Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, this is one of the most important bills to come before the Congress. I hope it has bipartisan support, because, indeed, people of all income ranges have credit card debt. And the actions of the credit card companies in changing due dates and other features hurt everybody. This is crippling Americans, consumers, with interest, debt and fees.

We had a committee meeting--I am chairman of Commercial and Administrative Law--on this subject. The credit card industry told us they couldn't change their computers quicker than 2 years to get ready to do such a bill. I would submit if we can put a man on the Moon, the banks can get their computers fixed to deal with this bill, and they should.

We had an amendment we offered in committee on college students. College students are most vulnerable and shouldn't be lured to credit cards at an early age and put into even more debt than student loans do by offering prizes and gifts.

I support the bill and hope we can go further in the future or with the Senate.

Thank you, Chairman Conyers. I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this bill of which I am a sponsor.

The gentleman who just spoke, who I respect, talked about the Founding Fathers and what has happened to our country. Well, it is a great country and I love our country, and it was a great country when it was founded. But when it was founded, women didn't have the right to vote and African Americans weren't citizens.

It takes time to perfect your law and to become a more perfect Union, and that is what this law is doing. It is taking an effort to perfect and make better our laws to reflect the society we have today and the thinking and the mindset that we have and the understanding of what happens in law.

If we go all the way back to always the Founding Fathers, we would have slaves, we would have second-class citizens--which are women--and we wouldn't have any rights for anybody that wasn't a white male who owned property.

Times have changed, and thank God they are changing today, Mr. Speaker. The fact is, this has no effect on anybody that speaks about hate crimes. It doesn't affect any minister that speaks from the pulpit. We have had hate crimes in this country in State legislatures, and Federal law as well, for decades, and no preacher or person using the spoken Word has ever been prosecuted or charged with a crime, and never would.

This law goes further than any law ever because it specifically says that no First Amendment rights or rights guaranteed through freedom of speech will be abridged or, because of the exercise thereof, have any charge brought against a person who exercises those rights. Never before has that been in a law that we have had here.

So more rights are given to people, even though it is unnecessary to give them because there is no problem, it is basically simply to guarantee and assure people, to calm their concerns.

People talk about people not being able to preach against people being gay. The fact is they can do it, and the fact is the Ten Commandments tell you not to bear false witness. And people who submit that preachers could be arrested for preaching against homosexuality, which they do today, that they

could be arrested, there is a commandment about that, ``Don't bear false witness.'' This is a good law.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and achievements of noted historian and visionary, John Hope Franklin.

I have a copy of Professor John Hope Franklin's book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans in my office. The manual has been an invaluable reference text for me for many years. It was one of my college textbooks while I was an undergrad at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Born in 1915 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, John Hope Franklin was the grandson of a slave. He went on to become one of the most prolific chroniclers of civil rights history in America.

Professor Franklin was just 4 or 5 years old when he witnessed the horror of the Tulsa Race riots of 1921. Under Chairman Conyer's Judiciary Committee, I was fortunate enough to meet Professor Franklin in 2007. He came to testify in a hearing before Congress urging the passage of legislation that would clear the way for survivors of the riots in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa to sue. The hearing's main effort was to extend the statute of limitations survivors' claims.

John Hope Franklin was a graduate of Fisk University, a historically African-American university in my home State of Tennessee; he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

In 1956, Dr. John Hope Franklin became the first African-American Chairman of the History Department at the all-white Brooklyn College.

Dr. Franklin's research contributed to the success of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund. Officially, Dr. Franklin was a part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team that helped develop the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case that forever changed the face of public education in this country.

In 1982, he became the first African American professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke University.

In 1995, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in our country. Dr. Franklin received the National Freedom Award in 2007 from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee for his influence over the state of civil and human rights in America.

Dr. John Hope Franklin has been honored by the nation's two oldest learned societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

John Hope Franklin integrated the African American narrative into the fabric of American history. He made us recognize that African American history is the history of all of us.

Currently the Judiciary Committee, Chairman Conyers, and I are working on H.R. 1843, the John Hope Franklin Tulsa-Greenwood Race Riot Claims Accountability Act of 2009. H.R. 1843 provides that any Greenwood, Oklahoma, claimant (a survivor or heir/descendent of victims of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Race Riot of 1921) who has not previously obtained a determination on the merits of a Greenwood claim may, in a civil action commenced within five years after enactment of this Act, obtain that determination. Simply put, this is the legislation that stemmed from the 2007 hearing where I met Professor Franklin. This legislation extends the statute of limitations for survivors and survivors' claims.

Thank you, John Hope Franklin.

Mr. Speaker, during the break, the director of police in Memphis, Tennessee, Director Larry Godwin, called me. He called me to thank me for the COPS bill. He called me to thank me because he was going to hire 125 policemen in the next fiscal year and 125 in the following fiscal year and those would be hired because of COPS monies that were in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Director Godwin and I have known each other for a long time because I started my career as the attorney for the Memphis Police Department, attended International Association of Chiefs of Police meetings, and know that the patrol is a deterrent to crime. Patrol is the first way to stop crime.

These COPS programs hire more policemen, put them on the street, and oftentimes in innovative community policing activities.

The Afro American Police Association, Lieutenant Curry, and others have talked to me about community policing and how it helps my community reduce crime.

My Mayor, Willie Harrington, has asked me to come to Washington and work to get more COPS money and help him with putting more cops on the street; and that was one of the first things I wanted to do here. I'm a cosponsor of this bill. I am a proud supporter of it, and voted for the Recovery and Reinvestment Act because crime is a serious issue all over this country.

We support policemen in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to support policemen all over this country and protect our citizens from crime.

The crime rate is going up. And by supporting this COPS bill you can make a difference. You can keep citizens alive and reduce crime. This is an effective deterrent to crime. It's what the policemen on the street tell me. It's why the Office of the United States Mayors has endorsed this bill.

I rely on the United States Mayors, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, my cops on the street, and my experience as a police legal advisor.

And I appreciate Mr. Weiner for bringing this bill, and I'm proud to be a sponsor, and urge this House to pass it.

Mr. Speaker, I depend on my mayor, my police director and the citizens of my community who have e-mailed me and told me, we want more policemen; we want more deterrent. We need a safer community and a neighborhood. We want our children safe. We want our old people safe, and I'll respond to them. That's the number of policemen that we need is enough to satisfy my mayor.

It's not as simple as math. But I know this: There were funds that were voted for Iraq that I voted against to protect the people in Baghdad. I want to protect the people in Memphis, Tennessee.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Conyers for the time and for being the lead sponsor on this important legislation. I greatly respect my colleague from Texas, the ranking member, but I would have to disagree with his perspectives on the bill.

First of all, it does not rewrite contracts whatsoever. It just gives a court the opportunity in a contested hearing, with the United States on one side and the recipient of what is alleged fraudulent transfer or excessive compensation or bonus on the other side, to argue whether that compensation was a fraudulent transfer and was excessive and was beyond what would be dictated in the economic conditions and times that the payment was made.

I think that is the American way to have issues such as this determined before a neutral and detached magistrate based on the facts and on the law of this country. This would be applying a fraudulent transfer law which 45 States have and that has existed in common law for many, many years.

The manager's amendment, which makes the bill, is different from the original bill that did have some controversy about the question of its constitutionality. There were several esteemed judicial minds who felt that

the original bill was constitutional, a majority of people whose opinions were sought and who replied, but it is almost unanimous agreement that this bill is constitutional. None other than Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School and others have taken the position that this is constitutional.

The public was justly outraged, as were many Members of this Congress--I suspect nearly every Member of this Congress--at the size of the bonuses paid to AIG. AIG, Merrill Lynch and other companies were given money, Mr. Speaker, because they were going to be broke. They were broke. They had recklessly ruined their stockholders' investments and had put this country on the verge of economic collapse. Because of that, it was necessary for the United States Congress to respond, both under President Bush and President Obama, and to put moneys into these institutions to make them whole, hopefully, with the idea that they would be lending money to the American consumer and to American businesses to get the economy moving again.

Unfortunately, what some of these people did--Merrill Lynch was one, and AIG was another--is they used these moneys in ways that were not intended, sometimes parceling them out to their associate companies in Europe as well as here, by giving out bonuses called ``retention bonuses'' or other types of bonuses in excess of $1 million and sometimes up to $6 million. The individuals who got these bonuses would have gotten nothing if it were not for the United States' money coming in to make those companies solvent, with the purpose of making them solvent and able to lend money to businesses to get our economy moving--to stimulate our economy. Instead of that, they stimulated each other, and did something to the American public that has not been done since, maybe, to Sabine women. It was the wrong thing to do.

For this purpose, it was important that Congress responded to protect the taxpayer and to protect the Treasury. We passed a bill last week concerning taxes. This is a fairly narrowly drawn bill, surgically drawn to only allow courts to make these decisions on companies that have over $5 billion worth of assets--not community banks, not small folks--but big folks who got big bucks who then put big bucks out to their employees who basically, in many cases, were the people who recklessly put those companies on the verge of collapse, and the American economy and the world economy on the verge of collapse.

It shocks the public conscience, and any of those bonuses should be void against public policy, and because they would be void against public policy, this Congress appropriately acted with legislation. I am proud to stand with Chairman Conyers and with other members of the Judiciary Committee who brought this legislation that has been reviewed by scholars and that has been found to be constitutional and that gives the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, the opportunity to bring fraudulent transfer charges into court where a judge can make a decision on whether or not the moneys should or should not be expended.

So I urge all of my colleagues to vote as to what is appropriate--to void this act against public policy and against the unjust enrichment of people who have been reckless with our public dollars and earlier with their private dollars and with their stockholders' dollars and to put the whole situation back in balance.

Mr. Speaker, this Congress' Budget Committee worked long into the night last night to prepare a budget for the House to vote on. It's a budget that cuts the deficit by two-thirds by the year 2013, and gives a tax cut for 95 percent of the American people.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, the middle class and 95 percent of the people will get a tax cut, not simply the upper 1 percent who have gotten the tax cuts while we have been Bush-whacked over the 8 years of the Bush- Cheney Presidency and a Congress that's now run off the tracks and threatened the world's economy.

We're going to invest in health care to give people affordable health care, invest in education so the Chinese don't lead us in science and math, and we can maintain our position as the world's number one economic power and also invest in renewable energies so we're not dependent on Middle Eastern oil, and a Defense Department that needs to protect those routes to keep America secure; a budget that is a promising budget for the future to creates jobs.

I am proud of the Budget Committee and look forward to supporting the President.

The American public wants to see bipartisanship and they want to see Democrats and Republicans work together. This is my second Congress I have served in, and it's disappointing to me to see a new President--who was elected with overwhelming numbers and overwhelming support--not get bipartisan support and help on his efforts.

I don't agree with President Obama on everything that he is trying to do to get us out of the economic morass that the Republican Congress and the previous President and Vice President left us in. But I support our President because I know we have one executive authority and one Treasury Department that needs to have a direction to get us on the road to prosperity.

It is disappointing that people just criticize, criticize, criticize. The fact is we need to spend to stimulate this economy and we need a recovery package as well as a reinvestment package to get this economy moving, and that's what is being offered. It's being geared toward the middle class that's being forgotten.

On the other side, they talk about preserving prosperity for our children and our grandchildren. Most people in this country--95 percent--don't have prosperity, and they need help. The Democratic budget will help them with health care, jobs, and education.

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend our President, the administration, for the bold action they took today to help resolve our economic morass that we are expressing because of the past administration and the lack of regulations by this Congress. The stock market responded positively with a 500-point gain.

I think it's important that people recognize the good that the administration is doing and trying to do, that we need to work together as a team, as Americans.

After 9/11, Republicans and Democrats came together to support the President and support us in a great crisis. This is an economic 9/11. People should support the President and not do critical things.

Some of them have even suggested, oh, he had time to fill out his NCAA bracket, where he correctly had the Memphis Tigers going to the Sweet Sixteen. There's nothing wrong with that. President Obama is good on the Sweet Sixteen, and he's good on the economy.

Mr. Speaker, Democrats and Republicans may disagree on things, and people in my city of Memphis may disagree on things over the years. But one thing that brings us together is March Madness, the NCAA tournament which tips off this morning.

In that tournament will be my home team, the University of Memphis Tigers. They have the longest winning streak in the country, 25 games, and they have the Coach of the Year in John Calipari. We have a great team that came just inches away from winning the national championship last year.

We were seeded number two this year rather than number one where we should have been. But this is the opportunity to show who deserves to be seeded number one. The University of Memphis Tigers that bring my community together and do something that basketball and sports can do for this country in bringing us together in difficult times and giving us a pastime that is so important will do well, and our city will cheer for them and see that they do well.

President Obama has picked them to make the Final Four. He was correct. He picked them to lose to Louisville; he was wrong. We will do well.

Go Tigers.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may be permitted to extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on H. Con. Res. 76.

Mr. Speaker, today is the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war. We Americans need to remember all those who have made sacrifices because of this war, the 4,259 service men and service women who have given their lives in this conflict.

One of the soldiers who paid the ultimate sacrifice was Specialist Christopher Fox of Memphis, a constituent of mine, who was based in Fort Carson, Colorado.

Only 21 years old, he was on a second tour in Iraq, was due to be discharged from the Army in July of this year. He was looking forward to attending the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, possibly to play football and to study criminal justice. He hoped to be a police officer so his military training would not have gone to waste after he left the service.

But Specialist Fox did not make it home alive. He died in Iraq on September 29, 2008, of wounds sustained when he encountered small-arms fire while on patrol. On this anniversary of the war, we need to remember these sacrifices and do what we can to honor the memory and the wishes of the soldier who has given the ultimate sacrifice.

Specialist Fox wanted his mother figure, not his mother, who was deceased, but his mother figure, a woman who was awarded temporary custody when he was 17, to oversee his burial arrangements, as soldiers are asked to designate someone. Her name was listed on the form that he filled out to direct the disposition of his remains. However, because of current Federal law, it is prohibited that servicemembers designate nonrelatives to make those arrangements.

It is a travesty, Mr. Speaker, that our laws do not allow a soldier's wishes to be honored, especially for something as final, as simple, and as appropriate and meaningful as the disposition of their remains.

Someone who puts their life on the line in defense of their country should be allowed to have whomever they wish to make arrangements for their memorial service. I attended his memorial service in West Memphis, Arkansas. There were few people there. There were no other public officials.

It was unfortunate that even his mother figure wasn't able to make it, she was in Knoxville. But if she would have had the opportunity to make the arrangements, I think we would have seen something different.

It is with this experience that I, along with Congressman John Duncan of Tennessee, where his mother figure lived and where he otherwise might have been buried, and Dana Rohrabacher of California, Congresswoman Watson and Congresswoman Gwen Moore are filing the Honor the Written Intent of Our Soldier Heroes Act today, or Honor the WISH Act.

This bill will allow service men and women to designate whomever they want to direct the disposition of their remains. I hope my fellow Congress people will join me in sponsoring this act and help move it forward for passage. It seems only appropriate and fitting that we honor the wishes of our soldiers.

Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to read that President Bush made his first address since he left the Office of President yesterday in Canada. President Bush said that he loved his country more than he loved his party, and he wished President Obama success. I thought that was really telling. President Bush, while I differed with him on many policies and many of his initiatives, I always felt he was a good and decent person. And I think what he said showed that in many ways he is.

I wish that the people on the other side of the aisle, rather than coming here and constantly bringing up false information about our current President, wishing him ill will--which of course Rush Limbaugh has done, the leader of the other side, and others, like former Vice President Cheney, who came out for television on Saturday and had some statements that were very inappropriate for a former Vice President to make this quickly after he has left office. There is a certain time when Presidents and Vice Presidents should go back to their private lives, maybe practice shooting, and learning how to shoot in a proper direction and not jeopardize their friends, and do other things, but not necessarily take shots at the new President of the United States and not claim that the American public is less safe, which is not in any way true. As my colleague here from Kentucky has well spoke in a 5 minute recently, the other side of the story and the full side of the story showed history that we are safer.

But the bottom line is, President Bush said he wished our country well, his country came before party. And it gets tiring to be here and hear the other side take shots and shots and shots and hoping they can win in 2012 and take back this House in 2010 rather than working for the American public and the American government.

We are at a very critical time, caused by years of lack of regulation and deficit spending, wars that we didn't need to be into, loss of life and monies, and lack of regulation that Mr. Paulson was responsible for in giving AIG this money, and in many other ways, without regulations and restrictions on benefits. And President Obama has had to deal with that.

I support our President. And I am proud to be a Member of this Congress trying to lead this country out of the abyss of which it seemed to be heading at the end of this last term.

I am also proud to join in a few minutes with my fellow sophomore Majority Makers, Mr. Klein of Florida and Mr. Yarmuth of Kentucky. We're called the Majority Makers because we did take this Congress in 2006 back, but it was after 12 years of Republican control in the House and Senate, 1994 to 2006, and a Republican administration that caused the deficit problems, caused the budget problems, caused the economic crisis. We plan to bring it out.

I appreciate the opportunity to join my colleagues and particularly to follow my colleague from Louisville, which my basketball team, Memphis, also follows as the second team in the ESPN coaches' poll, Louisville being first. That won't last for long for the tournament starts and we're all on an equal footing and Memphis will once again be first, as they have been in many people's minds.

This situation with AIG is just hard to fathom that it could come about. When we had the Six for '06 when we started this Congress, we had six laws that we wanted to pass, and one of them was the minimum wage. And the minimum wage had been impossible to pass through 10 years of a Republican-controlled Congress. We increased that minimum wage for the first time in 10 or 12 years, and I think it was 12 years, where people making just $5 and $6 an hour were getting a very small increase, and this was done over the horror of certain people in business. And now we hear of people who are making $6.5 million bonuses in a year when their company lost money and would have gone bankrupt but for the bailout by Mr. Paulson and President Bush and have basically taken the financial economic situation in the country and put it in great peril. Having gambled and lost and jeopardized the entire world economic structure, they paid themselves bonuses in the area of $1 million to $6.5 million. And it's hard to see the contrast in perspectives in this Congress and this country when certain people just want a minimum wage and others get away with millions of dollars in bonuses for doing next to nothing.

I had a man come into my office last week, and I had checked him out on the Internet beforehand, and his salary the previous year was about $2 million. He had a company where the stock had gone from $45 to $1.50, and he told me that he was working for nothing. I thought, well, that was noble. I said, ``Are you really working for nothing?''

He said, ``Virtually nothing. Look at what happened to my net worth.''

I said, ``How about your salary?''

He said, ``No, I'm taking my salary, but I'm taking less of a bonus this year.''

Well, I thought that was unbelievable. His salary is in the millions. He's taking less of a bonus because of the stock's going from $45 to $1.50. And he said it with a straight face. I'm sure he wasn't in favor of the minimum wage. And there's something wrong with this country where people who work 40-hour weeks can't get a basic minimum wage and other people who think they're the masters of the universe and who have almost destroyed this universe want to get millions and millions of dollars and particularly now from government-handed-out moneys to save businesses from going under.

Well, I'm on the Judiciary Committee, and in the Judiciary Committee, we had a bill today which we voted out which would give the Attorney General the power, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, to recoup those moneys paid in the past and to stop those types of expenditures in the future on compensation to people who are part of businesses that have gotten extraordinary government relief, $10 billion or more in government support, and but for the government moneys they would be in bankruptcy and taking the theory of bankruptcy and the theory of the laws against fraudulent conveyances that all States have and limiting the amount of moneys that they can give out to their management employees to a very decent amount. And that law would allow that money to be recaptured and prohibited in the future from those types of individuals.

When you have a fraudulent conveyance, it's assumed that you're paying money to preferred creditors at the expense of others. In this situation when AIG went ahead and said they were bound by contract to pay their gamblers, that they did it because they were bound to, the fact is these were fraudulent conveyances and but for the government they'd have had no money to pay them and they didn't earn any bonuses. Now, they were retention bonuses. Some of the people have already left. I don't know why they'd give retention bonuses to people who lost, but that's what happened. And I am pleased that the Judiciary Committee voted the bill out. It will probably come to the floor next week. It's a new way to approach this and an opportunity for constitutional experts to come together and fashion this unique approach for an unusual circumstance.

We see the taxpayer and the American Treasury being raped, and in such a situation if it's criminal law, you allow for police to take extraordinary actions with either the use of deadly force or the opportunities to apprehend somebody about to commit a crime in hot pursuit. And I think what the Judiciary Committee is proposing and what the Congress is doing, in essence, is hot pursuit to stop a violent felony from occurring to our Treasury by people who are morally reprehensible in taking this money at this time.

I don't know if my colleagues have thought too much about it, but I suspect there are other companies who have been paid billions of dollars by AIG, as they revealed this week under pressure, that are paying bonuses to their executives as well. The old Merrill Lynch and whatever their successor name is now; Goldman Sachs, I believe they might have been paid. Other companies, the banks have been paid moneys, and they're probably paying out bonuses as well with taxpayer money that's gone through AIG, and we need to look at that as well. These companies also are getting government support, and I'm sure they're paying out bonuses. And the names of every single one of those individuals who've receive bonuses from any of these companies should be published. The head of AIG said they're not putting the names out because they're concerned about the safety of the individuals, but that ought tell you that what they did was wrong. Criminals don't want to be exposed to the public because the public would come get them in some type of personal posse. They would form their own groups, a posse comitatus, and come get them. And if they don't want to be revealed, obviously they did something wrong. If they did something good, they'd want to have their posters up and not in the post office.

So I'm proud the Judiciary Committee acted today, and I'm proud this House is going to act tomorrow. What's happened has made me, as one congressman, a representative of the people, extremely upset, and I had several thoughts about the French Revolution and what drove people to that. And if we were looking at this 200 and some odd years ago, we would have seen the guillotine being brought out because this is the type of thing that is absolutely revolting and it needs to stop. And I think there has been too much of this in our society where people just think that they are the masters of the universe on Wall Street. They've caused a cataclysmic condition. They've been rewarded for too long. And they have what is known in the Yiddish language as chutzpah, and we ought to call this the ``chutzpah act of the 21st century.''

I thank Mr. Klein for the opportunity to speak here on this floor.

Thank you. I would like to ask a question of one of my colleagues. Either of you can answer it.

I know the hedge funds, and they are involved in all of this as well, and the

hedge funds folks were making enormous amounts of money, unfathomable amounts of money. They are taxed at capital gains rates, which is like, what, 15 percent instead of ordinary income, which a person on minimum wage is paying ordinary income. Of course, they are a lower rate, but still ordinary income.

Didn't we try to do something in the last Congress to try to change that taxing scheme of the hedge funds and find some problem and some pushback maybe from the administration? Do you recall that?

Let me ask a question, too, of my colleagues. The hedge funds monies, I think that's something, I thought we had a proposal on it, and I thought it got passed through the House, I'm not sure, to raise that, but that was an issue that came up and maybe there was a problem in the Caucus as well on taxing the hedge fund folks at regular income.

That's something that needs to happen, because it's outrageous. The money that they make and then the monies that they are taxed on is such a low percentage.

There was a lot of deregulation. The banks were deregulated, the financial services, and banks got into doing different things than they used to be able to do in savings and loans. Do you believe that we need to go back to some of these types of regulations to get into a more conservative type of financial structure?

Well, thank you, sir. The SEC has a new leader--Ms. Mary Schapiro is her name--and I have confidence she's going to provide the regulation we need. In the past administration, the SEC was woefully understaffed, and I think when there were

whistleblowers, they weren't listened to. I believe, if I'm correct, there was a whistleblower on the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and there was a Ponzi scheme that was through Dallas, Texas, and in my city of Memphis with a company called Stanford Financial that has taken a lot of people's investments, claimed they were buying CDs in an island in the Caribbean--I think Antigua--and in fact they weren't doing it. A lot of people have lost all of their investments. A lot of people lost all of their investments with Madoff.

They were not regulated. And that is what the SEC needs to do, is have regulations on all these companies to make sure they're really doing what they say they're doing and to listen to whistleblowers and to have investigative staffs. Money invested in government in these areas can save people in the long run. There are people who wished we had spent that money because they're not going to have their monies, and if they don't have their monies, it's going to hurt the Treasury as well because they are not having to have money for spending.

I believe you're on Financial Services, are you not, Mr. Braley.

A lot of people have talked about mark-to-market changes, and I think Mr. Kanjorski talked about that today, and also on the uptick rule. Are these two changes that you think might come about soon? And, if they do, do you think they will be helpful in having a more fair and just and realistic perspective on the valuations and on trading in the stock market?

I yield.

Thank you, Mr. Klein. It's an issue I've heard from a lot of brokers about what they think would help the stock market, but they also think that the uptick rule would require people that at least own some stock and to have a trade take place before they shorted it, and basically win by the economy losing.

That's not the American way. And it's what has happened in the stock market so much, and in other ways in the stock market. People have manipulated the market. Hedge funds have manipulated the market to destroy companies and to make money while they did it, and to become fabulously wealthy.

This is where regulation is so important. We haven't had regulation in this previous administration. The market didn't work. The market needs regulating because if you let people go unchecked, greed comes into play. We've seen the utmost of greed.

I think Mr. Braley's wonderful new AIG is something that will take fire.

I thank the gentleman.

I just join with my colleagues in saying how much of an honor it is to have the opportunity to try to clean up this mess. And as I started earlier, President Bush is to be commended for saying he hopes this President succeeds. He puts his country before his party. And I hope that his colleagues and the members of his party will listen to him and not to his Vice President, who broke the code of silence before it should have been broken.

With that, I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. Speaker, we have had a change in America. We have gone from a previous President who for 8 years didn't believe in regulation and believed in tax cuts, which led us to the greatest economic crisis which we have faced in this country in 76 years, to a President who believes in regulation and believes in stimulating the economy.

There are two ways you can help get the economy moving. One is monetary policy and the other is fiscal. Right now the only way we can do it is fiscal because monetary has gone down to about zero. We have done all we can do with monetary. So the stimulus package, the Recovery Reinvestment Act, is what America needs. Some would suggest we haven't done enough. Mr. Krugman suggests that. I tend to agree with him. But the fact is we can only get three Republican votes in the Senate, one vote more than we needed for the bill in the Senate, so you get what you can get from the Senate.

I support my President because he has a policy and a program that will get us out of this recession and move America forward to being the great national and international leader that we need to be in the 21st century, and we can only do that by supporting our President with a stimulus package.

I appreciate the opportunity to join with my colleagues and the Majority Makers Caucus on this March 4, 2009. It's been 76 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt took his first oath of office. March 4--which was then in past history when the President took office--March 4, 1933, and he said, ``The only thing the American people have to fear is fear itself.''

President Roosevelt took office after President Hoover, and Mr. Yarmuth discussed some things that were about the Detroit Lions, and you don't have to go back as far as the Detroit Lions. You can look to what the Republicans said about Mr. Roosevelt's attempts to bring us out of the Depression. And they caused the Depression, President Hoover and Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau of that Congress. And President Roosevelt brought us out of the Depression. He created work programs that put money in the economy and put people to work. And he made a major difference. He transformed this American economy.

Once again, the Republican responses are similar to what we saw pre- 1933. They're similar to what we heard in 1993 when President Clinton was looking at bringing about a balanced budget and the Republicans said that wouldn't work. And the Republicans have said many of the same things about this proposal depending entirely on tax cuts and entirely on the same type of issues and policies that have gotten us into the ditch that we're in now.

The fact is we need to move forward and the leader of the Republican Party's philosophy is none other than Rush Limbaugh. And Rush Limbaugh has said he wants this American President to fail.

Now, I can understand people wanting to have power for their party, but when you want a newly elected President of the United States--with a tremendous majority vote and majority support in this country--to fail, you are basically suggesting that the United States of America should fail. Because if President Obama fails in this most unusual time, when economic crisis has gripped this country--we're in a recession that is, in fact, probably is a depression, but we've kept the linguistics of a recession--you're suggesting that the American economy and the American Government should fail.

With the Republicans up here talking constantly against what President Obama has done and voting against it lockstep in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we saw a party that's not only being negative but is being, in my opinion, un-American. They've offered not new ideas but negative thoughts to question anything that's being done. They offer only the old and failed tax cuts.

We had the privilege today to listen to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and he said, and I may quote: But sometimes the reality is that defining moments of history come suddenly and without warning, and the task of leadership then is to define them, shape them, and move forward to the new world they demand. An economic hurricane has swept the world creating a crisis of credit and of confidence. Credit and confidence. History has brought us now to a point where change is essential. We are someone not just to manage our times but to transform them. Our task is to rebuild prosperity and security in a wholly different economic world where competition is no longer local but global, and banks are no longer national but international.

What Prime Minister Brown said, and said so well, is besides the fact that we have to restore confidence--and that's what I hear from every economist that I talk to is that's one of the problems right now is the American public needs to have confidence.

We came out of the Great Depression. We've come out of smaller depressions, recessions, and we'll come out of this one. But we won't do it with naysayers saying that it won't happen and this plan will fail and not offering an alternative.

And it's a worldwide problem. And what Prime Minister Brown said to us is basically his government and the governments of the world are doing the same thing that our government is doing and doing it together in a united front: stimulus packages, reforming banks and making sure that we can go into a new economy and create jobs.

The President's plans create new jobs by going into broadband and extending broadband into rural areas and inner cities to create jobs and give people access to the Internet; seeing that health care costs are controlled, which is taking a larger and larger percentage of

our budget and threatens American industry that has to bear those costs, while, in most other countries where they have national health care, the government bears it and not the industry. And we're competing against foreign producers who don't have that as part of their costs, so it's a disadvantage that we have. And General Motors and Ford and Chrysler have that disadvantage.

But we're trying to control health care costs, and we're trying to invest in education. We're putting more money into Pell Grants and giving people an opportunity to get better jobs to compete on the world scale where it is global and not local for competition for jobs. Investing more and more in science.

And in the previous discussion to this hour, we heard people on the Republican side talk about science. They talked about stem cells. We put over $10 billion into the National Institutes of Health. I was really pleased that happened. I'd offered an amendment to do something similar, and it was passed by Senator Harkin on the Senate side.

That's going to be putting scientists to work finding cures for the illnesses that they were talking about but refused to fund: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, AIDS, diabetes, Parkinson's. Those illness can be cured or treatments can be found if we give enough opportunity for scientists to do their studies, and the National Institutes of Health is the organization from which those funds come.

There have been so many falsehoods put out about this bill, and I would like to share a few with the American public here. One is--and I found this most interesting. The Republicans have claimed that under this bill--and many people have probably heard this--that each job will cost $275,000 per job. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist called that a ``bogus charge.'' He said, ``Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years creating millions of jobs each year and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years. It is as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next 5 years and divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years and asserts that the program was hugely wasteful because it cost $13 per lunch while the actual cost of lunch was $2.57.''

There have been so many false figures put out and accusations concerning different programs in the bill and the different economic plans that have been put forth by the Obama administration.

We know from Larry Summers and others that stimulus moneys need to be timely, targeted, and temporary. And they voted against giving the people who are on the front lines, the Purple Hearts of this recession, more extended unemployment compensation. They voted against giving States moneys for Medicaid when we know we're going to have more and more need for Medicaid because more people fall in that category and can't afford their health care. And they voted against extending people food stamps, and those moneys, particularly food stamps and unemployment, are the most timely.

Those people are in desperate need, targeted to those who will spend it immediately because they don't have resources otherwise, and temporary because it's a short-term amount of money that's expended. And those people spend it immediately. They won't spent it on their condos and vacation vistas that they might go to someplace else, but they will spend it in their neighborhoods and their communities. And they'll be taxed, sales taxed immediately and put money into State and local governments who need that money to provide law enforcement and other services.

So, Mr. Yarmuth, my friend from Kentucky, and the other sophomore Majority Makers I have joined here, I think we need to think about Franklin Roosevelt and the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That was kind of what President Obama talked to us about in his State of the Union and addressed us about when he was sworn in. A confidence that this country is a great country and this government will overcome the obstacles that we face, though they be great, and we will be the greatest country on the face of the Earth in the 21st century as we've been in the past.

But we need to think in new ways. We need to invest in new sectors to provide new jobs and to give our people the resources and tools they need because we're a greet people. And I think you can usually see history repeating itself. You see it being repeated here with Franklin Roosevelt, that Congress; President Obama and this Congress.

Thank you, sir.

Would the gentleman yield?

Is it accurate to say that 95 percent of the Americans-- and nobody with an income of a quarter of a million dollars a year or less--would see a tax increase and, in fact, would get a tax cut under this plan?

Thank you, Mr. Yarmuth.

Tomorrow we will have a vote in this House on a housing bill, and many have said that not only do we have to have confidence in our economy to have it come back, but we have to cure the housing problem first, which has been one of the main problems in causing us to go into this economic recession and the malaise that some say the economy is in and, indeed, it is.

One of the things we are doing tomorrow with the bill is to permanently make FDIC insurance for banks and credit unions $250,000. That was something that we proposed in the first TARP and we were able to get that passed temporarily.

That permanent amount of money will secure American investors' deposits in banks and assure people they have confidence which they need to have and will have in the banks to know that their money is safe. That's important for our banking system to make it solid and for our constituents' deposits to make them secure.

The bill will also change and allow, for the first time, something that has been long in coming, the opportunity for people who might have to file chapter 13, bankruptcy, not a pleasant subject, not an easy subject, not an easy process but an ordeal where one has to go and show to the bankruptcy judge their need for help, all of their assets, their expenses, and be put on a plan for approximately 5 years on how they would have to spend their monies. And they have to have approval from the court over their finances.

In that process one can have the loans that they have made on a second home, on a farm, on a family farm, on an airplane, on a yacht, just about every type of property, modified by a bankruptcy judge to make it affordable to the person going into chapter 13 bankruptcy. The judge can reduce the principal down to the secured amount, can extend the terms, can lower the interest rate, but the judge has not been allowed, since 1978, because of an act of Congress, to modify a person's principal residence, which is their most valuable possession-- maybe not in a monetary fashion but generally it is, at least in a spiritual way.

And in this particular crisis, to allow people to modify their mortgages on their personal residences, is similar to what people can do with secondary homes, vacation homes, yachts, airports, family farms, et cetera. We allow people to stay in their homes to solidify their neighborhoods, to keep houses on the tax rolls, to keep neighborhoods solid where if your neighborhoods aren't solid, you have increased crime, increased vermin, increased problems, and maintain hope for people in their neighborhoods and in their homes.

This will be a first-time activity. We have worked with all elements in this Congress to come about with amendments, there will be a manager's amendment tomorrow, to make it to where it is a last resort, to guarantee that the monies, the people won't be allowed to enter into the bankruptcy or have their mortgages changed unless they meet very strict criteria and provide that relief that we need to help this housing market succeed.

So we help the banks tomorrow and our financial security, really not the banks but the individual depositors with the $250,000 FDIC insurance, and we help individuals in their homes with the opportunity to stay there and help neighborhoods.

I think this is landmark legislation, and I know that it's been extended to Vermont and Kentucky as well. I thank the anchor of our hour and the former president of this class, the distinguished and honorable gentleman from the former Conference U.S.A. city, Louisville, Mr. Yarmuth.