United States Financial System Protection Act of 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman.

To my friend from Connecticut (Mr. Himes), look, I know you to be one of the, actually, smartest people here on these sort of subjects. So I am going to take a slightly different approach and see if what I am actually reading in this legislation is a little different than some of the nature of the conversation here.

The way I am reading this legislation, it functionally says that U.S.-chartered institutions will not act as the clearers, clearinghouses, for FX, for dollar-denominated trade.

So, as we walk through those mechanics--if we all remember when we sat down, both in the isolated area, reading the nuclear agreement, what was in that agreement that said we are obligated to hand over the infrastructure of our U.S. financial system, our banking system, our foreign exchange clearing system, and we have an obligation to provide that infrastructure that we have built and hand that to the Islamic Republic of Iran? There is nothing in the agreement that says we have an obligation to provide our financial infrastructure to help them.

Now, we have already heard Chairman Royce and others walk through all of the bad acts and how this money is often killing people around the world and taking their lives and threatening our allies. That may be the meat of it, but the actual legislation functionally denies the use of clearing U.S. currency, U.S. dollars from U.S.-chartered institutions.

My understanding is that, if they wanted to, they could probably go to the Bank of Singapore and clear their dollars there into gold and wash money for other bad actors and send it to murderers in Lebanon.

But at least those institutions that we hold dear, that we regulate, that we talk about here, that our taxpayers guarantee deposits in, why would we hand Iran our infrastructure to clear their dollars when so many of their resources are going for bad acts?

I know we keep having this conversation of, ``The nuclear deal is bad, many of us voted against it,'' others saying, ``Oh, it is a great achievement, we want to support it.'' Fine. There is nothing in the agreement that says, great, you now get to use the U.S. infrastructure to finance yourselves, move money around, and actually ultimately wash money to do evil in the world.

So if we are going to have this conversation, let's be intellectually honest of what the language in the legislation actually says.

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