Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. I thank the chairman of the Finance Committee.

This is the Executive Calendar. It contains the names of the nominations the President of the United States has sent to the Senate for confirmation. It is an orderly process, a historic process. It has happened thousands and thousands of times. Very few times do we have a lot of controversy associated with these names. If there is a controversy, ultimately there is a vote--a debate, and then a vote.

But now there is a new approach being used by the minority side. That approach is to basically use one of three options: stall, stop, and kill. What they are trying to do, for the 104 nominations sent by President Obama, is to hold them on the calendar as long as possible so it is difficult for him to organize his administration and move forward.

There are some key positions. The one the Senator from Montana spoke of is the nominee for Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. We are concerned about the state of the American economy, our competition in the world, how we stack up against countries such as China.

There is an allegation, which I think is valid, that the Chinese are manipulating their currency so they continue to take jobs away from the United States. It gives them too big a competitive advantage. Here is the Under Secretary for International Affairs who would be tasked with looking into that issue to try to help American businesses, small and large, and to save American jobs and this nomination now sits on the calendar with 103 others.

What you find is that of those 104 nominations, most of them went through the committees on their way to the Senate floor with unanimous votes or overwhelming majority votes. There is no controversy associated with it.

Mr. DORGAN. Would the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DURBIN. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wonder if the Senator from Illinois knows who has a hold on that nomination.

Mr. DURBIN. I do not know. Does the Senator know?

Mr. DORGAN. No, I do not. The reason I asked the question is these holds are, in some cases, anonymous. I spoke earlier today about a hold on a promotion for one of the generals in the Army to be a major general that has now been held up for nearly 6 or 7 months by Senator Vitter.

I use his name because I told him I was going to because he is demanding of this general something the general cannot do. I mean, that is an example. We happen to know where that hold is from.

But of these other 100-plus nominations, they sit here, day after day, month after month, and someone has put a hold on them for some reason. If I might mention one other, the woman who was to head the GSA, that was vacant for nearly a year because of a hold of one Senator, and when we finally got around to voting for her, it was 94 to zero.

The Senator who held her up for a year even voted for her. That is the kind of game that is being played. It is unfair.

Mr. DURBIN. I agree with the Senator from North Dakota. I would say to those Senators who have holds on nominees: Come to the floor and explain to the American people why you believe these people should not be serving in our government. If you think there is something wrong with them, if you think they are unqualified or there is some issue involving their character or integrity, do you not owe it to these nominees to step forward and say so?

I have held some nominees in the past but was open and public about it for a specific purpose. Recently, under the Bush administration, I was looking for a report from the Department of Justice. The report was sent. The hold was lifted as quickly as it was sent. Those things I understand.

But to hold these people indefinitely in anonymous holds, secret holds, and never state the reason why is fundamentally unfair. It is unfair to the nominee who has gone through this process of FBI checks, background checks, poring through income tax returns, questions about their personal and private lives most Americans would not want to face.

They finally get through the nomination process, the President sends their name, and now they are being held up on the calendar indefinitely, 104 different people. I think we owe it to them, we owe it to the President and to the country to do this in an honest, orderly way.

During the course of this week, Members of the Senate are going to come to the floor and ask to move these nominees forward. I hope those on the other side who have the courage to hold them will have the courage to stand and explain why. That, I think, is critical.

FINANCIAL REFORM

There is another issue involving a hold, which goes to a much larger issue. We will have a bill before us soon, reported from the Banking Committee, that is long overdue. This bill is Wall Street reform. Our country has been through one of the toughest economic downturns in modern memory. For 80 years, we have never seen anything like what we are going through now.

Some 8 to 14 million Americans have lost their jobs, $17 trillion in value was taken out of the country. Virtually every one of us with a savings account or retirement account knows what that meant. We lost value in things, our nest eggs, the money we put away for our future.

We know businesses failed, way too many of them. We know a lot of people lost in that process, losing their jobs, losing retirement income, losing their health insurance. Investors lost when the stock market went down to about 6,500 on the Dow Jones average. It is now back up in the 10,900 or 11,000 range. But with all that downturn in the economy, people stood back and said: What happened? What did we do wrong?

Well, mistakes were made. Many mistakes were made in Washington. I will concede that point. But a lot of mistakes were made on Wall Street with the biggest financial institutions. The worst part of it was, when these financial institutions were about to take a dive and go down, where did they turn? The American Treasury, the taxpayers of this country.

They said, under the Bush administration: We need a bailout, $700 billion in taxpayer money to Wall Street to overcome the mistakes we made and keep our banks afloat and insurance companies, in some cases, because of the big problems we have, problems many times of their own creation.

They received the money. Many of us had a stark choice. We were told by the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve: If you do not send this money up to Wall Street and these banks and insurance companies go down, the economy will follow them, not just in

America but globally.

So we voted for this bailout money. I did not want to do it. But I thought it was a responsible thing to do. Well, it turns out some of these banks and other institutions are paying back the money, with interest. The taxpayers are okay; but, by and large, a lot of others are not. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to run through this script again? Do we want to see this movie happen next year or the year after?

The obvious answer is no. So the Banking Committee sat down and said: Let's rewrite the rules. If they are going to act like a bank and be protected like a bank, they should have the oversight of a bank. If they want to loan money on a bad loan, and they do not have a reserve, do not ask the taxpayers to stand and make up the difference. That is part of what we are doing with this financial reform bill, to try to create the rules and oversight from organizations and agencies in Washington to make sure the taxpayers do not end up footing the bill again.

Secondly, this whole world of derivatives, which I thought was explained very ably by the Secretary of the Treasury over the weekend, is basically either an insurance policy that someone buys to make sure, if they are entering into a contract on a premise that they are going to make some money and they do not make money, they are protected--or it is a basic bet. They are basically betting on something that is going to occur, even if they do not have a personal interest in it.

Well, these derivatives got out of hand, so out of hand that there was a lot of gaming that went on. We try to clean this up. I, of course, am partial to the Chicago model, where in the Board of Trade and Mercantile Exchange we have had transparency and open-market dealing in derivatives for decades. I think that is the answer. Let's put this all out in front of the public so they know exactly what is going on. Stop the backroom deals on Wall Street.

The third thing is to create a consumer protection agency so average consumers across America have a fighting chance when banks and credit card companies dream up new ways to fleece us. It happens with regularity. We know it does. So this agency would be there to make sure these financial institutions are honest with consumers.

We do have agencies of government that make sure the toasters you buy do not explode in your kitchen. You expect as much, do you not, that some agency is going to make sure that product is safe? What about your mortgage? Should you not have the same peace of mind that when you walk out of the closing, you have not fallen into some trick or trap that is going to catch up with you later on?

Well, that is what we did. The Banking Committee had this financial regulatory reform bill. Senator Dodd of Connecticut went to Senator Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican, and said: Let's make it bipartisan. He worked with Senator Shelby for several months, and ultimately Senator Shelby said: We cannot reach an agreement.

Then he sat down, Senator Dodd did, with Senator Corker of Tennessee, who just spoke. Senator Corker is a man I respect very much. They tried to work together. They spent about a month at it. It led to nothing. So Senator Dodd said: Well, at this point, we ought to move it to committee. Let's have the amendment process. Let's find out what this bill is going to look like. Let's have a debate. It was brought to the Banking Committee with over 400 amendments pending. The Republicans decided, at the committee, they would not offer one amendment to the bill.

Instead, the Republican ranking member said: Just vote it in or out. They voted, partisan rollcall. Democrats voted it out. It is now on the floor and will be up next in consideration.

The Republican minority leader, Senator McConnell of Kentucky, comes to the floor last week and says: We are going to oppose the bill because it is another taxpayer bailout. He fails to mention that what has been built into the bill, with Republican input, is not a taxpayer bailout at all. It is says to the banks, which would be protected: You have to create your own liquidation fund so if you get in trouble, the taxpayers do not end up holding the bag.

This has to be bankers' money, not taxpayers' money. So if there is any bailout, it is a bailout of, by, and for bankers, for their institutions, so the taxpayers do not end up holding the bag, again.

So Senator McConnell's characterization of what this bill does is not accurate. It charges up people to hear about another bailout, as we would expect. But it does not tell the story. Then comes a decision by the Republicans, 41 of them, to sign a letter to say they oppose this bill. They did not participate in creating it, they oppose it.

One of the Republican Senators said: That means we are going to vote against your even bringing it up. We are going to start a filibuster against this bill to try to stop it.

Well, I would ask my Republican colleagues, all 41 of them, to pause and reflect for a moment. When Senator McConnell was selling to his Republican caucus tickets on this ``pleasure cruise'' to end financial reform, to end this reform of Wall Street, there were pretty calm seas. But last Friday something happened that changed the picture.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil action against Goldman Sachs and said they had been engaged in conduct which was literally reprehensible. They were basically misleading the people who were investing in their investment products and steering the business for an outcome.

It truly was the worst, at least the allegations of the complaint, are the worst in corporate greed at the Wall Street level. I would urge my colleagues on the Republican side to think twice about the letter you signed that said you do not want to be part of a reform effort. Most of America is fed up with what is going on, on Wall Street.

This latest action by the SEC is clear evidence of the problems. Those who signed the letter for this pleasure cruise trip have come onto some rough seas now with this SEC action. I would think, if they look closely at that ticket that they have for this pleasure cruise with Wall Street, they will find they are on the SS Titanic. They are about to hit an iceberg because the American people are fed up with what has happened on Wall Street: Taking taxpayers' money for a bailout, using the money for bonuses for CEOs who made these boneheaded mistakes, taking it out on investors and savers across America, and then saying to Congress: Whatever you do, our friends in Congress, do not let them change the laws and make it more difficult.

Well, the American people want us to have laws that will protect them in their investments, in their savings, that will guarantee transparency. They do not want us to continue down this path where we are allowing the financial institutions on Wall Street to engage in practices that are ultimately going to harm the economy. We do not want to see a rerun of this recession.

We need to move to this financial regulatory reform bill after we consider nominations, and I hope--I hope--a few of the Republican Senators who are genuinely committed to reform will not get on a pleasure cruise with Wall Street. We would rather have them roll up their sleeves and join us, going to work to bring real reform.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DURBIN. I would be happy to yield.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Would the Senator believe the latest iteration of objection by the other side to this Wall Street reform effort is what I heard this morning: that they now say this legislation should not be rushed through the Senate?

My question to the distinguished assistant majority leader is, How many months have we been working, and working in a bipartisan fashion, on this legislation?

Mr. DURBIN. I can say, to my knowledge, 6, 8 months--maybe longer--this has been in the process. It passed over in the House of Representatives. It came over here, and I know it has been under active consideration. We did have health care reform going. But I know Senator Dodd and the Banking Committee, at least for the last several months, have been working with the Republicans trying to engage them in this process. So to say this is being sprung on them without notice I do not think is accurate.

Mr. NELSON of Florida. Does it seem to the Senator--Mr. President, if I may continue a question--does it seem to the Senator there is something eerily symmetrical here in the way there is always the cry that it is being rushed through the Senate Chamber? Did we hear echoes of that over the course of the last year with regard to health care legislation?

Mr. DURBIN. In response through the Chair to the Senator from Florida, after the Senate in the HELP Committee adopted 150 Republican amendments to the health care bill, every single Republican on the committee voted against it. And you know what happened--the same, of course--in the Senate Finance Committee. And then the complaints were made that after 14 months of active consideration of this measure, we were somehow rushing it through.

It is the same story. It is the same script being played over and over. As I said--I do not know if the Senator from Florida was on the floor--the basic policy on the other side of the aisle is stall, stop, and kill. And this approach--saying no to everything, refusing to engage in even writing a bill--is not serving our Nation. There are things we need to do, and this is one of them.

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