Motion to Instruct Conferees on H.R. 4173, Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, 3 minutes is all I need because we're going into a process, one in which I would like to be optimistic, one in which I will have 72 hours to pore over a 2,000-page bill to see where we can make it better.

Mr. Speaker, I, too, like the gentleman from Pennsylvania, remember 2008. I remember helping lead the charge against a wholesale bailout, a slush fund for then-President Bush to pass around $700 billion and to pass on to the next President a piece of that left over to spend it, and if you happen to get paid back, to spend it again.

Mr. Speaker, the American people are tired of endless bailouts of the select few. When the gentleman spoke of AIG, AIG still owes us $100-plus billion we'll never see back, in spite of the fact that much of that money went outside the country.

I'm part of a Congress that saw the Bush administration make mistakes. I'm fortunate that I voted against it and I'm happy that I voted against it. As we go into this financial reform, I would hope that we remember Milton Friedman once said, Capitalism is a profit and loss system: the profits encourage risk-taking and the losses encourage prudence.

Mr. Speaker, we must have freedom to fail in this country. We cannot have "too big to fail.'' And more importantly, we cannot have the politicalization of the process by picking and choosing people like Freddie and Fannie to get $6 trillion worth of full-faith funding from the American people in order to guarantee what ultimately was to a great extent their fault. We went into a financial collapse because when homes became unaffordable, gimmicks were produced. The American people watched their government create most of those gimmicks, and even today the American Government continues to fund a 3.5-percent-down form of financing as though homes will only go up in price. So I look forward to working on a bipartisan basis to get this bill right in conference.

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