Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, let me thank the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Before I launch into the substantive critique of this bill and I urge Members to vote ``no,'' I would like to make a preliminary observation, and that is that when our chairman of our committee begins his presentation, making a broad-based critique and attack on regulation, Members should be very careful about this because good regulation is good for the American people. We need health and safety protections. We need to be protected from unsafe water, unsafe products. And investors need to be protected, as well. Any time a Member of Congress or anyone comes up and says regulations are bad, this is obviously wrong and the American people know it. Therefore, when you are being told to do something just because regulations are always bad, you should be very suspicious of what is going on and dig deeper into the situation.

I urge Members to just consider how important good, solid, well-tailored regulation is to benefit the American people, and I push back on anybody who just makes a frontal assault on all regulation, no matter how good or how bad and just regulation in general. This has been a theme around here, and I urge Members to be suspicious of it.

It should also be considered that when this bill is in front of us, we should know that people have looked carefully at it. Members who are wondering what they want to do on this bill, they should consider that the Obama administration has strongly opposed this bill, with senior advisers recommending a veto. This is a bill that is not going to become law. There is no Senate companion. I just checked and have been advised that there is no Senate companion. So we are really here talking about a bill that is going to be a threatened veto by the President and has no Senate companion, but is also opposed by SEC Chair Mary Jo White and the Council of Institutional Investors, an organization which has investors' interests in mind as this bill is trying to make investor information more opaque, and Americans for Financial Reform, not to mention the Consumer Federation of America, the AFL-CIO, and State securities regulators.

So the people who work with these regulations all the time don't think they are the right thing to do. Even if some Members might consider that maybe this might get capital to somebody who wouldn't otherwise get it, the people who regulate and use these regulations every day have carefully considered H.R. 1105 and have come to the conclusion that it is bad for investors, that it creates less transparency, not more, and, therefore, is, in fact, a risk to our financial well-being.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.

Mr. LYNCH. I yield the gentleman an additional 1 minute.

Mr. ELLISON. Americans are obviously looking for jobs. This is the big hook, the way to get anybody to vote for anything around here. It says it is going to create jobs. Of course, there has been no demonstration of how this is going to create jobs.

The point is that it will create a situation where there is less information for investors who need it, and it is important for Members to know that the SEC has taken enforcement actions against private equity firms.

For example, at Knelman Asset Management Group, the SEC found that registered private equity funds-to-funds adviser Knelman Asset Management Group, LLC, Irving Knelman, a managing director, chief executive officer and former CEO, violated the Advisers Act custody, antifraud compliance reporting, and books and records provisions. This is a case where you have the SEC using information to bring accountability in the private equity arena.

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