Wall Street Bailout

WALL STREET BAILOUT -- (House of Representatives - October 03, 2008)

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I don't think any vote in the Congress has had as much attention in recent years as the vote we took on Monday and the vote that we took today. I think that is good for the American people to have had their focus placed on the Congress in the midst of all that's being said about the presidential debates, the presidential race. In fact, not just because I'm a Member of Congress, but because of what Congress does in relationship to the Presidency, I think it is important that there be more balance in the focus on our branches of government. I think there is not enough about what happens in Congress, and I hope that what happened this week will cause more people to pay attention because every day that we pass a bill, we have an impact on people's lives, and folks can either be proactive or reactive to what we do.

But I think the vote that we took Monday and the vote that we took today was one that everyone--I know in my conference, in the Republican Conference--took extremely seriously. And I have confidence that everyone who cast a vote made a careful decision based on their conscience, and that's the way it should be for every vote that we take.

But now that this bill has passed the Congress, we must work together in a bipartisan way to hold those accountable who got us into this mess. We had many groups this week that worked in a bipartisan way to try to effect this bill. Unfortunately, we were not given a chance to do that because the process promised to us by the Democratic majority has never materialized. We were promised open rules, we were promised debate, we were promised the ability to offer amendments, that was not allowed today, that was not allowed Monday. We could have made a very bad bill better had we had that opportunity.

I do believe that my Republican colleagues who worked on this bill got some good things into the bill, but it was still not a good bill, in my opinion.

We have reckless financial institutions, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and those others who are at fault must be held accountable, and we must have meaningful reforms so we don't find ourselves in this situation again.

The problem we're facing now began in the 1990s, when the Federal Government decided to put pressure on mortgage lenders to make loans to high-risk borrowers in order to increase homeownership in America. Increased homeownership is a noble goal and a piece of the American dream, but pushing homeownership for people who could not afford the payments that come with homeownership was a fatally flawed approach. This created a new market for lenders who soon rushed to make heaps of money by inducing people who could only afford small houses to buy large ones instead.

In other words, this crisis has its roots in a failed government botching an attempt to do something good. This is not a crisis of the market. Capitalism works. Our market system works. This is a failure of our government.

Congress must address this underlying problem, in the subprime lending glut that stemmed from Fannie and Freddie's reckless underwriting of subprime lending. Both of these government-sponsored enterprises were ringleaders in the subprime circus, heading up the move into risky lending and even backing much of the financial industry's shaky mortgage loans. By backing the excesses of subprime lending, Fannie and Freddie fed the monster that today threatens our economic strength.

And nothing in the bill that was just passed does anything about that, and that's one of the many flaws of the bill. And today in Congressional Quarterly, we read that there is not the oversight that we need to have, and we need that oversight for this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I share the belief of my predecessor here: I go to sleep tonight praying that those of us who opposed this bill were wrong and those who supported it were right.

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