitalization read: ``Advocate for the poor, Henry Shelton, suffers stroke--but continue work from hospital.'' The paper went on to report that Henry organized a State house rally from his hospital bed.

This is the Henry I know, and who we in Rhode Island have known and loved for many years. This Monday in Rhode Island, the Fund for Community Progress will present Henry with its Profile in Courage Award, which the organization describes as a ``distinctive honor for those who have dedicated their lives to creating positive change in the community.'' Henry Shelton has generated enough positive change in his life to satisfy that requirement many times over.

And so today, Mr. President, I would like to thank Henry Shelton for a lifetime of selflessness and courage, and for always being a voice for those who needed one most.

I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider en bloc the following nominations on the Executive Calendar: Nos. 820, 821, 822, and 823; that the nominations be confirmed en bloc, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table en bloc; any statements relating to the nominations be printed in the Record; the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and the Senate then resume legislative session.