Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I am pleased to be here with my colleague from Alaska. I also was not planning to come to the floor to talk about this tonight because I thought the vote was going to pass. This is called a motion to proceed, and around here, I think that is Senate-speak for a motion to not get anything done. That is what happens when we do these motions.

It is particularly aggravating because I was back in Colorado this weekend, as I am every weekend, traveling the State and had the chance to see the TV from time to time. You couldn't turn on a television station without seeing some politician from this town on TV talking about the importance of getting this work done, Democrats and Republicans, people taking the time out of their weekend to say to the American people: We are actually working hard to try to correct the problems that led us into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Then we all get back to town on Monday and we don't get anything done. We take a vote, not on the bill but a vote that would just allow us to debate the bill, to amend the bill, to get Republican amendments and Democrat amendments, to improve the legislation, and we are told we can't do that. We can have the debate on the airwaves, we can have the debate all weekend long on television in front of the American people, but when we come back here, in theory, to do the people's business, somehow we cannot debate it anymore. This is the reason so many people across the country think Washington is completely out of touch.

There are people saying: Well, the recovery started. Everything is OK again. And I am glad to see there are some signs of improvement in our economy. But for the families in Colorado, there is still a lot of struggle going on, there are still of lot of people worried about losing their houses or how to replace the houses they have lost, worried about losing their jobs or how to pay for their kids' higher education.

The last period of economic growth in our country's history before we were pitched into the worst recession since the Great Depression was the first time in this Nation's history ever, ever, that our economy grew, our gross domestic product grew, but middle-class incomes fell in the United States. In Colorado, it fell by $800, while the cost of health insurance went up by 97 percent, the cost of higher education went up by 50 percent.

Our families are recovering not just from one recession but effectively from two recessions, and you would think the least we could do would be to put some commonsense regulations in place that, had they been in place before the last crisis, we wouldn't have had the crisis to begin with.

Our last period of economic growth in this country was based on debt, too much debt at every level of the economy.

The consumers have too much debt. Washington has too much debt. Some bankholding companies in New York that historically had 12 to 14 times debt to equity decided during that period to go to 28 and 30 times. By any standard, it is an incredibly risky strategy. To make matters worse, the way they leveraged themselves up was with derivatives that no regulator was looking at, that shareholders didn't even understand, that bondholders didn't even understand. The commonsense reforms that are in place in this bill--because of the work of the Banking Committee, the work of the Agriculture Committee, both committees on which I serve--would have cured that problem.

Ultimately, what we are trying to do is put ourselves in the position of never having to say some financial institution is too big to fail or that the taxpayers have to hold a gun to their head and clean up somebody else's greedy mistake; to make sure there is transparency in the marketplace so we know what securities are being traded.

I have spent half my life in the private sector, a lot of it in the capital markets. This is not an antibusiness piece of legislation. In fact, quite the contrary. There are a lot of businesses out there that have been harmed terribly by judgments that were not made because they were prudent business decisions but to make a fast buck.

Here we are on Monday night, after a weekend of people talking on television programs, and we can't get done the American people's business. Again, this is not an up-or-down vote on the bill. This is just a vote so we can have a debate on the floor of the Senate, so we have the opportunity to amend and improve the bill. I am sure the bill is not perfect. In fact, I know it is not perfect. It has room for improvement.

I see my colleague from the Banking Committee from the Commonwealth of Virginia is here.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. BENNET. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Virginia. As he was talking, I was thinking about my work in the real world, as he has had that experience. If you were in a position where everybody wanted to get it done, if there was general agreement that you were 80 or 90 percent of the way there, the way to get it done was not to not continue discussion. It wasn't to say: Well, I am going to pick up and fly back to Denver or fly back to Virginia until cooler heads prevail. It was to stay in the room and get it done.

I think, particularly when this isn't about a private sector transaction, this is about the American people's business, the people who have hired everybody here to do this job, it is a shame that we should not be out here tonight in a bipartisan way figuring out how to cross the t's and dot the i's and put a framework in place that would have prevented the catastrophe our families are now continuing to live through.

Sometimes that is one of the things people forget. There are parts of the economy that have recovered faster than others. There are parts of the economy where people are getting hired or paid, other parts where people are still struggling along. The people I saw this weekend were people who were struggling along. They are not interested in engaging in class warfare, as some people say. What they are interested in is making sure we create a set of conditions where the game is not rigged and where they have some predictability in their lives as business people and as working families.

Like my colleague, I am new. Maybe we don't know exactly the way this place works. I hope somewhere in this building there are people who are coming together to figure out how we can create the conditions where we could at least get a vote to have the conversation about how to get to that last 10 percent on this bill.

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