Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank both Senator Thune and Senator Cantwell for their exchange back and forth. I especially appreciate Senator Cantwell's work. I grew up an hour and a half away from Lake Erie and saw, in the 1960s, what that lake looked like. For 10 years, I lived in a home near Lake Erie, and I saw the improvements we made. This bill, unfortunately, with that amendment sets us back.

We need to keep invasive species out of Lake Erie, and we need to pass a Coast Guard bill. There is no reason we can't do both. I want to speak to that in a moment.

First, I want to speak on how vital Lake Erie is to my State. Fifty percent of the fish in all the Great Lakes consider Lake Erie their habitat. The water is critical to farming, clean energy development, industry, and regional economic competitiveness. From tourism in Catawba and Put-in-Bay, to fishing in Marblehead, to vacations and family reunions at Maumee Bay State Park, Lake Erie benefits our communities and creates jobs in Ohio.

For more than half a century--I am going back to when I was a kid in the 1960s and saw what Lake Erie looked like--keeping our lake healthy has been a constant struggle. Where I lived on Lake Erie, the lake was about 50 to 60 feet deep. Moving west toward Toledo, the lake is about 30 feet deep. Contrast that with Lake Superior, which is 600 feet deep, and you can see the challenge of keeping Lake Erie clean, and you can see the vulnerability of that lake. That is the reason for the algal blooms. That is the reason that Lake Erie has had the most difficult issues facing its aquatic life. Runoff that causes harmful algal blooms and invasive species are threats we battle every year.

That is why Senator Portman and I came to this floor and fought back against the President's budget 2 years in a row when the President was going to cut close to $300 million from the Great Lakes Initiative. Two years in a row, Senator Portman and I fought back against it because we know that cleaning up Lake Erie is something we did in the sixties, but keeping Lake Erie clean is something we do in the seventies, eighties, nineties, into this century, and into this millennium.

The Great Lakes are home to more than 185 non-native species. By some estimates, invasive species cause $5 billion in damages to the Great Lakes every single year. A provision that would make our fight against invasive species harder has been added to the bill to reauthorize our Coast Guard. That is why I voted no earlier today.

As much as I want Coast Guard reauthorization, my first responsibility, other than looking out for working families in Ohio every day, is to keep the greatest natural resource in the country clean--my part of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie, the part that borders Ohio.

This provision would make it easier for invasive species to enter our lakes, harm our drinking water, and threaten local jobs that depend on boating and fishing. Every year, I meet with the Lake Erie sea captains, boat captains. They talk about the beauty of the lake and the importance of the lake to their businesses and to all of us in Northern Ohio. This provision doesn't belong in the Coast Guard bill. The Senate did the right thing by blocking it.

Again I say I strongly support the Coast Guard reauthorization. I want to see it passed. I agree with Senator Thune. I want it to be law. That is why it is critical that this provision be removed from the bill so Congress can move forward with supporting our Coast Guard without threatening the Great Lakes. Members of the Coast Guard surely think the same thing.

This provision would eliminate the ability of Great Lakes States, such as Ohio, to set separate water quality standards to keep out invasive species. Tankers and cargo ships carry something called ballast water with them to help with stability and smooth sailing.

When they load on more cargo, they let out some of the water, and it flows out into whatever body of water they happen to be in at that time.

Think about these ships. In some sense, they are luxury liners for invasive species. They might be picked up off the coast of Japan. They might be picked up in the Indian Ocean. They might be picked up in the South Atlantic Ocean. They end up coming down the Saint Lawrence Seaway carrying this water with invasive species from around the world, and they release them into Lake Erie or into Lake Ontario or Lake Michigan or Lake Superior or Lake Huron.

It may not sound like a big deal if a ship takes on water with zebra mussels in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Russia and lets them out in Lake Erie, but those little mussels do major damage to our lakes and our economy. Local governments and taxpayers end up paying the price. This affects the beauty of Lake Erie and the cleanliness of its water. That is so important. It affects the economy because it costs local taxpayers money to clean up from these invasive species. They clog up water intake pipes. They spike costs for local ratepayers. They make toxic algal blooms worse. When drinking water gets contaminated, the local water utility has to clean it up, and they pass on the cost. The fishing and tourism industries rely on Lake Erie and feel that pain.

As I said, I remember how polluted Lake Erie looked when I was growing up. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has made a real difference. We have made real progress cleaning up the lake's tributaries, from the Black River, to the Cuyahoga River, to the Ashtabula River, to the Grand River, to the Maumee River, the largest tributary feeding into any of the Great Lakes, draining 4 million acres west and south of Toledo. It has been a bipartisan success story.

The Great Lakes region contains 84 percent of North America's surface freshwater and provides drinking water to tens of millions of Americans. It generates billions in economic activity. Why would we risk that? Why would we risk that by voting for this bill? That is why Senator Cantwell was right. We need to pass a Coast Guard bill. We need to keep invasive species out of Lake Erie. We can do both by stripping this provision from the bill right away and move it forward and pass it.

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

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for his leadership and his outspokenness--how he has shown the importance of the Senate actually doing its job on both climate change and campaign finance and how much they are related to each other because of the stranglehold the oil industry has on the Republican Party and the hundreds of millions of dollars they spend. Senator Whitehouse has been on this floor well over 100 times to talk about that. The country certainly listens, and the country is, certainly, in the same place he is and a lot of us are. Unfortunately, the special interest groups in this town continue to control this Senate.

Mr. President, I am disappointed that we can't confirm the Ex-Im nominees today. I know many other Senators want to resolve this situation.

I will continue to push to reopen the Ex-Im Bank.

We were willing--the majority of the Banking Committee was willing to flip and put Mr. Garrett as one of the members, one of the four members, and make Mr. Bachus, another former House Member, who is qualified and is a supporter of the Ex-Im Bank Chairman. We were willing to have Scott Garrett on this Board but not as Chairman because the Chairman sets the agenda. Mr. Garrett would not, when questioned by Senator Heitkamp, who asked him tough questions, would not commit to the committee that he wasn't out to destroy and undermine the Bank. We were willing to put Mr. Garrett there, just not in the Chairman's position. It is clear Mr. Garrett, on behalf of the Vice President and a small number of Members of this body, want to undermine and destroy the Ex-Im Bank. There is no question about that.

Mr. President, I reserve the right to object.

Mr. President, how does it make sense to confirm an inspector general for an agency that really isn't an agency that is actually in operation doing its best? So we are not going to appoint the members of the Board. We will have zero Board members. They will not be able to conduct the quality and the quantity of business that they used to, and that they could if we had no objection to the motion earlier, and then we are going to have an inspector general to watch over them? That simply doesn't make sense.

I object.

Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the motion. This is my second day in a row being on the opposite side of my friend Senator Moran and Senator Crapo, too, for that matter, but you have to do what you have to do.

Over the last year and a half, as we have seen time after time after time, Republicans in this Congress have made it pretty clear to the American people whose side they are on. They have used the Congressional Review Act--something nobody at home really knows about and something most of us didn't know anything about until we began to see at the White House these executive retreats every weekend for Wall Street executives. They have used the Congressional Review Act more than any other Congress in history to give handouts to big corporations at the expense of ordinary Americans.

It is not enough for Republican legislators to go to Senator McConnell's office down the hall and cut deals giving tax cuts to the richest people in the country and giving tax breaks to General Motors, which promised that if tax cuts were given to the largest corporations in America, they were going to raise wages and hire more people.

Well, GM just announced--to its everlasting discredit--hundreds of layoffs at its Lordstown plant near Youngstown, OH. Hundreds and hundreds of people were laid off, perhaps permanently. We don't know, but the signs

aren't good. At the same time, General Motors in Toledo, because they make the transmissions for the Chevy Cruze in Youngstown, are laying people off. And then the Ohio Turnpike from Toledo to Youngstown, this long Ohio turnpike--one of the centers of the American auto industry-- we will probably see layoffs in the supply chain. Even though they got a huge tax cut, written in the office down the hall, in Majority Leader McConnell's office--they got a huge tax cut and lots of money in their pockets. What do they do? They mostly do corporate buybacks and stock buybacks. They share this money with their biggest stockholders.

So that is what happened with the tax cut. Now they are giving another handout to a big corporation at the expense of Americans. It is bad enough that we are considering this Congressional Review Act piece of legislation. We are considering a bill that would tell Wall Street banks and shady lenders that it is OK to discriminate against borrowers.

Somebody who looks like me can go to a car dealership and get a loan when they decide they are going to buy a Chevy Cruze. My wife and I have each bought a Chevy Cruze. I am going to go finance a Chevy Cruze, and I get a certain interest rate. We have seen data that shows that if somebody looks a little different from me--if they are African American, Latina, Asian American, or Pacific Islanders--they pay a higher interest rate. We know that is what the data says. But this body--from the last vote, it is pretty clear--they say that is all right, that if the dealer wants to charge higher interest rates to people of color, that is OK.

So it is bad enough that we are saying today and this body is giving its stamp of approval saying that it is OK to discriminate and to charge higher interest rates to people of color. I have said this in the Banking Committee before, and Senator Crapo has heard me say this many times: The ZIP Code where my wife and I live in Cleveland, OH, had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America. There are reasons for that. Part of the reasons for that is who lives in my ZIP Code, mostly.

But it is not just that which today's legislation would do. It threatens thousands more protections for workers and families that are vulnerable to repeal by Congress.

Republicans have used the Congressional Review Act to repeal important rules that would have given low-wage workers access to retirement plans. So here in the Senate, we talk about caring about workers, we talk about the dignity of work, and we talk about helping people save for the future, but one of the provisions of the Congressional Review Act would have given low-wage workers access to retirement plans, and this legislation takes it away.

One of the other rules that were rolled back ensured that Federal contract employers had protections for their workers regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation. It ensured that women had the right to choose their own healthcare provider regardless of their form of insurance.

The Congressional Review Act repeals all of those rules.

They repealed the rule that would have guaranteed customers the right to a day in court when they were ripped off by a bank like Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo has a whole rap sheet of ripping off their customers. But we in this body said: Well, you shouldn't have done that, Mr. and Mrs. Wells Fargo, but we are going to let you do that on individual contracts.

So if you are wronged by Wells Fargo or any of these other big financial institutions, you don't get a day in court, sorry. That is what this body did.

It is the same with Equifax. We know what Equifax did. Equifax violated the privacy of pretty much half the people in North Dakota or Idaho or Ohio or in this whole country, but we said: That is OK, Equifax; just try not to do it again; and we let them off the hook.

Fortunately, too much time has passed for Congress to use the Congressional Review Act to roll back other protections the last administration put in place, but they now want to open up a whole new idea. They want to use a legal loophole to interfere with potentially thousands more Federal decisions, potentially going back as far as 20 years.

In order to clarify how laws work, Federal agencies--this is really in the weeds, but you know we have some pretty smart people here who figure out how to go in the weeds and find loopholes and exploit people and, frankly, hurt the little guy. Whether she works in construction or punches a time clock or works as a waitress in a diner in Garfield Heights, they find ways to screw the little guy.

So here is how it works. Federal agencies issue guidance to help people understand how the law protects them and to help businesses understand how to follow the law. Just last week, some of these smart people--my Republican colleagues--at a hearing decried the practice of enforcing the law without providing guidance in advance. This week, though--this week--some of those same smart Republicans want to start nullifying agency guidance, which would completely up-end the Federal programs that families depend on. And this is an anti-business decision, too, on their part. The businesses want the predictability, they want the certainty so they can follow the rules.

Under this crazy new plan, some of these very smart Republicans--and at least one of them is on the Banking Committee--under this new plan, they can ban Federal agencies from explaining how States administer Federal health insurance programs, programs like the Children's Health Insurance Program. They can undermine requirements to make sure that federally funded projects pay the local prevailing wages.

Today I went to breakfast with a number of iron workers and glaziers and laborers and electricians and pipe fitters and others who work with their hands and make a damn good living, with good benefits and good retirement for their families. You know what. They can use this newfound rule that these very smart Republican legislators figured out how to exploit to undermine pay and beat back local prevailing wage laws.

Republicans have used the Congressional Review Act to attack access to healthcare and worker and environmental protections. So it is no stretch. They have done it before. It is no stretch that they would do it again, only now there would be no limits on the types of agency actions they can target because they found this loophole and they can go back 20 years. The one we are working on today was handed down--this agency guidance was handed down in 2013.

So one of the first things Republicans want to do with this--they are just so excited with this new loophole--they found that they can go after people who don't have good lobbyists in Washington. They can go after people who won't contribute to their campaign. They can go after people who, frankly, struggle every day just to make a living in this country.

What is the first thing they do? They make car loans--it is clear what happens. They make car loans more expensive for women and for people of color. The bill sends a message to lenders across the country that if you are legally discriminating, go ahead, we are not going to stop you.

We created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police Wall Street banks and other shady lenders who ripped off working families. Under its last Director, the Bureau returned $12 billion to 29 million Americans who had been ripped off by payday lenders and credit card companies and for-profit colleges.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau used to be a cop on the beat to protect consumers. We want a consumer bureau because we have the banks--$1 trillion, $2 trillion; Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo--these banks are trillion-dollar banks, some of them $2 trillion. So we have the banks here, and we have a lot of consumers who don't have a union or any protection, and they sign these contracts for a loan or something, and they don't really know what the fine print says. So that is why we have a consumer bureau--to protect those people.

Twenty-nine million Americans have benefited from it just since its creation less than a decade ago, and they have saved $12 billion. It used to be a cop on the beat. It used to issue reports warning consumers about industries that weren't following the law. It brought

tough enforcement actions. It identified discriminatory lending practices in auto loans and home mortgages.

We know discrimination is still a major problem for people of color who make the biggest investment of their lives: their house and their car--their house and their car, their two biggest investments, and you can legally discriminate in this country because of the way somebody looks. You can discriminate against them because of race, and now we are saying it is OK.

Look at what has happened in this country because they said that. Just a few months ago, the Center for Investigative Reporting released a report showing that redlining is still a problem in big American cities to this day. The National Fair Housing Alliance conducted tests and demonstrated that people of color were systematically offered worse loan terms for cars than White borrowers with the exact same credit seeking to purchase the exact same vehicle. But instead of working to root out this discrimination--you would think that is what we would all do, Republicans and Democrats alike. Instead, we are making it easier for banks to turn customers away or to take advantage of them based on the color of their skin. This is 2018, for gosh sakes. Why would we still be doing that?

This repeal could permanently weaken Federal anti-discrimination laws. These laws have been the law of the land for decades. These are the laws that brave Americans fought for during the civil rights movement. Do you remember when Congress passed the fair housing bill? The fair housing bill was passed a week after Dr. King's assassination, 50 years ago last week. You would think we would want to strengthen it, not weaken it.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record letters from the scores of civil rights and consumer and environmental and other organizations that vehemently oppose this legislation.

Mr. President, Americans for Financial Reform called this resolution ``a deeply troubling piece of legislation that will leave millions of people of color at the mercy of auto-dealers and lenders with a long history of racial discrimination.''

I know a lot of auto dealers, and I am sure my friend from Idaho, Senator Crapo, does as well. We all do. Most of them don't do this, but some of them do, and why are we allowing the some of them who do to continue to do this?

If Republicans are willing to use this loophole that a few very smart Republicans uncovered--this loophole that they went down in the weeds and figured out how to exploit--if they are willing to use this loophole to attack our basic right to equality, there may be no end to the other consumer protections they can repeal. Big corporations could be free to take advantage of customers with little to rein them in, with fewer consumer protections and with fewer environmental protections.

Think of the progress we have made in this country because of consumer protection, because of strong safe drinking water laws, and because of strong clean air laws. I live 10 miles from Lake Erie. I know about the progress, in part because we passed strong laws for environmental protection. I know what we have done to clean up Lake Erie.

The Great Lakes are 20 percent of all the ground and surface freshwater in the world. I look at what we have done as a society. Do we want to go back on this as the President cuts funding to clean up the Great Lakes? The EPA issues guidelines today to ensure that corporate polluters aren't putting communities in danger by contaminating the air they breathe or the water they drink. States rely on Federal guidance--the key word--so they can work with the Federal Government to provide healthcare to families and children. Workers rely on guidance from the Department of Labor to make sure they are getting fair pay in a safe workplace. But under the legislation before us today, those protections could be stripped away in the future, one by one by one.

Every time somebody here wants to do a favor for their favorite special interest group, they can go down to Senator McConnell's office, probably pick up a ticket--because there is probably going to be a line, with all the lobbyists going in and out--they will pick up a ticket to say, which special interest group can I do a favor for today, and they will find another one.

For the millions who lost their jobs, for the millions who lost their homes in the financial crisis a decade ago, for the millions who are struggling to build their retirement with wages that haven't been growing for more than 20 years, it is already hard enough to get ahead. We should be making it easier for them, not harder.

I ask for a ``no'' vote.

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

Mr. President, I strongly encourage my colleagues to reject this anti-worker bill masquerading as an issue of Tribal sovereignty.

I strongly support Tribal sovereignty. I can't speak for everyone in this body, but I am virtually certain that every single Democratic Member of this body supports Tribal sovereignty, and I am pretty certain that most Republican Members of this body support Tribal sovereignty, but that is not what this bill is about. This is just the latest battle in the decades-long war that so many in this town have been waging to undermine the rights of

American workers. This bill strips away the rights of 600,000 employees at Tribal casinos, so 600,000 employees at casinos on Tribal lands will lose their right to collective bargaining. We know what that means to their wages and their benefits. Seventy-five percent of these 600,000 employees are not members of a Tribe. So when these casinos all over the country, on reservations, these casinos on Indian lands--most of the 600,000 employees at the Tribal casinos have the right to collectively bargain, to form unions if they choose, to collectively bargain if they choose, and to get better wages and benefits if that is what brings them to it. Again, 75 percent of these workers are not members of any of these Tribes. There are other Federal laws that apply to workplaces on Tribal lands.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Employment Retirement Income Security Act--so-called ERISA--and title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act all apply on Tribal lands, but this bill only goes after collective bargaining rights, only goes after those workers. There is no reason Congress should single out and attack the rights of these workers to organize and advocate for themselves in the workplace.

We can protect Tribal sovereignty. I want to do that. I am leading the charge against this bill. I want to protect Tribal sovereignty, but you can also protect workers' rights at the same time. You don't have to jettison workers' rights. You don't have to hurt these workers. We don't have to take rights away from these workers--the right to organize and bargain collectively--in order to protect Tribal sovereignty. Our laws do that right now.

Some of my colleagues will say they want to make sure that Tribes have the same rights as States, whose workers are carved out of the National Labor Relations Act, but Tribal government employees are already exempted from the National Labor Relations Act. This bill eliminates the Federal labor rights of workers at for-profit businesses, like casinos.

So who is behind this? The national chamber of commerce wants to go after unions every chance they get and take away collective bargaining rights. Do you know what that means when companies do that? It means higher profits. It means they can pay less to workers. It means they can strip workers of their healthcare and their retirement. Of course these companies want to take away collective bargaining rights and put unions out of business. That is the whole point of this bill.

Again, Tribal government employees are already exempted from the NLRA. This bill eliminates the Federal labor rights of workers at for- profit businesses, like casinos. You don't think these casinos are making lots of money? Of course they are. They will make more money if you take away the collective bargaining rights of employees. Employees will make less. Employees will, in some cases, lose their health insurance. Employees will get fewer dollars for retirement, but profits will go up for these casinos.

These casinos are often run by companies that have nothing to do with these Tribes. That is not establishing parity. States can't carve out home State, for-profit businesses from the NLRA. Nevada can't say that it has decided its casinos on the Vegas Strip are exempt from Federal labor laws. So why would we treat these private, for-profit casinos any differently?

Supporters of the bill will say it is necessary to prevent overreach by the National Labor Relations Board. That argument doesn't hold up either. The Board is methodically evaluated when they do and don't assert jurisdiction on Federal lands. They use a very careful test to ensure that the Board's jurisdiction does not infringe on Tribal rights or interfere in the Tribes' exclusive right to self-government.

All of us in this body--at least all of us on this side of the aisle; I think all of us in the body--of course we want to make sure that Tribal rights are enforced and that we don't interfere in the Tribes' exclusive right to self-governance. These, though, are for-profit businesses on these reservations.

In a June 2015 decision, the Board used the test and did not assert jurisdiction in a labor dispute on Tribal lands.

As I said, I think all of us here support Tribal sovereignty. I wish all of us here supported American workers' right to organize just as strongly.

My friends on this side of the aisle have spent day after day, week after week, month after month, doing all they can to stop workers in my State, in the State of Kansas, and all over this country from organizing. This bill is an attempt to take advantage of Tribe support in Congress to attack workers.

There is another provision slipped in. At a time when Congress is engaged in a long-overdue discussion about sexual harassment in the workplace, this bill repeals all Federal protections against harassment for the 600,000 workers. So it strips collective bargaining rights from 600,000 people. It also repeals all Federal protection against sexual harassment for those same 600,000 workers. Right now, these workers cannot bring Federal harassment claims. Their only Federal protection against harassment is the NLRA. Under that law, workers have the right to collectively protest harassment. They can file grievances under union contracts to enforce their rights. If this bill passes, that Federal protection will disappear. All of the collective bargaining agreements in these workplaces would expire at the end of their terms, and the union-won protections against harassment would simply disappear along with all of them.

We are going in the wrong direction. Today more than ever, workers need a voice in the workplace.

Think about this: Over the last 40 years, gross domestic product has gone up and up and up. Corporate profits have gone up and up and up; worker productivity has gone up and up and up; executive salaries have gone up and up and up--all because of the productivity of American workers. But workers haven't shared in the wealth that they have created for their bosses. Workers haven't shared in the growth of those companies. Wages are flat.

So think about that again. Profits go up, productivity goes up, executive salaries go up, productivity of American workers, as I said, goes up, but wages are flat. A big part of that is because of this attack from this body and the House of Representatives--the attack on workers trying to organize and bargain collectively. So if this bill passes, we are going to make sure that 600,000 fewer Americans have the right to organize and bargain collectively. Again, it means profits will go up at these casinos, executive salaries will go up at the casinos, and wages will be flat and go down even as these companies do better and better.

Workers don't share in the growth they create. Hard work just doesn't pay off the way it used to. The dignity of work has been undermined by this Senate, by the House of Representatives, and by the White House. If work isn't valued, then Americans can't earn their way to a better life for their families no matter how hard they work. This bill will make it harder for these workers to ensure that their work is valued.

This bill undermines the dignity of work in this country. We ought to be lifting up workers. We shouldn't be undermining their right to advocate for themselves. These are workers banding together to advocate for themselves. Their voices are stronger when they are together, and that is when management has to listen to them. That is why they get better wages. That is why they get better healthcare. That is why they get better retirement. But we know what this bill does. It doesn't protect Tribal sovereignty. That is just what they say it does, just like they said--80 percent of the tax cut went to the richest 1 percent of Americans, and they called that a tax cut for the middle class. Surely it wasn't that. Just like the bank bill that rolls back some tough rules on Wall Street--they like to say that was a bill for the small banks. No, it wasn't. It was much about Wall Street. Just like this bill is not for Tribal sovereignty--it is to help put labor unions out of business and depress wages. That is why I oppose this bill.

I urge my colleagues to vote no.

Nomination of Ronny Jackson

Mr. President, over the next few weeks, the Senate will consider the President's nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Ronny Jackson. I will be meeting with Dr. Jackson tomorrow, and I look forward to that meeting. I am eager to

hear what his plans are and how he will make the VA system work better for the women and men who serve our country. I will have some tough questions for him. I know my friend, the Senator from Kansas and the current Presiding Officer, who also sits on the Committee on Veterans' Affairs, has the same concerns that I have.

One of my top priorities will be finding out his views on the misguided idea that some are pushing of privatizing the Veterans' Administration. Privatizing the VA would mean putting profits ahead of veterans. It would mean depriving the women and men who served our country the best possible care just to line the pockets of healthcare executives.

We have seen what happens when we introduce corporate profit motives into organizations that should be set up to serve the American people. Just look how private, for-profit charter schools have failed children in my State. The owners of the private, for-profit charter schools have done well, while taxpayers have been fleeced and students have been betrayed. We know that privatization of the prison system or privatization of Social Security or privatization of Medicare or privatization of the Veterans' Administration all works the same way. The people who are to be served find they have less quality care or service. The people who own the newly privatized agencies or companies do very well.

Study after study in my State shows these for-profit charter schools don't give Ohio students an adequate education and cost taxpayers more. According to a report from Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, students at Ohio's charter schools lose 43 days of math instruction and 14 days of reading instruction, compared with traditional public schools in the State. We allowed for-profit school operators to inject profits into Ohio's public education, and they treated taxpayers like ATM machines and shortchanged students. We can't allow the same thing to happen to veterans. I will fight any effort to use America's veterans to pad the profits of wealthy corporations. Dr. Jackson will have to commit to oppose any VA privatization efforts to earn my vote.

We know the VA system isn't perfect, and we know it can improve. We have work to do to rebuild and strengthen it. Dr. Shulkin was trying to do that and made some inroads in doing it, but it will be hard. It is the largest healthcare system in the country. It serves 9 million veterans every year and provides care at more than 1,200 facilities across the country, including about three dozen in my State.

Some of those serve veterans very well, while others need significant investment to improve their services. Too many veterans still face obstacles to get the highest quality care through the VA system. I know veterans service organizations, some of the best groups and civic organizations in our country--to name a few, knowing I will leave some out: the Disabled American Veterans, the American Legion, the AMVETS, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the Polish American Veterans--all these organizations have said: We don't want to privatize the VA. We want improvements in the Veterans' Administration, but we want to keep it a public organization that serves veterans who fought for this country.

Just because the task to fix the VA is hard doesn't mean we abandon our responsibility to the men and women who served this country. We need to redouble our efforts to strengthen the VA, not tear it down and not privatize it.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, 50 years ago today, Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act, exactly 1 week after the assassination of Martin Luther King as he fought for economic justice for sanitation workers in Memphis. It also came just weeks after the Kerner Commission issued its report on the origins of urban unrest in the 1960s. This report contained the now famous warning that ``our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.''

In the wake of these events, the Fair Housing Act made discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing illegal for the first time. For generations, redlining, restrictive covenants, and outright discrimination kept families of color locked out of entire neighborhoods, often far from where jobs were, and they created segregated communities that linger to this day. They denied these families the opportunity to build wealth through home ownership. Many of these exclusionary practices were carried out by private entities and local governments. But as Richard Rothstein reminds us in his new book, ``The Color of Law''--and I recommend to everybody listening that they read that book--Federal policies also played a significant role in reinforcing segregation.

From 1934 through 1962--30 years, three decades--98 percent of all FHA mortgages went to White homeowners. In a country that in those days was about 10 percent African American, 98 percent of mortgages went to White homeowners. The Fair Housing Act made this despicable discrimination illegal. It required that Federal housing and urban development grants be administered in a way that would ``affirmatively further'' fair housing--not in a reactive way but in a way that would affirmatively further fair housing. State and local governments and public housing authorities were required to use their Federal funds in ways that would reverse, rather than accelerate or reinforce, segregation in their communities.

April 11, 1968, however, was not the end of our work to ensure fair housing and equal opportunities. Fifty years later, we haven't had the progress we should have had, and so much more needs to be done.

A new report this year from the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed tens of millions of mortgage records and found that all across the country people of color are far more likely--even holding constant for economic situations--to be turned down for a loan, taking into account factors like their income and the size of the loan. We know that the 2008 housing crisis hit communities of color particularly hard.

In the run-up to the crisis, faulty mortgages were targeted to people of color. Even those who qualified for a no-frills, no-surprises prime mortgage were often instead steered into a subprime, much riskier loan. Even African-American and Hispanic borrowers with higher incomes than other borrowers found themselves in risky, subprime, designed-to-fail products. These practices of discrimination stripped a generation's worth of equity from communities that had fought hard for equal access to home ownership.

I know in my community in Cleveland, on the southeast side of Cleveland in the Broadway, Harvard area of that community, so much wealth has been lost. As people finally began to gain in home ownership and in wealth accumulation, what happened in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 devastated these communities. As a number of my colleagues have heard me say, in my ZIP Code of 44105, in Cleveland, OH, in the first half of 2007, there were more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America.

The household wealth of communities of color still hasn't recovered. My neighborhood hasn't, my community hasn't, and my State hasn't. Middle-class Black and Hispanic families lost half their wealth from 2007 to 2013--half their wealth. Middle-income Black household wealth was $63,000 in 2007. A decade later, it was $38,000. The numbers are similar for Hispanic households--$85,000 down to $46,000.

Borrowers with these higher cost loans were foreclosed on at about triple the rate of borrowers with standard, 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages. Over a recent 8-year period, 9.3 million homeowners lost their homes through foreclosure, distress sales, or surrendering their home to the lender.

After the crisis, we took steps to fight this discrimination. We created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to look after bank customers and to help root out discrimination. We required lenders to report more detailed data so that we can more easily spot modern-day redlining.

In 2015, HUD also issued the affirmatively furthering fair housing rule. This rule would have given clearer guidelines to communities to help them assess their own fair housing needs and provided them with the data they needed to inform their decisions. It would have allowed them to set their own goals and timelines.

Some of the questions communities would ask during these assessments would demand they think in new ways about how to create housing and economic opportunities for all of their residents--no matter their color, no matter family size, no matter their disability if they have one. These are the types of questions this body told the country to ask when it enacted the fair housing bill five decades ago.

But instead of recommitting ourselves to the promise we made 50 years ago, too many Washington politicians are trying to take us backward. Earlier this year, HUD suspended implementing the affirmatively furthering fair housing rule. That will not reverse the requirements of the Fair Housing Act. Instead, it hurts communities, which will once again be left to comply with the law without the technical assistance they need.

Remember that new data that banks were going to report to make it easier to spot lenders who discriminate? The bill the Senate passed last month right here would exempt 85 percent of banks from reporting the data they are collecting and reporting today. So we are not even going to know what happened. This body has scaled back the amount of data we are trying to gather to stop discrimination. Without it, we can't monitor trends in mortgage lending. It will be harder to see who has access to affordable mortgage credit and, importantly, who does not have access.

HUD is even thinking about changing its mission statement in ways that diminish the importance of combating housing discrimination. The administration's actions over the past year make it clear they are already wavering in that commitment. For example, in 2017, HUD withdrew guidance requiring equal access for transgender people in homeless shelters. Let's pick on them even more. According to a report in the New York Times, Dr. Carson's HUD has suspended several anti- discrimination investigations, including an investigation of discriminatory housing advertisements on Facebook. The administration proposed a 14-percent cut to the HUD budget, including affordable housing and community development programs aimed at creating housing and opportunity for low-income communities.

We know that one-fourth of renters in this country spend at least 50 percent of their income on housing. If one thing goes wrong in their lives, they are evicted or they lose their homes. One-fourth of people in this country who rent are paying at least half their income in housing costs. In Cuyahoga County, the second most populous county in Ohio, one-fourth of all family units, one-fourth of all residents, homeowners or renters, spend one-half of their income on housing, so it is not just renters, but it is often homeowners too.

We are deciding in this body because the President wants to--the far right in this body wants to cut spending on housing even more. We have enough money to do a huge tax cut for the

richest people in the country. The richest 1 percent will get 81 percent of that tax cut. I was talking to an accountant the other day in Elyria, OH. It is tax season, of course, and he is busy. He said: When people come and see me, they ask inevitably when I am doing their taxes ``Well, how does this tax bill affect me?''

He asks: Are you a billionaire?

They laugh and say: Of course not.

He then says: Well, only if you are a billionaire will it affect you, and then you will save millions of dollars on your taxes.

That is a bit of an exaggeration, but that is what that tax bill is all about. So if you are a billionaire, if you are a decamillionaire, if you made a million dollars last year, you are going to save a whole lot on your taxes this year. But if you are living in working-class housing, if you can't afford much more than the very basic kind of housing or even worse than that, you are going to see your budget cut. You are going to see fewer vouchers. You are going to see less funding for housing.

What kind of government is this, this mean-spiritedness? There are more tax cuts for the richest in this country, but let's stick it to people who are barely making it. These are people who make $10 to $12 an hour. They make $10 to $12 an hour, and we are going to cut their Medicaid. They are making $10 to $12 an hour, and we are going to scale back their SNAP benefits. They are making $10 to $12 an hour, and we are going to undermine their housing subsidies. What is all of that about in this new government that we are living in now?

The last thing we ought to do at a time when a quarter of all renter households--400,000 families in my State of almost 12 million, 400,000 families pay half of their income in housing costs. Again, if one thing goes wrong, if their car breaks down going to work, could they come up with $500 to fix their car? Probably not. Then what happens? Then they are evicted, and then everything goes upside down because they can't pay their rent, so they get evicted. The kid has to go to a new school district. They lose most of the things they have. They have to find a place to live. They probably don't have the money for the downpayment that a landlord charges.

A few years ago, I hosted a discussion with some of my colleagues and invited Matthew Desmond, the author of the book ``Evicted.'' In the

Mr. President, thank you.

I thank the Senator from Rhode Island, who has been a great advocate for moving this country forward on everything from campaign finance rules to labor, to justice, and to keeping our planet as clean as possible.

During his campaign, Candidate Trump made a lot of big promises to workers in Ohio and across the country. He told them he would put American workers first, but too often the people he has put in charge have a record of doing exactly the opposite. That is certainly true of the two nominees to the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board whom we will consider this week, Patrick Pizzella and John Ring.

Think about this. They have spent their careers working to strip workers of their rights, defending corporations that are accused of mistreating workers, and trying to undermine collective bargaining rights.

Mr. Pizzella worked for disgraced former lobbyist and convicted felon, Jack Abramoff. They worked on the same lobbying team at the law firm of Preston Gates, trying to keep workers from being protected by Federal labor laws. These are the candidates the President of the United States, who talked about empowering workers and being on the side of workers, has nominated, one for the Department of Labor and one for the National Labor Relations Board. They have been busy through their professional careers--and very well paid doing it--trying to keep workers from being protected by Federal labor laws.

I know everyone is entitled to representation, but when you devote your life to keeping workers from having collective bargaining, keeping workers from working in a safe workplace, and defending companies who are accused of mistreating workers, it makes you wonder.

Mr. Pizzella also previously served at the Department of Labor, but his record there gives us no reason to rehire him at the Department of Labor. He worked at the Wage and Hour Division. He was supposed to look out for workers being cheated by their bosses out of the paychecks they had earned.

All over my State, from Cleveland to Cincinnati, from Ashtabula to Lima, from Marietta to Bryan and Toledo, I

hear stories of workers who simply couldn't fight back when their employers would occasionally cheat them out of a paycheck or overtime or misclassify them. We know most employers don't do that, but we know it happens with some regularity in communities all over my State and all over our country. That is why it is so important to have someone at the Department of Labor who looks out for the worker who doesn't often have a strong voice, as opposed to always siding with the employer on every issue.

Instead, an independent review by the Government Accountability Office found that when he was in his Department, the Wage and Hour Division was ineffective and actually discouraged workers from lodging complaints to get their hard-earned money back. So when a worker felt that he or she was cheated in the workplace, when Mr. Pizzella was in the Wage and Hour Division, those workers were reluctant to lodge complaints to get their money back because the Department of Labor was not on their side in those days.

This is the man who wants to be Deputy Secretary of Labor. He would be the second highest ranking official in charge of looking out for working men and women. His record indicates he would be more interested in looking out for corporations that want to take advantage of their workers. Isn't there enough of that in this country without the government siding with the richest, most privileged people in the country, the large corporations in the country against workers who simply don't have much of a voice? We are going to put government on the side of those corporations against those workers.

John Ring's nomination to the NLRB may be even worse. He has been nominated to be on the National Labor Relations Board. He is supposed to be a neutral arbiter between workers and management. He has spent his career representing employers. He has attacked the agency he is seeking to join. So much is at stake with this nomination. It will likely result in a 3-to-2 anti-worker and anti-labor majority on a board that has enormous influence over American workers. It will mean big advances in the decades-long campaign to chip away at workers' power in the workplace.

We need someone in both of these jobs--Mr. Pizzella at the Department of Labor and Mr. Ring at the NLRB--who wakes up every day thinking: How do I help American workers? How do I help American workers have a safer workplace? How do I help American workers get paid fairly? How do we make sure companies do the right thing as they treat their workers? That is what they should wake up every day thinking. Instead, President Trump has nominated and is hiring two people who have spent their careers trying to push those workers down. What these folks don't seem to understand is that it is not corporations that drive the economy; it is workers.

There is a problem in this institution. The leaders in this institution--the majority leader down the hall, Senator McConnell-- think you grow the economy from the top down. They think you give the richest people in the country tax cuts, you give the largest corporations in the country tax breaks, and it will trickle down and help workers.

No, that is not how you grow the economy. You grow the economy from the middle out. That is why we had greater job growth with President Obama after the auto rescue in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016. More jobs were created in almost every one of those years than in 2017--President Trump's first year in office.

If work isn't valued, if corporations shortchange workers with the help of lawyers like Mr. Ring and Mr. Pizzella, then Americans can't earn their way to a better life for their families, no matter how hard they work.

In my hometown of Mansfield or where Connie and I live in Cleveland or in Cranston, RI--Senator Whitehouse's hometown, where my daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren live--how many times do I hear people in these communities say: You know, I am working harder than ever, and I have less to show for it.

President Trump is going to put two lawyers in key places in the Federal Government who are going to stack the deck even more against those workers. The last thing we need is more people serving in Washington who don't value work and who don't respect the Americans who do it.

I urge my colleagues to listen a little more to the Americans we serve. As President Lincoln said: Go out and get your public opinion bath. Listen to workers--not just employers, not just lawyers, not just to country clubs. Go to where workers hang out. Listen a little more to the workers we serve and a little less to big corporations, which it seems these days are trying to squeeze every last penny out of their workers.

Mr. President, reject these nominations.

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

Mr. President, this weekend, Americans around the country and at, at least, a dozen places in my State of Ohio will hold peaceful marches in their communities to demand that we in this body--the people who represent them--actually do something to protect them from gun violence, not just state that my thoughts and prayers are with the victims and the families but to actually do something.

That sort of activism is so important to our democracy. Change never starts in Washington. We make progress because of the grassroots movements of Americans across our country who demand action. For too long, Congress has ignored millions of Americans who want reasonable gun safety measures. Instead, this Congress continues to do the bidding of the gun lobbyists.

We already see activism making a difference. It is a minor step, but this week, in the bipartisan budget deal, we will vote to loosen government regulations that severely limit research on gun safety. It is an important first step, but we have a long way to go. We can't say we are doing what it takes to keep our country safe until we are finally willing to pass commonsense laws that protect all Americans from gun violence. Many of us have tried.

I supported the original Federal assault weapons ban in 1994 during my first term in Congress. I joined with many of my colleagues to vote to

renew it after the shooting at Sandy Hook. Weapons of war don't belong on our streets or in our classrooms.

We have tried to pass legislation to close loopholes in our background check system so the people who buy guns on the internet or at gun shows have to go through the same background checks as law- abiding gun owners who buy their guns at stores in Ohio.

After the tragedy at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, we tried to pass legislation to prevent people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns. People can't believe the law in this country; that if you are on the government's terrorist watch list, you can't go to the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in Cleveland, to the John Glenn Columbus International Airport in Columbus, or to the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington and get on an airplane, which is the right thing, but that you can go out and buy a gun.

We know what happened each and every time. The gun lobby stood in the way. It stands in the way, despite the fact that the laws we are talking about will not undermine the rules and rights of law-abiding gun owners. I have always respected the rights of hunters and collectors and other law-abiding gun owners. No one is trying to take away their guns. Yet, when our students aren't safe in school, it is clear something has to be done. We will not give up on making our country safer. We will keep fighting until we get weapons of war out of our schools and off our streets.

Creating change in our country is not easy. It requires often going up against powerful special interests. It is how things happen in this country. It is how women got the right to vote. It is how we passed civil rights. It is how we passed workers' compensation. It is how we passed Medicare. It is how we got Social Security. People banded together--activists--around the country. They pushed their country and pushed their government at the State level, at the county level, at the courthouse, at the Capitol in Washington. They stood against powerful special interests and won on behalf of the public. From the Women's March to airport rallies, to the activism around the Affordable Care Act, last year, Americans proved over and over the power of activism.

The people I will be with on Saturday--my daughters, my wife, and probably three of our grandchildren--will join hundreds of thousands all over this country in fighting for these issues. The people who will be marching on Saturday are the ones we were elected to serve. We were not elected to serve special interest gun lobbyists. These activists give me hope for the future. I hope my colleagues in this body will listen to the activists, not to the lobbyists.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Portman and Senator Blumenthal for their work on this. Senator Portman and I have spent untold hours, and he has been a leader on this. I thank him for his leadership, in Toledo and Cincinnati, but especially in Toledo, where the sheriff, the community, Celia Williamson, and so many others have been so important in combating this terrible affliction in our society. I thank them.

Wall Street and American Workers

Mr. President, last week, the House passed another giveaway to Wall Street, siding with special interests and rolling back accountability on some of the biggest banks at the expense of taxpayers. It comes on the heels of last year's tax giveaway that will benefit those same megabanks. This Congress bends over backward to help Wall Street while working families continue to struggle.

It is not just that we are helping Wall Street with tax breaks, we are helping Wall Street with rolling back regulations. Let me outline what exactly all that means.

In a series over several months, I am laying out the case for how Wall Street undermines America's workers and some of the changes we need to make in this country to grow our middle class and make work pay off.

Remember, one of the points I made was that American Airlines announced that they were going to increase workers' wages, as did Chipotle, and Wall Street hit them with a lower stock price as a result.

In each installment of this series, we have talked about these issues. I want to talk specifically this time about what Wall Street's war on workers does to employment. You can follow each installment on my medium page at www.medium.com/@SenatorBrown.

Last time, I talked about workers' paychecks. Today, I want to talk about layoffs.

Wall Street's singular focus on padding their own pockets is bad enough, but worse, it comes at the direct expense of American workers. Corporations focus almost exclusively on their quarterly performance on the stock market. That is how a CEO's performance is evaluated. They are compensated in large part with company shares. They do better when their stock price goes up. They do things to make their stock price go up, and then they do even better because they are compensated in large part with company shares.

Wall Street analysts like it when corporations minimize their cost to boost their short-term profits; hence the stock price goes up even when the company is already profitable, and that leads directly to layoffs. Corporations lay off workers to show they are serious about cutting expenses, and their stock prices often rise as a result. Wall

Street's war on workers means not only smaller paychecks but also pink slips for those workers.

How did we get to a point where stock prices are more important than workers? It didn't happen overnight.

I was talking with Senator Whitehouse about this, and whether it is Cranston, RI, or Mansfield, OH, companies used to consider their employees, their customers, and even the people in the town they did business in, as stakeholders. They cared about their community, they cared about their workers, and they cared about their customers. They felt a duty to fulfill obligations to a broader community, not just their own corporate board members and their own corporate executives.

I grew up in Mansfield, OH, a city of about 50,000 in North Central Ohio halfway between our State's two largest cities, Cleveland and Columbus. I remember that there were so many companies in our town. I didn't know those company presidents--they were the big people in town, and I was a kid--but I do remember what those companies did. They sponsored Little League teams. They were involved in local Kiwanis clubs. They cared about workers, and they cared about the community. They cared about their customers. They weren't always interested in shareholders; they were interested in stakeholders, in all of us as a community. All the workers, all the customers, and all of the community were stakeholders. But now the focus has narrowed to just shareholders.

As Wall Street's influence has grown, corporate priorities have shifted from shareholders kind of writ large, and the way success is measured has changed fundamentally to stockholders. Businesses have become beholden to those quarterly earnings reports. They have left employees, communities, and customers behind in many ways. They do everything possible, including laying off workers, to make sure their balance sheets and profit margins look as good as they can--the impact on the workers and the long-term health of the company be damned.

In the 1980s, investors began to pursue hostile takeovers of companies that failed to maximize profits. Executives at other companies began to fear takeovers if they didn't keep profits and stock prices high. The pay packages of top management became greater and greater and became more and more closely tied to short-term stock performance.

Wall Street's and Main Street's interests began to diverge. Folks in the corporate boardroom were no longer forced to consider what was in the long-term interests of their workers and of their small-time investors. For top corporate executives, workers became nothing more than a line item in the budget, a cost to be minimized.

By the 1990s, even profitable companies started laying off workers to boost profits even further. Look at what happened to Xerox, an iconic American company that had never had a major layoff in its history. In 1993, the company announced plans to cut 10,000 workers despite being profitable. The company was doing fine. It wasn't a case of an industry moving south, facing an agonizing decision with bad options, but the CEO justified the job cuts as necessary ``to compete effectively'' and to have a ``lean and flexible organization.'' He also said he expected to see higher profits because of the layoffs the following year.

Xerox wasn't alone. In the first 10 months of 1998, when the economy was booming, corporations laid off over half a million U.S. workers-- 200,000 more than were laid off the year before. This is the definition of profits before people, and things have gotten worse and worse since the late 1990s.

In 2015, Sysco announced a 3-year plan that included reducing its workforce--corporate-speak for laying off workers. It might have made sense if the company had experienced a year of sluggish sales, but guess what--the opposite was true. Their sales had increased. They generated $1 billion in cash flow, and they were able to pay $700 million in dividends to the company shareholders. If the large dividend payout the year before wasn't generous enough, the CEO said that one of the goals of the 3-year plan and its layoffs was to ``maximize shareholder returns''--not stakeholders, not employees, not the communities, not the customers, but shareholder returns.

The next year, 2016, Tyson Foods announced layoffs despite having a good quarter in beef sales. The following year, the company's president touted ``exceptional financial results.'' What was the reason for those results? Cost-cutting. It is always cost-cutting--more corporate-speak for laying off workers. Do you know what else he cited as the company's good health? Not great sales, not new products or investments in more workers, but the ability of the company to buy back billions of dollars of its own stock. So an accounting trick that funnels money to executives is what the company cited as a measure of its success. Buying back means executive compensation goes up. That is the key to what it was doing with cost-cutting. The company buys up shares of its own stock to drive up the price and increase the value for shareholders and the compensation for executives whose pay is tied to stock performance. Sounds familiar.

It is no coincidence that since the biggest corporations reaped their tax windfalls in September, they have announced billions of dollars in buybacks. It is always about the executives--about the executives' tax cuts, about the executives' compensation, about the executives' buybacks. Again and again, we see Wall Street consider workers as simply a cost to be cut but executive pay as essential to a company.

Last year, Humana announced that it was eliminating 2,700 jobs despite $13 billion in revenue. In the same call that the CEO announced the layoffs, he also announced an increase in executive pay. Workers lose their jobs to pay for more money for corporate executives. Sound familiar again and again and again? And the cherry on top? A month later, Humana announced $3 billion in stock buybacks. Again, what is that about? Higher executive compensation.

Of course, cost-cutting measures typically include workers losing their jobs. Cost-cutting measures almost never include pay cuts for corporate executives. In each of these examples, the company cited cost cuts that were so necessary, they had to fire workers, upend thousands of employees. I wonder how many of those executives and how many of those corporate leaders actually brought some of those workers into their offices and looked them in the eye and told them they were laying them off. My guess is that they had a much lower paid employee make that announcement and face the media and, more importantly, face the employees who lost their jobs.

How many of these executives actually listened to the story of an employee who loses her job, loses her house, whose total life is upended? How many of them ever listened to the stories of what happened to their workers who got fired? The company cited cost cuts that were so necessary, they had to fire those workers.

The shortsighted approach to running a company may work for top executives who can squeeze as much value out of the company in the short term without considering the business's long-term value. It is not just bad for the employees and communities, it is usually bad for the long-term health of the company. Making short-term decisions pays off if you are already well paid, but it doesn't work for those employees. Mainstream investors and workers only make a profit when a company's stock value continues to rise over time, but the corporate executives are no longer forced to consider what is in the long-term interest of workers and small-time investors. As long as Wall Street's analysis of one-size-fits-all measure of corporate success continues to be cost-cutting, workers are at constant risk of losing their jobs. As long as CEOs get paid based on stock prices instead of the company's long-term success, workers will keep getting fired from hostile companies.

We need to break this cycle of greed between Wall Street and CEOs. In the end, companies can't be profitable without good workers. We need policies that restructure our economy so workers share in the profits they create and Wall Street doesn't determine when workers keep their jobs or how much is in their paycheck.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I particularly appreciate, in light of my comments in a moment, Senator Klobuchar's service. She has been a pioneer as the first woman Senator from Minnesota. And I believe the Presiding Officer, Senator Fischer, is the first female Senator from Nebraska.

Tribute to Marcy Kaptur

Madam President, I rise today to honor my colleague and my longtime close friend, Marcy Kaptur. Marcy Kaptur serves down the hall on the other side of the building. She has dedicated her life to serving the people of Toledo and northern Ohio.

This Sunday, she will make history. She will officially become the longest serving woman in the history of the U.S. Congress in either House. On Sunday, she will have served in the House of Representatives for 35 years, 2 months, and 18 days, breaking a record that was set in 1960 by I believe a Massachusetts Congresswoman. For 3\1/2\ decades, she has been principled and she has been passionate about her family, her community, and our country, and she has advocated for Ohioans. She serves like nobody else.

She is the granddaughter of Polish immigrants. That is important to her. She comes from a working-class family. That is important to her. She is a practicing Roman Catholic. That is important to her. That describes much of who Marcy is--Polish immigrant, working-class family, Catholic faith.

Her father was a trucker and autoworker who became a small businessman. Her mother worked at the Champion spark plug factory, where, of course, she helped to organize a union. I say ``of course'' because of Marcy's not just understanding of the importance of the labor movement but her feeling it in her bones, that a unionized workforce is good for those workers, good for the company, and good for the community, and we need more of that.

Marcy's story echoes that of so many of our generation. Her parents worked hard. With the help of a union card, they earned their way to a better life for Marcy and her brother. She became the first in her family to graduate from high school and then college, and then she ended up in the U.S. Congress. What a great country we live in.

Marcy has never forgotten those roots. If you want to know one thing about Marcy Kaptur--who, as I said, works down the hall at the other end of the building--know that she has never forgotten her roots. That is what drives her. That is who she is. That is why she is such a terrific public servant. That is why she is going to break the record of 35 years, 2 months, and 15 days. She remembers her roots in Ohio's Polish and Ukrainian communities and how much they matter.

Unemployment reached 19 percent in Toledo in the early Reagan years when Marcy first ran for office. She said it was ``the condition of working people that drove me to change my life and run for office.'' She has lived up to that ideal, fighting for working families in Ohio for every one of the nearly 13,000 days she has served in Congress.

In my first year in the House, Marcy was a mentor to me. I worked with her to fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement. She showed me the way in understanding these trade agreements because she knew they would mean job losses in Ohio. She knew these trade agreements would push down wages. That is sort of the untold story-- something I don't think the President quite understands when he talks about NAFTA even though he is right that NAFTA was bad for our country. What NAFTA has done, which Marcy explained to me and understood for 25 years, is NAFTA also pushed down wages and is one of the reasons working-class Americans, whether they are in Omaha or Cleveland, so often don't get a raise. Unfortunately, Marcy was right.

Since then, as we have fought bad trade deal after bad trade deal, Marcy has been a reliable ally and leader in our fight for a trade policy that puts workers in Toledo and everywhere else in this country first.

We have also worked together to protect another very important love of Marcy Kaptur's, and that is our greatest natural resource, Lake Erie. We fought for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. We joined with Senator Portman on a bipartisan basis to stop the President's all but elimination of the--why would the President of the United States want to stop our cleanup of Lake Erie? That is why Marcy steps up. She works to protect the lake from invasive Asian carp; she works with farmers to prevent runoff into Lake Erie--all to protect the lake. It is what the lake means to us in terms of drinking water, jobs, commercialism, commercial development, and people just enjoying the beauty of the lake.

She has gone to bat time and again for the auto industry. When some called the auto industry dead, she fought back. Never bet against American workers. Never bet against the American auto industry. Never bet against Marcy Kaptur. That scrappy, fighting spirit is one of the qualities I love most about Ohio, and you find it in abundance in Marcy Kaptur.

No one fights harder for people in her district. Because of absurd redistricting, her district now goes from Toledo all across northern Ohio, only a few miles wide along the lake, all the way to the city of Cleveland. In only 5 years, the people of Cleveland have gained the same affection for Marcy as the people from Toledo have. You can see the love and respect they have.

I remember once going to a rally in Toledo for President Obama. People were excited to see him, of course. I

guess a few people may have noticed I was there too. But when Marcy walked in, someone screamed ``Marcy,'' and there was pandemonium. Everyone got to their feet as if a rock star had just taken the stage, because in Toledo, a rock star had taken the stage.

She fights for the people of Ohio. She fights for her district. She fights. She is known, more than anything, as a fighter for working families. It is so fitting that she reaches this milestone during Women's History Month. When she first joined the House, there were fewer than two dozen women serving. She helped blaze a trail for others. She even told the stories of the women who paved the way for her in her book ``Women of Congress: A Twentieth Century Odyssey.''

Having Marcy in Congress matters for so many reasons. It mattes for the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans she serves. It matters for the perspective she brings as the daughter of working-class parents. As I said, she was first in her family not just to go to college; she was first in her family to graduate from high school, right in the industrialized heartland.

As in Nebraska, Madam President, it matters to the little girls in Toledo, who for 35 years--do you know how, when you are in school, there is often a map or a chart of the Presidents? There was a calendar in Brinkerhoff Grade School when I was a little kid in Mansfield, OH. Every year, there was a calendar with all the Presidents' pictures on it. When I was in school, all the Presidents looked alike. Some had whiskers; some didn't. But they all looked alike because they were all White guys. Right? That changed in 2008. I was hoping it would change in 2016. It didn't. That is beside the point.

Marcy Kaptur--because she is the Congresswoman for Toledo, little girls growing up in Toledo since 1982 have realized there is someone to look up to. In Scottsbluff and in Lincoln and in Kearny, NE, they will now look up to having a woman Senator from Nebraska. Ohio has never had a woman Senator or woman Governor, but they have had Marcy Kaptur. That has mattered to little girls for 35 years, as they see a picture of their Representative in the local paper, the Toledo Blade. It is not just another man in a suit but someone who looks more like them, someone they can grow up to be.

I want to thank Marcy. She is not in the building now, but I want to thank Marcy for her service to Ohio. I hope we get to keep working with Marcy Kaptur for another couple of decades. The voters would have to approve that, but I am hopeful that we will.

Tribute to Rachel Petri

Madam President, I also want to talk about somebody else who is sitting in this Chamber who will continue, as her career advances, to be a role model for the people of this country and the people of her community. A daughter of Eastern Ohio, Rachel Petri has done communications work for me for a number of years.

She is leaving our office to, of course, return to her home State of Ohio. She has been a joy to work with. She has been a pleasure to work with. She is so smart and so committed, with an incredible work ethic. I am honored that she has spent part of her life working with me in our office in Washington, DC, and I thank her for her service.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, 10 years ago today, March 14, Bear Stearns was on the verge of collapse. Despite its 85-year history, despite its relationship with nearly every bank on Wall Street, the bank suddenly found itself on the brink. On this very day, March 14, Bear Stearns lost $3.5 billion in market value. The bank was in the midst of a free fall. In the course of one week, Bear Stearns went from trading for $65 per share to being bought for $2 a share in a sweetheart deal orchestrated by the Fed over the course of a weekend. Nearly overnight, one of Wall Street's most prestigious, almost 100-year-old banks fell apart.

Across the country, families sat at their kitchen tables and started to wonder: Will one of us lose our job? Will we have to move? Will we be able to retire? Will we lose our house? Will we be able to send our kids to college? On this day 10 years ago--March 14, 2008--a headline from CNN read: ``Job Losses: The Worst in Five Years.'' The story talked about how the economy was hemorrhaging jobs. The article warned that the crisis was building, quoting one analyst who said the real estate and credit crunch ``was whipping its way through the U.S. economy like a Midwestern tornado.''

In hindsight, we know that things would get a lot worse before they got better.

Some people say nobody could have possibly seen this coming. Some people say the 2008 financial crisis was like the weather--like that Midwestern tornado--something out of control that we wouldn't have seen, but we know better.

Advocates in communities--the people who are actually dealing with the consequences of this crisis--were sounding the alarm. For years before the crisis, they predicted what would happen if Washington didn't rein in Wall Street, and clearly they were right.

A few people in Washington, like Ned Gramlich, saw the problem for what it was; that Washington didn't stop the crisis, after it began, after it intensified--Congress at least responded. We passed a law that created important protections for the financial system, for taxpayers, for homeowners to hold banks and watchdogs accountable to prevent another crisis, but Wall Street wasn't even close to being ready to quit. There was no contrition. Nobody went to jail. In fact, on the day that President Obama signed Wall Street reform--what we know as Dodd- Frank--on the day that bill was signed into law, the top financial service lobbyists in this town said: Now it is half time.

Now, what would that mean: Now it is half time? It meant they lost the first half. They lost the battle where people in this Congress actually had the guts and the backbone and sloughed off their campaign contributions and were unwilling to listen to bank lobbyists tell them what to do. They stood up to the bank lobbyists and stood up to Wall Street and they did the right thing, but this lobbyist said it was half time. So the lobbyists lost the first half, but they were back at it, going to the regulators, trying to convince the regulators to weaken the rules and not implement the bill.

Not long ago, another bank lobbyist told us their game plan: ``We don't want a seat at the table, we want the whole table.'' This bill gives them that. The same group that warned us about the last crisis-- this is what I ask my colleagues to listen to. The same group that warned us about the last crisis or that were the regulators who tried to fix the last crisis--those same people are opposed to the bill the Senate is considering today. That doesn't seem to matter to about 65 of my colleagues.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the list of the range of civil rights, labor, and consumer advocacy groups that oppose S. 2155.

People who cleaned up the last crisis are warning us not to pass this bill. Experts from both parties are warning us, the authors of Wall Street reform. Barney Frank said he would vote no if he were in the Senate. Chris Dodd, in an op-ed today, writes that the bill's changes amount to ``chipping away at the ability to conduct comprehensive and effective oversight.''

Now, people are saying this isn't a major scale-back of Dodd-Frank, but Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank both say they would vote no because they recognize it as damaging to the work we all did.

Experts like Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve; Sheila Bair, head of FDIC, Republican appointment by President Bush, used to be chief of staff for Senator Bob Dole; Dan Tarullo, who was effectively the head of supervision of regulation for the Federal Reserve, wants us to vote no. Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was at the Federal Reserve and then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury; Gary Gensler, who is head of the Commodities Future Trading Commission; Tom Hoenig, a Republican who is at FDIC and earlier was the Fed president; Antonia Weiss at the Treasury Department; Paul Tucker, international banker from England-- international regulator; Phil Angelides, a former California State Treasurer who ran the Commission that examined what happened in the bank crisis--they all wrote to the Senate. They all outlined a combined 28 pages' worth of concerns about this bill, and my colleagues just say: Oh, this is just helping the small community banks and some of the regional banks a little bit.

Well, not exactly. That is what happens here. We start off wanting to help the small banks; we start off helping some of the midsized regional banks that generally do a good job--banks like Huntington and Fifth Third and Key Bank--but then Wall Street gets involved, and Wall Street drives a bigger and bigger hole in this bill and gets more and more help and more and more breaks and look where we are.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record letters from two of these financial experts.

So the question is, Why do we ignore these pleas? Let's recap the problems with this legislation.

First, the bill puts American taxpayers at risk of another bank bailout. It weakens stress tests for all large banks. In spite of what my colleagues say, everybody that has commented on this bill--so many experts that have commented on this bill understand that this is not just about community banks; it is not just about the regional midsized that go up to $250 billion. We can stress test for all large banks; JPMorgan Chase, $2.5 trillion in assets; Bank of America, $2.3 trillion; Wells Fargo, $1.9 trillion. As if they haven't had enough-- done enough, made enough mistakes, violated the public trust enough times. Citigroup, $1.9 trillion. These four banks--JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup--hold 51 percent, more than half of all industry assets, $8.6 trillion.

These banks have had a really good run since the crisis, since the bailout. Remember, people didn't go to jail even though people in my ZIP Code, in my community, in my State and in Pennsylvania and all over the country--people lost savings, their homes, and their jobs. These banks, which are more profitable than they have ever been in the last couple of years, got a huge tax break just last December, and now we are doing them a favor by weakening the stress test. All the country's biggest banks took about

$239 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Without rigorous annual stress tests, taxpayers can once again be on the hook if too-big-to-fail banks collapse and we don't have the right tools in place to see it coming.

Second, this bill opens the door to weaker oversight of foreign megabanks operating in the United States, the same banks that repeatedly violated U.S. law. These are banks like Deutsche Bank in Germany, the Trump business organization's personal bank; Santander in Spain, Barclays in Britain, Credit Suisse, and UBS in Switzerland. These are banks that violated Iran sanctions. They are banks that repossessed cars from American service men and women who were serving overseas. These are banks that were fined by the Federal Government, and we are doing these foreign banks a favor in this bill.

Third, with the change of just one word, this bill forces the Fed to weaken the rules even for the largest banks with more than $250 billion in assets. Former CFTC Chair Gary Gensler wrote to the Senate this month and said this change ``may subject the government to additional lobbying and possible litigation from individual banks seeking specially tailored rules.''

We know all of these regulators put in place by the Trump administration--most of them with ties to Wall Street, and we know the White House now looks like an executive retreat for Wall Street executives--we know these regulators are going to bend over backward for the big banks, and if they don't, they are going to be sued by the foreign banks and by other big banks to open up those loopholes even more.

Senator Dodd, one of the authors of the original bill, identified this $250 billion threshold as the No. 1 reason he can't support the bill. He said: ``It raises the danger of a cascading economic effect.''

Fourth, this bill makes another change to allow big banks to borrow more money than they can afford, which, once again, puts taxpayers and our economy at risk. The New York Times described this provision as weakening rules ``aimed at keeping banks from being able to take big risks without properly preparing for disaster.''

The Washington Post reported that JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup may get a combined $30 billion windfall--$30 billion windfall--if this provision passes. I am not making this up. This is what analysts are saying this bill will do.

Fifth, this bill chips away at key mortgage rules put in place after the last crisis. It includes provisions that weaken transparency, inclusiveness, and fairness in mortgage lending. The bill makes it easier for lenders to mislead families into mortgages they can't afford, and takes away those families' right to take the bank to court. It strips away key data used to monitor trends in mortgage lending and spot discrimination against communities of color.

There was an amendment to fix that from Senator Cortez Masto that the Republicans will not allow us to offer.

We know that in too many places across the country, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan for no good reason. Without this data, we will not know when that redlining is happening.

Sixth--and this may be the most awful of all. For reasons I can't even pretend to understand, this bill helps Equifax. It is the same Equifax that let hackers steal 148 million Americans' personal data. More than half the adults in this country had their personal data breached because of Equifax--their birth dates, Social Security numbers, and addresses--the same Equifax whose former executive was just today charged with insider trading for dumping his stocks just before the company announced its data breach failure.

In exchange for a small provision helping servicemembers watch their credit, this bill forces them to give up their right to take Equifax to court the next time the company's recklessness exposes sensitive financial data.

If that weren't bad enough, the bill also gives Equifax a big new business opportunity. This will give a company that put half the American population at risk of identify theft the power to decide who can get a mortgage.

What do the American people get in exchange for these goodies to big banks and to Equifax? They get to pick up the check. The Congressional Budget Office confirmed that this bill would increase the probability of a big bank failure and a financial crisis adding to the deficit. Even after the addition of language offsetting some of the costs of this bill, the legislation would increase the deficit by $455 million. Let me repeat that. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office found that this bill will increase the probability of a big bank failure and a financial crisis. So don't tell me this bill doesn't roll back Dodd- Frank for the biggest banks.

In this town, no one seems to be able to find a single dollar when we need to solve our pension crisis or invest in infrastructure or remove toxic lead from kids' homes, but when the Big Bank lobbyists come calling, the Senate waives its budget rules to do Wall Street's bidding.

Let me also remind my colleagues how hard it was to enact the reforms we passed after the last crisis.

Do you remember that lobbyist said that it was only halftime after one of the few times in this body's recent history that Wall Street actually lost, when we did the right thing 10 years ago?

In the move up to that bill, the Senate considered 14 separate Republican amendments, where there were votes taken, to Dodd-Frank and another 12 from Democrats. Of those 26 amendments, 5 of them were adopted, 5 Republican amendments, 10 Democratic amendments. They were voted on in a Senate where the Democrats were in the majority and gave both parties the opportunity to amend the bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.

During the conference committee, televised live on C-SPAN for 48 hours, 17 Senate Republican amendments were accepted and 22 amendments from Senate Democrats. Contrast that with today: No subsequent amendments were adopted. I credit Chairman Crapo for at least allowing amendments, but that is as far as it went. On the Senate floor, it has been worse. Democrats and Republicans alike were completely shut down, not able to offer a single amendment.

We know how this place has worked the last year. All decisions are made down the hall in the majority leader's office. The tax bill was written there. The healthcare bill was written there. This bill was written in a way that there are no amendments allowed on the floor, no debate, no deliberation, no changes.

Lastly, fundamentally, the problem with this bill is that we are entrusting the profiteers from the last crisis, the deniers of the last crisis, with implementing big-bank giveaways. I am not willing to put blind trust in the people who failed us before. Regulators Quarles, Mulvaney, Otting, and Mnuchin are the people we are expecting to regulate and save us from another bailout, save us from another financial crisis, and save us from another implosion in our economy. These are the people who failed us so spectacularly in the past, with such grave consequences, and we are expecting them to protect us the next time. Nothing in their public record has earned them this trust.

This is the collective amnesia crowd--the crowd who forgets what I talked about at the beginning of the speech about what happened 10 years ago--but Ohio families haven't forgotten. People across this country still struggle. People who have lost savings haven't been able to entirely rebuild them. People who lost jobs are often in lower paying jobs as a result. People who lost their homes--in my part of Cleveland, I still see the devastation caused by this financial crisis, the tens of thousands of homes in Greater Cleveland that were foreclosed on. These are the people we are sent here to serve. What this bill does for them and the issues facing their lives is impossible to see.

I urge my colleagues to reject this bill. I urge my colleagues to fundamentally ask themselves whose side they

are on. Are you going to vote yes on this and side with special interests and Wall Street, or are you going to vote no and side with taxpayers and homeowners and students and workers?

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I would like my colleagues to take a trip down memory lane. Go back a decade or two to 2006, 2007, 2008, and look at the decade before that. My State of Ohio, for 14 years in a row-- from the late 1990s through the year 2010--experienced almost a decade and a half of foreclosure increases leading up to the crisis. That meant that in Ohio, literally every year for 14 years, there were more foreclosures than the year before in my State.

Predatory and irresponsible lenders made dangerous, subprime loans. They often ignored whether borrowers had the ability to repay that loan. The incentives were these: We will keep writing these; we will keep underwriting; we will keep collecting fees. We don't care if the borrower can pay.

We can see that is a setup for disaster. Because of the lack of standards for underwriting, we learned a painful lesson that not all mortgage lending is created equal.

Look at some headlines from that period. On September 18, 2008, the front page of the Wall Street Journal featured three headlines. This was September 18, 2008, so just slightly less than 10 years ago: ``Mounting Fears Shape World Markets As Banking Giants Rush to Raise Capital.'' ``Bad Bets and Cash Crunch Push Ailing AIG to Brink.'' ``Worst Crisis Since `30s, With No End.''

On the same day the Washington Post reported: ``Markets in Disarray as Lending Locks Up.''

How did we get to that crisis? Banks forgot the essential rule of lending. A borrower needs to be able to pay back the loan. It is pretty simple, but a forgotten dictum. Instead, lenders offered loans that required no documentation. They offered loans with teaser interest rates that shot through the roof after 2 or 3 years. They offered loans where borrowers never paid down their principal or they stripped their home's value through cash-out refinances.

So borrowers had these mortgages where they simply paid the interest with the belief the home would go up in value more and more and more, never paying the principal. The homes didn't go up in value, and look what happened.

All of these practices had devastating results for families and communities and the economy. My wife Connie and I live in ZIP Code 44105 in Cleveland, OH, just south of Slavic Village in the great city of Cleveland. Eleven years ago, in the first half of 2007, 44105 had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America. I can still see the blight brought on by those foreclosures--what it did to individual families, what it did to the neighborhood, what it did to the city of Cleveland.

Think about--and we don't do that very much here. We don't really think all that much when we talk about things like this. We look at numbers. We look at statistics. We read analyses and data, but we don't really think about individual families.

Think about what happens when somebody suffers a foreclosure. First of all, these families understand that things are getting tighter. It is harder

and harder to pay their mortgage. Their spouse may have been scaled back to half time, depending on the economic circumstances.

The first thing they do is often get rid of the family pet. It costs too much to take the dog to the vet. The second thing they do is cut back on everything. They just start cutting back on everything. Eventually they have that sit-down with their 12-year-old daughter and their 14-year-old son and their 15-year old son, and tell them: We are going to have to move. We don't know where we are going or what school district we will be in. We don't know how much we are going to get; we have to sell the car. We don't know how much you are going to be able to see your friends. They think about the personal side, but we don't do that much here.

Pope Francis used to admonish his parish priests to go out and smell like the flock. We don't do that very much here. We look at data and ideas, and we don't think about our policies and our votes and the impact they have on individual human beings.

So thinking back to ZIP Code 44105, if those faulty mortgage products weren't bad enough on their own, they were targeted to communities of color. The neighborhood my wife and I live in, ZIP Code 44105, is mostly African American, but pretty diverse. A lot of people look more like me, but there are a lot of people with moderate to low incomes.

These mortgage products were targeted to communities of color. In those communities in particular, even those who qualified for no- frills, no-surprises prime mortgages were often instead steered into subprime loans. Why? Because the lender could make more money on a subprime loan than a straightforward loan that most Members of the Senate generally sign up for. So even African-American and Hispanic borrowers with higher incomes than other borrowers found themselves-- because the banks put them there--with subprime mortgages.

These practices of discrimination, which went on for years, stripped a generation's worth of equity from communities that had fought hard for equal access to home ownership. Think about this: The household wealth of communities of color simply hasn't recovered from the last decade. Middle-class Black and Hispanic families lost half of their wealth from 2007 to 2013. In 2016, it was $38,000. The numbers are similar for Hispanic households: $85,000 in 2007, $46,000 in 2016. They all sound like numbers, but what that does to a family who has lost half its wealth, particularly because their wealth is generally in the home that they own--think of what that does.

My colleagues talk about how hard the banks have it, how hard it is to be a banker now, and how hard it is for Wall Street. I would like to revisit what happens when banks stop following the rules. Borrowers with these higher cost loans were foreclosed on at almost triple the rate of borrowers with standard 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages. Between 2006 and 2014, more than 9 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure in distressed sales or surrendered their home to the lender--9.3 million homeowners. What does that mean to us? Do we know any of them? Do we ever talk to any of them? Do we listen to their stories about what happens when you get thrown out of your house? Do we sit there and patiently listen and ask them questions and ask them to tell us about what has happened during the last 10 years of their lives? Because when you get thrown out of your home, whether you are evicted or whether you get put out because of foreclosure, you don't just give away the family pet. You don't just cut back on everything. You lose a lot of your possessions because you can't take things with you. You start again in your life, and you start again in debt. Does anybody here care about that?

They talk about how hard it is for the banks and how Wall Street is suffering, but they don't think about the individual homeowners who struggle. Some of them get foreclosed on. Some of them are just struggling. Some of them have lost half of their wealth.

It is not just families of color who lost half their wealth; a whole lot of working class White families have lost a lot of their wealth. Does this place seem to care? Not a whole lot.

It wasn't just subprime mortgages. The crisis revealed a host of other harmful practices, like steering borrowers to affiliated companies, kickbacks for business referrals, inflated appraisals, and loan officer compensation based on the loan product. If you have a certain loan product that might be more profitable, even though it is a little sleazy and a little underhanded, you make a little more money because you steer people into those loan products. It might lead to the ruining of their lives or it might lead to their foreclosure, but they are making more money.

So what does that mean? It means the worse the loan was for the borrower, the more money the lender made. In 2008, the worse the loan was for the borrower, the more money the lender made. That is what our laws were. We fixed that, and we are going to undo some of that in this bill.

After the dust settled, this country realized how twisted our mortgage lending market had become. Congress finally stepped in to do what the market and regulators refused to do for too long.

I believe in free enterprise. I believe in the dynamism of capitalism. But when the market and the regulators did nothing except encourage this kind of behavior--that is why government is involved. That is why government steps in. That is why we did Wall Street reform. It established a commonsense rule that lenders should evaluate whether a borrower has the ability to repay a home loan. The ability to repay rule means that lenders can no longer make a loan based on the home's value or ignore the fact that an adjustable rate mortgage will become unaffordable in a year or two.

A mortgage is the largest financial transaction most families will make in their lifetime. It is a big deal, central to the economic life and the life overall of a great majority of people in this country. Requiring that the mortgage process, services, and fees be transparent and understandable to borrowers is essential. We don't all have great sophistication when we get a homeowner's loan. That is why it is so important that it be transparent and understandable to borrowers. But the bill before us today chips away at that principle. It includes several provisions that, when taken together, weaken transparency and inclusiveness and undermine fairness in mortgage lending.

The bill says lenders need not consider whether a borrower can afford an adjustable rate mortgage after the interest rate adjusts. Banks and mortgage companies make more money when they write more loans. I get that. They should. But when the incentive is only that and there is no requirement that the borrower be able to afford an adjustable rate mortgage after the interest rate adjusts--we know what will happen.

The bill also allows the largest banks to acquire small banks and retains these legal protections for the larger banks.

I spoke to a member of a bank board in Mansfield, OH, yesterday, a longtime friend of our family's. That is where I grew up. I know the locally owned banks in Mansfield, OH. I know that Mechanics Bank works hard for their enrichment. I know they work hard for their customers. They know their customers. Small banks work with their customers. If they lose a job or face a sudden illness, the bank can try to work with them to figure out how to avoid foreclosure. Would a megabank in Cleveland, Columbus, or Dayton do the same thing? Based on the record of Secretary Mnuchin's bank, OneWest, and others during the crisis, we can be pretty sure we know the answer to that, and the answer is no, they won't.

The bill before us also gives lenders a pass on the requirement to escrow for taxes and insurance when making subprime loans. It doesn't cost real money to the lender to put money aside for taxes and insurance; it is part of the calculation when you buy a house. Most of us want our taxes and insurance included so we have a more predictable stream of outflow, so we know how much we are paying next month, and it doesn't change. It may change once a year, but it doesn't change often. By definition, someone taking out a subprime loan is at a higher risk of default. Also, escrow helps a borrower plan for the expenses of taxes and insurance, and it protects

the lender from unexpected losses. That is in the bill, and we are stripping that out of the law.

Former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, appointed by President Bush, is a terrific public servant. She was a high-ranking employee--I believe chief of staff--for Senator Dole when he was a Member of the Senate. She steered the FDIC through the worst of the financial crisis. She raised her opposition to this provision in a letter to me.

This bill exempts 85 percent of banks from reporting the HMDA data they are collecting and reporting today. I credit Senator Cortez Masto, who, as the attorney general of Nevada before she joined us in the Senate 14 months ago, saw up close what happened with foreclosures. She is a strong, outspoken opponent of this bill. She has had those discussions with people who have lost their homes. She understands how it happened. She doesn't have the amnesia that apparently a majority of my colleagues have, forgetting what happened 10 years ago and learning almost nothing from what happened 10 years ago. Her amendment would fix HMDA data collection. Without this data, we can't monitor trends in mortgage lending, particularly in rural areas. Without this data, it will be even harder to see who has access to affordable mortgage credit and who does not.

We know that redlining is still happening. The latest report from the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed tens of millions of mortgage records and found that across the country, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan even when you take into account factors like their income and the size of the loan. Without this data, we won't know when redlining happens. It will make it more difficult to show that community lenders go the extra mile for their customers. That is why the NAACP, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Unidos, National Urban League, Rural Community Assistance Corporation, and more than 170 State and national organizations have objected to this devastating new hole in lending data. Why in the world would Congress want to keep us from getting that information, keep us from getting that data, so we, in fact, understand better what goes on?

Part of our problem in 2007 and 2008 was that we had a whole bunch of regulators who were asleep at the switch, we had a Congress that was oblivious, and we had a national media that was not paying enough attention to this. Part of that was that the regulators didn't have the information they needed. That is why the head of supervision at the Federal Reserve, Randal Quarles, who was in the Bush administration then, could see nothing but roses and candy in the years ahead. He said that in 2006 and I believe in 2007. He had no idea what was going on, partly because he maybe didn't want to know but partly because we didn't have the data collected that we are starting to collect now. So we are going to say we don't care about that.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter from former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair and the letters from civil rights groups in opposition to this provision be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Any one of these provisions is bad enough, but taken together, they add up to riskier loans for American families and more foreclosures on American families.

Think about this: If this bill passes, a bank could make a subprime loan without considering whether a borrower could afford the higher interest rate when the teaser rate expires. The first 2 or 3 years, you are paying rate X, and then in the third or fourth year, you are paying X plus two or X plus three, and then the next year, maybe X plus that number plus one, to the point you can't afford your mortgage anymore. What happens? You get foreclosed on, and your life turns upside down.

If this bill passes, a bank could make a subprime loan without considering whether the borrower could pay the higher interest rate. A bank wouldn't have to collect taxes and insurance on a monthly basis, making a loan look affordable when it may not be because you have insurance and taxes. Why not put that in the monthly payment so people can predict more and understand their finances better?

The homeowner loses her right to take the bank to court for removing her from her home even though the bank made a loan it knew she could never repay. So the bank makes a loan to a homeowner. The homeowner perhaps doesn't have the sophistication the banker sitting across the table has, doesn't quite understand what the teaser rate will mean to the cost of her house. Then the bank doesn't do the escrow adding insurance and taxes, and the bank convinces this perspective homeowner, the borrower, that she can make these payments, no problem. Then she loses her right to action if she is foreclosed on. She has no recourse even though the bank sold her something that a good banker wouldn't have. It is a recipe for disaster. It is a recipe for more families ending up in homes they were misled into thinking they could afford. Is it too much to ask a lender to consider whether a family can afford the loan they are getting? Are we back here already?

The cherry on top is this bill eliminates data we need to determine whether banks are targeting certain communities for these risky loans. We know this administration and the heads of Departments are not concerned about accountability for financial institutions' equity, lending, and inclusivity. We learned that HUD is considering changing its mission statement to delete references to inclusive communities. Imagine that, Secretary Carson, that you would do such a thing.

I am concerned this bill will put more families at risk of poor housing conditions, particularly in rural communities that are so often ignored in this town. The bill reduces the frequency of required inspections for units overseen by rural public housing agencies that administer 550 or fewer units of HUD public housing and section 8 rental vouchers. For many of these so-called PHAs, HUD will inspect their property once every 3 years rather than every 1 or 2 years. This bill would allow PHAs to inspect more voucher-assisted units just once every 3 years. A lot can happen to an apartment in 3 years that could put residents' health and safety at risk. In my neighborhood, it is in the 90 percent rate, those homes that have toxic levels of lead, and it gets worse as the house gets older and the paint chips. And we are not going to inspect these places.

I understand that PHAs face many challenges in maintaining high- quality housing for families. Due to years of underfunding, public housing alone faces an estimated $26 billion backlog of repairs. My Senate Democratic colleagues and I have proposed an infrastructure package that includes funding for public housing repairs and revitalization to help address these challenges. We have an obligation to make sure these struggling families have safe and decent housing. I have been clear throughout this process that I want to help community lenders and housing providers better serve their customers. We don't do that by reducing accountability. We don't do that by returning to the freewheeling housing market that led to millions of families losing their homes.

When we talk about escrow and lending requirements, it sounds kind of boring, it sounds dry, and it may sound like legalese that don't matter, but it matters when it comes to the biggest, most important purchase most Americans will make.

It just seems that particularly when people buy that first home and they don't really know much about how to do that--maybe they don't have a lot of political sophistication; they are 25 or 30 years old or whatever age they are--we shouldn't make it more complicated, we should make it less complicated. Bankers should not be incentivized only by how much money they make by writing more and more mortgages but instead should walk through what this is going to cost: Here is the escrow. Here is what your insurance costs. Here is what you are going to pay if you have a teaser rate. We are going to make some decisions, and this house may be a little too expensive for you because of that teaser rate, because of what you will be paying 3 years from now in addition to the escrow, the taxes and insurance that you hadn't really planned for.

Weakening a standard here or granting an exemption there will end up causing real pain for real families.

Growth in the housing sector is only sustainable if families can afford their loans and homes are maintained. I know families in my ZIP Code can't afford a repeat of the housing crisis. I know what it has done to my neighborhood. Some of them are still digging out.

Let's stop listening to the big-bank lobbyists and start listening to the people we serve, the families across this country who remember all too well what foreclosures and job losses mean to them.

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

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

Mr. President, I first wish to thank Senator Whitehouse, one of my best friends in the Senate.

We came to the Senate on the same day. He will go down in history as the best advocate in this body or perhaps the greatest moralist of our time combatting climate change. He has educated Members of the Senate-- some more resistant than others.

He has taken to the floor over and over. He has continued to make sure that people listen to something important, and we all appreciate that leadership.

Climate change affects Ohio jobs that rely on Lake Erie. The Great Lakes are vital to our industrial heartland, as the Rockies are to the West, as the Atlantic coastline is to New England, as the Gulf of Mexico is to the Presiding Officer's own State of Florida. In fact, 84 percent of America's freshwater is in the five Great Lakes. Only polar icecaps contain more freshwater than do the Great Lakes.

Lake Erie is one of the biggest lakes in the world. It is also the shallowest of the lakes. This is an amazing statistic. Lake Erie is the shallowest and among the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area. Lake Erie contains 2 percent of all the water in the Great Lakes, yet it contains 50 percent of the fish in the Great Lakes because it is warmer and shallower and conducive to aquatic life and fish life.

Its shallowness makes it particularly vulnerable to storm water runoff and the algae blooms that it causes. The Maumee River runs through Toledo. The Maumee River Basin is the largest drainage basin of any of the Great Lakes, and the largest river that empties into the Great Lakes is the Maumee.

Climate change makes these algae blooms off the coast of Toledo in the western base of Lake Erie. Climate change makes those blooms worse. It contaminates our lakes, and it threatens the Ohio businesses and communities that rely on Lake Erie. Three summers ago, we had to get bottled drinking water to the citizens of Toledo and the surrounding areas of Northwest Ohio because the water was not potable at that time.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we know that one effect of climate change in the Great Lakes region has been a 37-percent increase in the gully washers--the heavy rain events that contribute to algae blooms.

I talked to farmers who have been farming in the Western Lake Erie Basin for decades. Just a few weeks ago I did a roundtable in that part of the State. My staff member Jonathan McCracken has done a number of roundtables before. Since talking to these farmers, they tell us they are experiencing heavier rain events more often and with greater intensity compared to even 15 years ago, let alone in the lifespan of many of these farmers.

Hotter summers and shorter winters make this worse. The effects of algae blooms have a profound effect on the ecosystem. That is why this matters. Protecting our lakes is one of the biggest environmental challenges facing the entire Midwest. It is the biggest challenge facing Ohio.

We have made some progress over the last 8 years, thanks in large part to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The GLRI is working. Everybody knows it does. Nobody claims it doesn't.

I remember how polluted Lake Erie was when I was growing up. I grew up an hour or hour and a half from there. My family, a week or two in the summer, would drive north to Gem Beach. I remember the dead fish. I remember the smell of the lake. I remember that this lake was in big, big trouble.

We have made progress cleaning up its tributaries. We increased access to the lake. We approved habitats for fish and wildlife. It has been a bipartisan success story, and it took the Federal Government to do it. The city of Cleveland couldn't do it, nor the city of Lorraine, the city of Sandusky, the city of Port Clinton, the city of Ashtabula. They couldn't clean up the lake. The State of Ohio didn't have the ability and the resources to clean this lake up. It took the Federal Government and the U.S. EPA to have the strength and the dollars and the mission to clean up this lake. That is why it has been a bipartisan success story all over our country.

We need to make sure that GLRI has the funding it needs to keep up its work and not eliminate it, as the President again proposed in his budget. Taking a hatchet to GLRI would cost Ohio jobs, and it would jeopardize public health by putting our drinking water at risk.

If you are over 50 years old, you remember what that lake looked like. You remember what that lake smelled like. You remember how people didn't swim there, how people's drinking water was threatened. You remember that before EPA, before there was this bipartisan commitment to clean up one of the greatest of the Great Lakes. You remember that.

Obviously, this President doesn't know this. This President won his election based on winning these Great Lakes States, and he has abandoned these States by drastically cutting funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Those of us along the Great Lakes didn't stand for a budget that eliminated GLRI last year. Nothing has changed this year. Ohioans on both sides of the aisle will go to the mat for our lake.

I am working with Senator Portman--I am a Democrat; he is a Republican--and my Ohio colleagues from both parties to protect it. Budget cuts are terrible for this; climate change will only make it worse.

When I was young, people wrote off Lake Erie as a polluted, dying lake. As I said, I remember seeing it. I remember smelling it. I remember hearing people talk about it. Many, many people thought that there wasn't much future for this Great Lake, that it would be impossible to clean up.

People in the past have had a habit of not just writing off Lake Erie but also writing off my State. We have proved them wrong time and again. We proved them wrong back then, we proved them wrong today, and we will prove them wrong in the future.

Our lake is improving. It is supporting an entire industry. It supports the jobs it creates. It is providing drinking water and recreation and so much more to communities across our State, and we can't allow climate change to ruin that progress. We cannot write off Lake Erie. We cannot write off the millions of Ohioans and people from Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota who depend on these five Great Lakes.

I see it up close. I live only 5 or 6 miles from the lake. I know what it means for my community. I know how important this is for the future--the environmental future--of our country, the economic future of my State. It is important for all of us to come together on a bipartisan basis.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, when you went to a local bank in Mansfield, OH, to buy a house 30, 40, or 50 years ago, you knew the lender, and the lender knew you. You saw him or her at the grocery store. Maybe they went to your church or synagogue. Your kids probably went to the same school. You knew that your deposits at the bank helped fund your neighbor's house or the hardware store down the street. A lot of banks and credit unions don't work this way.

The 2008 crisis taught us that finance has changed. Now a mortgage in Zanesville, OH, is diced and sliced and sold to an investor in Zurich, Switzerland. Banks in Frankfurt place bets on loans in Fostoria.

When the system went bust a decade ago and predatory loans began to fail, Ohio taxpayers picked up the tab, including for foreign banks headquartered an ocean away. The Federal Reserve opened up a spigot of cheap money to keep the global economy from tanking. Banks in Spain, France, Japan, Canada, and Korea all came to the United States for help to weather the financial storm.

Think about this. An analysis of the Fed's lending from February 2008 to 2009 showed that the vast majority of loans went to foreign banks. After the crisis, records released to the public showed that foreign banks took more than 70 percent of the Fed's loans during the crisis and 65 percent of loans from other emergency programs.

Under one bailout scheme, British Barclays alone borrowed $232 billion from the Fed at a sweetheart interest rate--the kind of rate a hardware store in Hillsboro, OH, could never get on a loan to keep them afloat back in 2008. Think about that. British Barclays got a sweetheart deal, a better deal than a hardware store in Ohio could get from a bank.

After the crisis, Congress responded with a law, the Wall Street reform act, to ensure that taxpayers would never again have to send bailout money to British and Swiss megabanks. We ordered the Fed to keep a closer eye on the big banks--to use their power to make sure the largest global banks did not again crash the economy.

Congress instructed that the Fed apply the strictest protections to the biggest banks--those with more than $50 billion in assets. We know that.

When the Fed implemented these rules, they applied some standards to banks that have more than $50 billion across the globe, but for global banks that have more than $50 billion in the United States, the Fed applied the strongest standards. For foreign banks with not only trillions worldwide but systemic operations in the United States, the Fed wrote rules that are as strict as those for our domestic megabanks, standards that former Fed Governor Dan Tarullo called ``special prudential measures.'' They are standards that ensure that we only import Swiss chocolate, not Swiss bank failures. These special measures are important.

Last year, the Office of Financial Research released a report showing that foreign banks in the United States are riskier than similarly sized U.S. regional banks. Hear that again. Foreign banks in the United States are riskier than similarly sized U.S. regional banks. Think of that in terms of what this bill that we just voted cloture on actually does.

This legislation threatens to undo important rules protecting us from risk. The legislation puts taxpayers on the hook for bailouts. That is what the Congressional Budget Office said.

Under this bill, foreign banks that took billions in bailouts would be able to take more risk under a less watchful eye. Who are some of them? Deutsche Bank, Santander, and UBS would all be treated more like they were an Ohio regional bank. Deutsche Bank, the Trump family's personal business bank; Santander, the bank in Spain that repossessed the cars of hundreds of service men and women cars while those service men and women were serving our country overseas; UBS, the Swiss bank that illegally financed Iranian activities--they would all be treated more like they were Huntington in Columbus, or Fifth Third in Cincinnati, or KeyBank in Cleveland. What is right about that? What is fair about that? What is smart about that?

Don't take my word for it. Secretary Mnuchin sat right in front of the Banking Committee; Senator Crapo, the chairman, and I, as the ranking member, looked straight at him just a few weeks ago. He confirmed that this bill would treat foreign banks with up to $250 billion in assets the same as U.S. regional banks. So they are up to $250 billion, just like Huntington, just like KeyCorp, just like Fifth Third in Ohio. Secretary Mnuchin said: We are going to treat those foreign banks the same if they are up to $250 billion in assets. That may be the first direct answer I have ever heard from Secretary Mnuchin. I sit on the Finance Committee and the Banking Committee, and he has trouble giving direct answers. He did at least that time.

It makes sense because he was just confirming his intention. From what he and the Treasury Department wrote in a report last year, that is precisely what this administration wants to do. That is what they said in this report that we should do--deregulate these foreign banks that have assets under $250 billion in the United States. They wrote it into their banking deregulation blueprint back in June.

I give credit to Secretary Mnuchin, and I give credit to the Trump administration. While I don't give them credit for the White House looking like a retreat for Wall Street executives, I do give them credit for at least finally owning up in that report, in the legislation, and in his answer to my question in the Banking Committee hearing that, yes, they are going to deregulate these foreign, huge megabanks--Deutsche, Santander, UBS, and Barclays--as long as they have under $250 billion of assets in the United States, and they do.

Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Fed, is worried, as I am, that this bill deregulates the U.S. operations of foreign banks. Sarah Bloom Raskin, former Fed Governor and Deputy Treasury Secretary, said this bill ``removes necessary guardrails that were installed to reduce the chances of foreign megabanks drawing on U.S. bailout funds.''

I have watched the Presiding Officer--the junior Senator from Oklahoma--serve with integrity and honesty. I don't think you, any of my colleagues on this side of the aisle, or anybody else wants to face the voters 5 years from now, 10 years from now if what we voted on today and will vote on this week results in our bailing out foreign banks. Americans were angry that we bailed out the big U.S. megabanks. Imagine the anger if the story is focused more precisely on the fact that we bailed out foreign banks--which we actually did--but the story was more about Wall Street. Imagine if that were the story.

Former Treasury officials Michael Barr and Antonio Weiss are worried that this bill is rolling back rules that protect the U.S. economy from foreign bank risk. The former CFTC Chairman, Gary Gensler, thinks we need to amend this bill to make sure that foreign banks don't get a windfall. These are across-the-board regulators, present, past, Republicans, Democrats. That is quite a list of watchdogs, but what is most interesting: Do you know who else is under the impression this bill helps foreign banks? Foreign bank lobbyists.

I offered an amendment during the committee markup to close the loophole. I am offering it again on the Senate floor if Republican leadership allows amendments on the Senate floor. My amendment would have ensured that foreign megabanks in the United States are watched over just as closely as Wall Street banks. They are roughly the same size; some are bigger, but because their assets are smaller in the United States, we are going to treat them like Huntington and Key and Fifth Third rather than treating them like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Foreign bank lobbyists--they are American citizens. They are lobbyists for foreign banks; they are not foreign lobbyists, a difference. These lobbyists for foreign banks, representing Deutsche and UBS--most of them--wrote a letter opposing my amendment, saying it was unfair for me to try to keep these rules in place. They said their banks should be treated like U.S. regional banks, not like the global giants they are. That amendment was defeated in the committee; we will leave it at that.

Now, why is that such a problem? Let's look at the rap sheet on some of these foreign banks. Santander, a Spanish bank, failed a stress test 3 years in a row. It would have its rules rolled back under this bill. Stress tests are exercises, as my colleagues know, to ensure that a bank can survive an economic downturn without a bailout. So this Spanish bank, Santander, failed not once, not twice but three times. What that failure means--most people, if they fail three times, they flunk out. If they fail three times, they get in this bill, and they get a potential bailout. What is smart about that? What is honorable about that? What is good economic policy about that? What is fair about that? What is just about that?

In addition to failing its stress test, it is a bank that illegally repossessed cars from 1,100 American service men and women while they were serving our country. I spend a lot of time at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the largest employer in Ohio. I see all kinds of financial institutions that prey on those young airmen and their families. Airmen and women, young Americans serving in the Air Force-- particularly when they are 18, 19, 20, 21 years old--are more financially vulnerable. They are a little less sophisticated than somebody 10 years older. They don't make much money. Their families are always anxious when their husband or wife or mother or father serve overseas. This Spanish bank repossessed the cars of 1,100 American service men and women while they were serving our country. We are going to give them a break?

This is a bank that overcharged racial and ethnic minorities for car loans. It is a bank that violated a Federal order to keep more capital and instead improperly paid out money to its shareholders, and we are going to give them a break? I don't pretend to understand the thinking of that.

This bill helps Deutsche Bank, which the IMF called ``the most important net contributor to systemic risks'' of all worldwide banks. Deutsche Bank, a German bank, one of the biggest banks in the world, the International Monetary Fund called it ``the most important net contributor to systemic risks'' of all worldwide banks.

Deutsche Bank is the only bank that would lend to the Trump family economic empire. Even after all of its failed business deals, they kept lending, for whatever reason, to businessman Trump and the family. This is a bank that every week is met with a new request for information on shady financial arrangements with people in the White House.

I don't think my colleagues and I were sent here to serve Deutsche Bank. I am thinking none of us goes back in our campaigns--I am on the ballot this year. I am not going to go back and say: Please reelect me so I can help Deutsche Bank, so I can bail them out, so I can pass a bill that will actually give them something they don't deserve.

This bill would also help banks like Barclays and UBS and BNP Paribas--banks that have rigged interest rates, helped people avoid paying taxes, violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and Sudan, and manipulated energy markets. These aren't banks down the street lending to homeowners in Sandusky or businesses in Findlay or small companies in my hometown of Mansfield; these are some of the most complex global banks. They hold $1.4 trillion in assets. That is $1,400 billion--$1.4 trillion--in assets in the United States and more than $14 trillion in assets abroad.

Listen to Paul Volker, listen to Sarah Bloom Raskin, listen to Gary Gensler, listen to Michael Barr and Antonio Weiss. Believe Secretary Mnuchin when he tells you what he wants to do. Believe the lobbyists for these foreign banks when they say that is what they want. That is why they oppose this amendment. This bill gives them exactly what they want.

Let me talk about one change made to the substitute amendment. Because I have come to this floor and some others have joined me in objecting to this foreign bank provision, the leadership--Senator McConnell and his office, I assume, down the way--I assume they huddled and thought: We have to answer this somehow; we have to at least look like we care about prohibiting a bailout of foreign banks. So they made a change in the substitute. The new version of the bill came out last week. There is a new provision that provides some window dressing. It is a figleaf protection to try to convince the public that this bill doesn't do what it actually does. It doesn't actually help Santander; it doesn't actually help UBS; it doesn't actually help Barclays; it doesn't actually help the President's bank, Deutsche Bank--but it actually does. The provision provides some vague, ambiguous language and puts the question to the Fed: You can regulate the foreign banks or not; it is your choice. It doesn't require the Fed to deregulate. It doesn't stop the foreign banks from suing if the Fed doesn't obey their requests.

Why not just prohibit? Why not just say: No, we are not going to do it. But they don't want to do that. They want to keep that door open because they know the regulators on FSOC, whether it is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jay Clayton, whether it is Mr. Otting of the SEC, whether it is Secretary Mnuchin, or whomever they put at any of these, we know what they are going to do. They have already said what they are growing to do.

Even a writer at the Wall Street Journal agrees, saying it will be up to the Fed to decide whether Deutsche Bank ``deserves a tighter leash.''

So we are expected--we, in a pretty much party-line vote, because most Democrats think you don't want Wall Street people in these positions regulating the banks, in a party-line vote, Randal Quarles was confirmed. His job is to be the Director of Supervision at the Federal Reserve. So we are expected to trust Randal Quarles not to weaken the rules in the foreign banks--to trust Quarles, even though he himself missed the last crisis. He predicted as late as, I believe, 2007, as a member of the Bush administration, that the economy was great, the banks weren't under duress, any of that. It might have been 2006, but I think 2007. He missed the last crisis and, I might add, he personally profited from Wall Street malfeasance. I am not saying he did it on purpose, but he personally profited because of Wall Street malfeasance.

We are supposed to trust Quarles, even though just last week he spoke at an international bankers conference, where a lot of those foreign bank representatives and lobbyists were in attendance, including CEOs and other executives, and he promised those bankers regulatory relief.

So we have the head of supervision at the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States--one of the most powerful people in this country-- speaking to an international bankers group saying: Yes, we are going to give you regulatory relief. Aren't you lucky you came to this conference because I am in charge of these issues at the Federal Reserve, and I am going to help you get regulatory relief as a foreign bank. Congratulations.

Finally, this last point is technical, but it is important. The bills make sure that a globally systemic U.S. bank will not benefit from any deregulation, even if it has fewer than $250 billion in assets, but the bill doesn't even do the same for foreign banks.

Let me repeat. State Street has fewer than $250 billion in assets. State Street is called a custodial bank, located in Boston, as the Presiding Officer knows. It has fewer than $250 billion in assets. The bill says, because that bank is systemically significant, it doesn't get a free pass. This legislation says that about State Street, but it doesn't say the same for similarly--or, I would argue, way more--risky foreign banks in the United States.

My amendment would close that loophole. It treats systemically risky foreign banks like systemically risky U.S. banks. Why? Because why treat Barclays and Santander and UBS and Deutsche Bank better than we treat Huntington or Fifth Third or Key or Regents in Alabama or any of these regional banks--many of which we want to help. If we want to help community banks and credit unions and our regional banks to do the right thing, let's help them. Foreign megabanks shouldn't get another chance of a handout from American taxpayers--never.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.