Providing For Consideration Of Motions To Suspend The Rules
Floor Speech
PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF MOTIONS TO SUSPEND THE RULES -- (House of Representatives - March 19, 2009)
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Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to this rule as well as the bill because of the lack of need for this and the disgrace that this has brought upon us.
Yesterday, for instance, the Federal Reserve met and they came out and announced that they would create new money to the tune of $1.25 trillion. The dollar promptly went down 3 percent, and today it went down another 1.5 percent. And today on emergency legislation, we're going to deal with $165 million worth of bonuses, which obviously should have never been given. But who's responsible for this? It's the Congress and the President, who signed this.
So this is a distraction. This is an outrage so everybody can go home that voted for this bill and say, look, I am clamping down on this $165 million but I don't care about the previous $5 trillion the Fed created and the $1.25 trillion they created yesterday.
Think of the loss in purchasing power in less than 24 hours. And we think that we can solve this problem. We first appropriate, unconstitutionally, $350 billion. We give it to the Treasury. We have no strings attached. And then you have an unintended consequence; so we express this outrage. And at the same time, what do we do? We come along and we now propose that we pass a bill of attainder. So we do things that are unconstitutional. They have an unintended consequence. So what is our solution? To further undermine the Constitution.
A line should be drawn in the sand. Let's quit appropriating funds in an unconstitutional manner. Let's quit bankrupting this country. Let's quit destroying our dollar.
If you really want to do something, you ought to consider H.R. 1207, which would monitor and make the Fed answer questions. I understand the Fed and the Treasury were involved in a lot of these antics, and yet the Fed is not even required to answer any questions.
So it's about time we have an open book about the Federal Reserve and solve some of these problems.
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