Restoring Americans' Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, 7 years ago Wall Street imploded, sending us into a recession that we hadn't seen since the Great Depression. While our economy has slowly bounced back, the memory of that crisis is still fresh in the minds of many Americans, millions of whom lost their jobs, millions of whom lost their homes, and millions of whom lost their retirement savings.
Nobody wants to repeat the financial collapse, the bailouts, the recession. Indeed, we have spent the last 6 years digging out of a hole. Despite this, Republican colleagues at this very moment are holding meetings and preparing policy riders to gut the reforms that shut down the Wall Street casino. They are working to open up that casino again, to the great detriment of families across this country. Their goal is to add poison pill policy riders to the fiscal year 2016 appropriation bills that may well be consolidated into an omnibus.
That is why I am here on the floor with my colleagues from Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Our colleague, Senator Bill Nelson from Florida, spoke earlier about these issues. We are here to say no to these policy riders that are seeking to reopen the Wall Street casino and put American families at peril.
To start things off, I turn to my colleague from Rhode Island, who has brought great expertise and diligence to this conversation over the responsible regulations, the ones that serve like the traffic signals that enable traffic to move slowly so they don't end up in auto wrecks, but they don't shut it down--the responsible regulations that will keep us from having another crash doing great damage to American families.
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks of the senior Senator from Massachusetts, who has brought so much personal research in the course of her career and passion and insight to this battle and who put forward the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to provide oversight of these predatory practices and who has been such a watchdog about these practices.
I would just ask her before she leaves the floor, why is it that this discussion is happening right now, in terms of policy riders on must-pass spending bills, rather than happening in the light of day with a committee hearing--a banking committee hearing--where this can be fully discussed and debated?
Ms. WARREN. Well, the Senator raises the right question, but I think it is pretty obvious. If these proposals were debated out in public, where everyone in America could see and hear them, they wouldn't pass. People don't want to line up to vote for fewer restrictions on Wall Street. They do not want to line up to vote for more opportunities to cheat American families. So, instead, the idea is just tack it on something else that is going to move through. Then the question is, Will people vote to keep the government open? And that gives a lot of people in Congress who want to help the big financial institutions a lot of cover, and that is fundamentally wrong.
Mr. MERKLEY. One of the things we have a lot of concern about is making sure that predatory mortgages don't return. They were a key product in helping drive the collapse in 2007-2008. We are concerned those could return if the ability of the CFPB to regulate them is diminished by changing the government structure of the CFPB or shutting down the funds that enable it to operate. Would that be a good idea or a bad idea?
Ms. WARREN. You know, the CFPB works. It works to help protect America's families. It works to help level the playing field. Already that agency has been up and operational for just a little over 4 years, and it has forced the biggest financial institutions in this country to return more than $11 billion directly to families they cheated. It has handled more than 750,000 complaints against big financial institutions, against payday lenders, and against college loan services that are cheating people and that are tricking people.
So what is the response? Well, it is helping the American people, but it is costing a handful of the biggest financial institutions in this country real money, and they are trying to find a way to make sure the consumer agency doesn't do its job. They want to find a way to weaken that agency, to tie that agency down, and to keep that agency from leveling the playing field for American families.
Mr. MERKLEY. I know my colleague and I have talked about this--the number increases. I will say something like the CFPB has returned $3 billion, and my colleague will say: Oh, Senator, it is now $5 billion. And when I say it is $5 billion, my colleague will remind me it is now $8 billion. And here we are at $12 billion?
Ms. WARREN. I think it is $11 billion.
Mr. MERKLEY. So $11 billion in returns. I believe that number includes real cash returned to individuals but does not include the vast savings that have come from families who were never cheated in the first place.
Ms. WARREN. I think one of the most important parts of this is the consumer agency said--when credit card companies, for example, got caught cheating people, it said to those credit card companies: Look, you have people's addresses to be able to cheat them. Now you have people's addresses to send them checks to pay them back.
It is as the Senator said. It was like a warning shot to everyone else out there cheating consumers. It said that this agency is on the level. This agency is tough. So I think there are millions of Americans who don't get cheated, who don't get tricked in one scam or another because we have a real watchdog out there--someone who is on the side of the American family.
Mr. MERKLEY. I thank my colleague so much for presenting this idea before she came to the U.S. Senate and for helping--well, stepping in to be the initial Director, getting it up and running, and now being here to make sure we defend its ability to provide fairer financial products for America's families--products that enable families to build their wealth rather than having wealth-stripping scams hurt and destroy the finances of American families.
Ms. WARREN. I only want to add that I am grateful for all the work my colleague has done on behalf of American consumers and all the work he did to get the consumer agency through Congress and now to protect it when the big banks were coming after it.
So I thank my colleague Senator Merkley for all he did.
Mr. MERKLEY. I thank the Senator very much.
Mr. President, as we have heard from this colloquy--and I appreciate that Bill Nelson was here earlier, the Senator from Florida, to discuss his insights on these dark-of-night policy riders designed to restore the Wall Street casino and cheat American families. I appreciate the comments he brought to this and that Jack Reed, the senior Senator from Rhode Island, has brought forward and Elizabeth Warren, the senior Senator from Massachusetts, each of whom made important points. So I will be brief because they have laid out most of the issues I will try to echo.
The key point is the debate over changing the rules for these powerful financial institutions should be debated in the open, in front of the TV cameras, in front of the American people, not in secret negotiation rooms and not in the dark of night, which is happening at this very moment, because a lot is at stake.
We found from before that when regulations were stripped away and the Wall Street casino went wild, we ended up with a crash that destroyed the finances of millions of families, many of whom will never recover. They lost their homes, their dreams of homeownership. That has been shattered, and they are not going to get it back. They lost their job and have been derailed and will never get back on track. They lost their retirement savings, and they will never be able to rebuild them. In fact, that golden vision of retirement may be something they feel they will never be able to be a part of--that chapter of their life will never come.
So a tremendous amount is at stake, and these dark-of-night negotiations to repeal, to undermine, to delay the shutdown of the Wall Street casinos are just wrong. Let us have the debate in the committee where it belongs. This is critical for working families everywhere in the country and certainly in my home State.
Let me mention one of the riders, which is to take and allow the Volcker rule to be voided for some of the financial institutions. What is the Volcker rule? The Volcker rule shut down the Wall Street casino. It said banks cannot bet with taxpayer-insured deposits. If a group wants to make big bets on the future of interest rates or monetary exchanges or the quality of mortgages and so forth, they must do so with private wealth funds, where the only persons at stake are those who have invested in the fund. Don't do it with taxpayer-insured banks. That is one example.
A second example is that we need to keep the quality mortgages we have now so they do not return to being a predatory instrument. We had a legalized kickback scheme, and that structure meant mortgage originators were paid for steering families from a prime mortgage that would build their wealth into a subprime mortgage with an exploding interest rate which would destroy their wealth. We ended those kickbacks. Let us not let that happen again.
Let us not undermine the role of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. When we had this dramatic massive increase in subprime loans, starting in 2003 and going through 2007, nobody was watching. We need to have someone say: Look at that surge in subprimes. And because of that surge, what is going on? Is this creating a bubble? Is this a big bet that is going to go bust? Is this going to destroy families?
We actually had an agency that was responsible for controlling these predatory practices. It was the Federal Reserve, but the Federal Reserve, full of sophisticated economists, said: Well, we want to talk monetary policy. That is what we do up in the penthouse of the Federal Reserve building. So they put consumer protection down in the basement and they locked the door and threw away the key and said: You know, we have that responsibility, but we just aren't going to do anything about it, and they let predatory schemes run wild and destroy millions of American families.
Now we have an organization--the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--that is the watchdog making sure the disclosures and the structures are fair and square for American families so we can build the success of those families. You cannot be for the success of American families and be for these secret, dark-of-night measures designed to destroy the effort to rein in this Wall Street casino.
I hope we will see a return to regular order, the type of regular order my colleague from Rhode Island talked about, the type of light-of-day committee discussions my colleague from Massachusetts talked about because this is so important to our future and the success of American families. Let's make sure we work together to build the wealth and success through fair financial practices, not special favors done for very powerful institutions that are designed to exploit and operate as predatory measures to strip the wealth of American families.
I thank the Chair.
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