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Floor Speech
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Mr. RICKETTS. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues who yesterday voted to proceed on my Congressional Review Act to undo the eleventh-hour regulation that the Biden administration put through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that would have greatly expanded the powers of the CFPB to start regulating payment systems as opposed to just the banking system that it was really designed to do.
I appreciate some of my colleagues' votes and encourage them to vote again as we vote on it here again later today.
Earlier today, some of my Democratic colleagues expressed some objections--and, again, in the interest of time, my colleague from Illinois pointed out, people are waiting to vote. I do have to hit upon one, though. The Senator from Massachusetts seemed to indicate--and she has done so many times in the past--that somehow the CFPB is the only cop on the beat there. That is simply not true. These payment systems are regulated at the State and Federal level. There are other organizations out there that do regulation, like the FDIC, the FTC, the Office of Comptroller, and, of course, State banking regulators, which I used to manage as a former Governor. These organizations all look out for protection of the consumer. She phrased this as somehow we are going to be opening the doors to bad actors, and that is simply not the case.
It is a complete misapprehension of our regulatory structure that is stunning from somebody who is the ranking member on the Banking Committee.
So I encourage my colleagues to vote for the CRA. It will help roll back this unnecessary regulation. This is a regulation the CFPB put forward without even defining what market they were going to regulate. They gave misleading information that somehow, it would only cost $25,000. In fact, consumers are generally very broadly pleased with these payment systems. The CFPB's own data shows that only 1 percent of the 1.3 million complaints they received last year were on these payment systems. So this is a regulation in search of a reason.
We need to stop this expansion of the Federal bureaucracy. We will have the opportunity to do that today.
I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of the CRA.
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