Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 738, S. 2913.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Kyl amendment at the desk be agreed to; the committee-reported amendment, as amended, be agreed to; the bill, as amended, be read the third time and passed; the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table; and that any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 1079,

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask that the Chair lay before the Senate a message from the House with respect to S. 496.

The Presiding Officer laid before the Senate a message from the House as follows:

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate concur in the House amendment and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 1039, S. 3109.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Thune amendment, which is at the desk, be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 1038, S. 906.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Boxer substitute amendment be agreed to, the committee-reported substitute amendment, as amended, be agreed to, the bill, as amended, be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of calendar No. 1084, S. Res. 659.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that 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 that any statements relating to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration, and the Senate now proceed to S. Res. 666.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session and that the Intelligence Committee be discharged of PN1791, the nomination of J. Patrick Rowan, to be an Assistant Attorney General; that the Senate then proceed to the nomination; that the nomination be confirmed and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that any statements relating to the nomination be printed in the Record, as if read; that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; that the Senate resume legislative session; and that no further motions be in order.

Mr. President, as in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that the injunction of secrecy be removed from the following treaty transmitted to the Senate on September 26, 2008, by the President of the United States: Agreement on Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, Treaty Document No. 110-22. I further ask unanimous consent that the treaty be considered as having been read the first time; that it be referred, with accompanying papers, to the Committee on Foreign Relations and ordered to be printed; and that the President's message be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in recess until 9:30 a.m. tomorrow, Saturday, September 27; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate resume the House message to accompany H.R. 2638, the consolidated security, disaster, continuing resolution; that the time until 10 a.m. be equally divided between the two leaders or their designees; and that at 10 a.m. the Senate proceed to vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to concur in the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 2638.

Mr. President, at approximately 10 a.m. tomorrow, there will be a cloture vote on the House message to accompany the consolidated appropriations bill.

Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that it stand in recess under the previous order.

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

I ask unanimous consent that I may go beyond the 10 minutes for morning business to perhaps 12 minutes.

Madam President, we are working this week, many of us working very hard this week--none harder than my friend and senior colleague from Rhode Island, Jack Reed--to address a paroxysm in the financial markets, one that has been a long time coming. During that long time, people in Washington, over and over, missed opportunities to prevent it. Make no mistake, this whole episode we are going through now was preventable. This is a human failure not some natural disaster, not economic inevitability. A political sellout to financial interests, a sellout given intellectual cover by a toxic ideology of deregulation appears to be at the heart of what happened. I was not here to see it, but all the clues point to that.

This crisis is now past preventing. We have to fix it. It is a shame on those responsible that it happened in the first place, but it is a shame on all of us if we do not learn its lesson because there is more to come.

In his famous ``Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death'' speech, Patrick Henry also noted:

We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and

listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into

beasts.

We should heed these words from the earliest days of our democracy and not shut our eyes to the painful truth of what has happened and not shut our eyes to the painful truths that still lie before us. Folks here have too often told Americans what they want to hear and too rarely told them what they need to know.

There is no painful truth that Americans cannot deal with; there is nothing Americans cannot solve--but not if we are not told what we need to know. So we are now borrowing $700 billion because people here refused to face a painful truth about our financial markets, about the folly of deregulation. But that is just one of many painful, in some cases inconvenient, truths that we confront today.

I remember sitting with the Presiding Officer, the distinguished Senator from Minnesota, in the Environment and Public Works Committee hearing the president of the Association of Health Directors of all the States and territories across the Nation deliver the unanimous statement of that association on global warming. It was a strong statement, a stern and sobering statement. But most important, it was unanimous. Yet in this Chamber some still ignore or deny the painful truth of the changes befalling our planet.

Our capacity for denial, for artifice, and for self-delusion has become dangerous. Phony doubts about global warming may hide the facts of our planet's condition from our people, but the Earth doesn't care about doubts. She will behave the way nature dictates, and the consequences will be on all of us.

Phony theories of deregulation may have obscured the facts of the financial markets from us, but the markets don't care about our theories. If we let them come to failure, they will fail. And now the consequences are on all of us.

The painful experiences we are going through today are, for the Bush administration, a rendezvous with reality. It is not the only one we have coming, if we don't begin to govern in a reality-based environment.

The $7.7 trillion debt that George W. Bush has run up as President-- there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. The $34 trillion Medicare liability, which is just one symptom of our bloated and unstable health care system--there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. The $740 billion annual trade deficit the United States of America is running--there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. An energy policy that hemorrhages $600 billion a year to oil-producing countries and puts us on the losing end of the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humankind, all to keep big oil happy--there will be a rendezvous with reality on that. There will be a rendezvous with reality on the tons of carbon and greenhouse gases we are pumping into our thin and delicate atmosphere. These rendezvous with reality will come.

The only question for us is on what terms will we meet them. We can decide: Will we be prepared or be caught flat-footed? Will we tackle problems while they are still manageable or wait until they overwhelm us? Will we address difficulty or face calamity? These are choices of ours and they pose the question, Are we capable of reality-based governing.

I ask these questions because there is a common narrative through all these problems, and it is a perilous one to our democracy.

I gladly suspend for the majority leader.

I applaud the majority leader for the enormous, hard, successful work he is doing in these hours.

Democracy as an institution will not do well if we are all satisfied to be told what we want to hear and not what we need to know. Democracy will not address problems well if our elected leaders traffic in ideology instead of respecting reality. Reality bites hard when she is ignored. Democracy will not flourish if leaders tout for special interests instead of fighting for the public interest.

Democracy will suffer a terrible blow when the days of reckoning come, when the rendezvous with reality occurs and our people, particularly our young people, turn to us and say: How could you? How could you not have warned us? How could you not have been square with us? How could you have been so irresponsible?

As elected officials, we have a trust and we had better begin to honor it. So as we grapple with the proposal for the biggest bailout in history, a $700 billion patch on Wall Street and our credit market, what do we look for next? What is the next wave that will hit? Well, I fear the next internal wave we face could be credit card debt.

We have 115 million households in America. They have 1.2 billion credit cards; 115 million households in America with 1.2 billion credit cards. The total credit card debt that Americans will carry by the end of this year will likely be $1 trillion.

To put that in context, our international gross domestic product is only $14 trillion. With that many cards in use and that much debt piled up, we now have a pretty fixed pool of credit card borrowers out there. This is not an expanding market. The Bush economy has stressed this pool of borrowers and stressed them hard.

The average middle-class family under age 55 makes $2,000 less than when George W. Bush took office. Their average family expenses have increased by $4,600 since George W. Bush took office. If you add the two together, the average middle-class family is $6,600 a year worse off after 8 years of Republican misrule.

So they are stressed. They are not whiners, as Senator Gramm, one of the Presidential candidate's campaign advisers, said, and the economy around them is not fundamentally sound, as one of our Presidential candidates has busily been telling Americans until it had become too preposterous to continue saying it.

So what happens to these stressed families? Well, the credit card companies see a family stressed, and they see them as a worse credit risk, so they raise their interest rates and they impose steep penalties and fees. It is an industry where when you are down, they make it even worse for you.

So now the family is more stressed. So they fall more behind, and a vicious cycle emerges. Another vicious cycle operates right alongside. One credit card company finds a new dirty trick to gouge the consumer, so they make more money. Investors and competitors see them making more money, and in a market economy, capital goes to the highest rate of return.

So now all the other credit card companies have to copy them to compete. So that credit card agreement gets more and more pages, longer and longer, more tricks to hit you with fees, penalties, and rate hikes. They get more devious and complex, and nobody can get off that merry-go-round, because if they try, they will lose their competitive position to the worst of the lot.

So you have two vicious cycles and they converge and together they can drive credit card debt in only one direction. The tricks and traps and rate increases and penalties and fees get worse and worse, driven by the jungle force of competition among the credit card companies. Struggling families see credit costs rising ever higher, driving them further and further underwater, with no end in sight.

There is no present mechanism to interrupt these gathering forces. Now, in a reality-based mode of governing, prudent men and women would do something. There should be consequences when abusive lenders take advantage of families in difficult circumstances.

This summer our majority whip, Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois, and I introduced the Consumer Credit Fairness Act, legislation that would provide a powerful incentive for loan companies to keep their rates and fees at reasonable levels and would give borrowers leverage to negotiate better terms. It would interrupt the vicious cycle.

But more can be done. For generations, for generations in this country, the 50 States had the power to enforce their own what were called usury laws, laws that limited the amount of interest that could be charged to fair and nonabusive levels, and they were able to enforce their usury laws against anyone. They were their citizens and they could protect them.

Then, in 1978, in a fairly narrow decision, construing the National Banking Act, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Marquette v. First Bank of Omaha and decided that States could only set limits on the interest rates and fees charged by in-state credit card companies.

So what do you expect would happen? Predictably, credit card companies began moving to States with the weakest lending laws, with the worst consumer protections, setting off what has become a race to the bottom among credit card companies, all at the expense of consumers.

I intend to propose that we restore to our sovereign States the rights they historically enjoyed for two centuries, to set limits on the interest rates and fees charged to their own citizens. It does not seem like asking a lot. I will soon be introducing legislation to accomplish this. I encourage my colleagues to try to help me bring this to reality.

If we simply reempower the States to protect their own citizens from unscrupulous lending practices, we can end the confluence of these two vicious cycles before this situation, too, gets out of hand.

While the current economic crisis gives us this moment of clarity, this moment of reality, this moment of reality-based governing, while this $700 billion rendezvous with reality has our attention, before we revert to claims that the No. 1 issue facing the United States is to drill for more oil or whatever we get back to, while we have a moment of honest focus, this is our chance to get ahead of one of these problems.

We will still have the $7.7 trillion Bush debt to deal with, we will still have the $34 trillion Medicare debt to deal with, we will still have the $734 trillion trade deficit to deal with, we will still have our energy hemorrhage to deal with, and we will still have global warming to deal with, to name a few.

But let's get ahead of this one. Let's not mess up this one.

I yield the floor.