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Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

Floor Speech

Date: Sept. 29, 2008
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Finance and Banking Housing and Property


EMERGENCY ECONOMIC STABILIZATION ACT OF 2008 -- (House of Representatives - September 29, 2008)

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Mr. ISSA. Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill.

I am resolute in my opposition, not because it was easy to vote against your President, but our President and his administration are wrong. And if we vote here today for this bill, it is truly the end of the Reagan era.

It's the end of the Reagan era because, in fact, under Ronald Reagan's time, we dealt with similar problems, a huge financial problem, and we worked our way out of it without unnecessarily buying assets. We closed institutions but we also saved institutions.

Madam Speaker, my Governor often says, ``I'll be back.'' Madam Speaker, I have no doubt I'll be back, and I have no doubt that we will be trying to fix the problems next year that we don't fix here today. The mark-to-market problem, which Secretary Paulson has refused to deal with, in fact, in his own bill is very clearly being denounced. He is raising the price of the assets we buy above mark-to-market while refusing to have the other assets allowed to be flowed to their true value. By definition today we are picking winners and losers in assets rather than going to creditworthy companies and helping them get the capital they need so they can make loans to men and women and companies and entrepreneurs out there who desperately need it to grow our economy.

Madam Speaker, we are deleveraging the very capital and the very enterprises we need to date. GE Capital has said they are openly deleveraging. Why? Because that's the signal we're sending. We are collapsing this country into, in fact, a recession at a time in which the Ronald Reagan policy would be to expand opportunity, to find ways to give people who have great ideas an opportunity to reinvent America.

So today we are ending the Reagan era if we vote for this, and if we can't come back and fix it next year, we will have permanently put a coffin on top of the coffin of Ronald Reagan.

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