Emergency Mortgage Relief Program Termination Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WATERS. Madam Chair, I rise to present my amendment, which I believe is a commonsense provision that provides transparency and clarity for distressed homeowners.

Specifically, this amendment would require the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to publish on HUD's Web site a statement indicating that the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program has been eliminated. The amendment explains that this program would have provided unemployed homeowners with low or no-interest loans to assist them in paying their mortgages.

Further, my amendment directs unemployed homeowners to contact their Members of Congress directly since the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program is no longer available.

If you listen to the recent debate, you can understand why this is important. First of all, we need transparency in what we do and in the public policy that we make. We need to be able to communicate better and clearly with our constituents.

And so they have been told and started to get involved with this program that would assist unemployed homeowners to be able to stay in their homes. As you know, this program was specifically developed so that it could deal with the high unemployment rates and the fact that people who had been working--some of them all of their lives--are now unemployed or underemployed or have medical conditions that cause them not to be able to pay their bills in the way that they had been paying them in the past. And so now that we are coming along just since this program has started and saying, oh, sorry, the program is eliminated, we need to be able to communicate that, and this is what this amendment would do.

American homeowners deserve our assistance and they deserve our help. We have just experienced a recession, almost a depression, where small businesses and big businesses alike had to close their doors or to downsize, and it has left us with some of the highest unemployment rates that we have experienced in many, many years. And still the unemployment rates are unacceptably high, still hovering around 9 percent, and in some communities it's even worse than that. It goes up to 15 and 20, and in some communities even 30 percent. And so our American citizens have turned to government and said, What can I do? Can you help?

This is but one of four programs that was designed to help them. Unfortunately, my friends on the opposite side of the aisle have decided that not only are they going to eliminate this program, the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program for unemployed homeowners, but they have decided they are going to eliminate the HAMP program, that is the Home Affordable Modification Program.

Yesterday, they voted off this floor the FHA program that would assist homeowners in refinancing. And don't forget, this FHA program was really for middle class citizens who paid their bills, who were not in default, had not lost their homes yet but their homes were underwater and they were trying to stay in them by reducing the mortgage. This legislation under the FHA would have helped them to do that.

You're going to hear more about the NSP program that my friends on the opposite side of the aisle are eliminating also.

But today, this is the most sensitive that we're doing now. This is the most sensitive because we have seen in Pennsylvania, as was described by my friend Mr. Chaka Fattah from that State, how this program has worked well for the last 20 years in assisting unemployed homeowners. We will set the regulations for how this is done. And of course they will look at these individuals in terms of how long they've been unemployed, how they've paid their bills, and whether or not they believe they're capable of not only utilizing the program but repaying these loans at some point. I don't think it's too much to ask of us to be of assistance.

I notice that my colleague from Texas referred to it as ``these people.'' These people are our people. These people are American citizens. These are constituents who vote and send us here to make good public policy. It has been said over and over again that we bailed out the too-big-to-fail institutions, that we were generous in our loans to them, billions of dollars that went into those too-big-to-fail institutions.

So I would simply ask for an ``aye'' vote on this very simple amendment that would bring some transparency to what we're doing.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WATERS. I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

Madam Chair, I rise to oppose the statements that were just made by the new gentleman from Arkansas, the one who claims that he and others are providing legitimate leadership for the first time. I would like to be in opposition to the fact that he describes what we're doing as ``pouring money down a rat hole.''

Let me just be very clear about my opposition. I do not like the American people being referred to that way. One of the other gentlemen on the opposite side of the aisle this morning referred to our citizens as ``these people.'' Now I hear our citizens being referred to as people who are receiving funds that are going down a rat hole.

The American citizens are not rats. The money that we are appropriating through good public policy is not money that's going down a rat hole. As a matter of fact, he knows, if he knows anything about this crisis that we're confronted with, that not only have we bailed out the biggest institutions in America that are too big to fail with billions of dollars that we loaned to them--and I didn't hear anybody talking about that money ``going down a rat hole'' or ``those people'' or ``these people.''

Let us be a little bit more respectful as representatives of the people in the way we describe our public policy here.

I don't consider that credible leadership, Madam Chair, and I would ask the gentleman to refrain from referring to the citizens of this country in that way.

And I would ask the Members of Congress to reject those arguments and to look at what we are doing and to understand, as the gentlelady from California has said, if they want to be credible in how they reduce the deficit, they should look at the money that we're spending on a war that we can't win--money, the billions that we're putting into Afghanistan. But no, they choose not to do that.

They choose to attack the most vulnerable in our society, people who have worked all of their lives who are asking their government for a little assistance because now they're underemployed or unemployed or they have medical conditions that don't allow them to meet their obligations.

I stand with the people. I stand with the citizens. The people on this side of the aisle generated the public policy under these four programs to help American citizens. And for those who don't want to help people whose homes are underwater, who don't want to help people whose neighborhoods are being decimated by these boarded-up properties, who don't want to help hardworking citizens who have worked all of their lives, who don't want to rise to the occasion of this crisis in our economic system, let them continue to identify themselves.

I have an amendment here that says, okay, if that's how you feel, then let's post on the HUD Web site exactly what we're doing. We're eliminating this program. And let the citizens call us so that we can tell them, yes, we have a program. They would like to say this program has not been started. It has. As a matter of fact, we started to get calls right after the Dodd-Frank bill was signed into law with people asking about the program, wanting to get in the program, being thankful that we had somehow come up with ways to help them.

It's not a program that has not begun; it has begun. And this amendment that I have before this floor would simply say: Tell the people that you are eliminating the program. Let them know that it no longer exists. Clear up any confusion about whether or not we stand with the people or we are going to work against the people.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. WATERS. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source