[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 187 (Wednesday, November 15, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7247-S7251]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                               Healthcare

  Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, our Constitution starts with those three 
beautiful and powerful words: ``We the People.'' Our Founders 
envisioned a nation with a form of government that wouldn't result in a 
government by the powerful and the privileged but instead would really 
deliver for the American people a form of government that is the 
foundation for every American to thrive. What a contrast that is to 
many of the governments of Europe that they had seen function on behalf 
of the privileged and the powerful.
  Well, we have an issue before us that certainly is about government 
of, by, and for the people. It is the issue of the Children's Health 
Insurance Program, often referred to as CHIP. This program has been 
expired for 46 days--46 days--putting children's healthcare at risk 
throughout our country.
  Why isn't this bill on the floor right now? Why isn't it being passed 
by unanimous consent right now, or at least being debated and amended 
and passed? We have five States--five States--that are running out of 
money in this quarter. Oregon, my home State, is one of them. We are 
going to be out of money next month. We have another 25 States that are 
going to be running out of money in the first 3 months of 2018, 
disrupting the continuity of essential services for our little ones.

[[Page S7248]]

  For 20 years, the Children's Health Insurance Program has ensured 
that no children fall through the cracks of our healthcare system. It 
has covered checkups, immunizations, dental visits, and doctors' 
visits, assisting our struggling and low-income families who make too 
much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to be able to actually 
purchase health services or healthcare for their children. Every single 
State in America--50 States out of 50--has a program. Now, they tend to 
operate at different levels. Forty-six States cover children up to or 
above 200 percent of poverty. We have 24 States that cover families up 
to incomes of 215 percent of poverty. So 24 States go a little further. 
We have a handful of States that expand coverage up to 300 percent of 
coverage. In my home State of Oregon, 140,000 children rely on the 
Children's Health Insurance Program.
  It is just not acceptable that Members of this body come to this 
floor to talk about how to do trillions of dollars of tax benefits for 
the very wealthiest of Americans while we are failing to get a bill on 
the floor for health insurance for America's poor and struggling 
children. There is a lot I could say about that tax bill. It is really 
a bank heist. It is designed to deliver trillions of dollars to the 
richest 1 percent of Americans, while doing virtually nothing for the 
middle class and absolutely nothing for the bottom third of Americans. 
But doesn't there seem to be something wrong in a ``we the People'' 
democratic republic when we have a bill on the floor that is a bank 
heist on the Federal Treasury to deliver benefits--trillions of 
dollars--to the richest Americans and we can't have a debate on this 
floor on healthcare for the poorest children in America? Well, 
certainly, I think it is a perversion of the principle of a government 
that serves the people to put the privileged and powerful ahead in 
line.
  We have seen, certainly, many renditions of this. We have seen a 
broader bill, a set of bills, including the TrumpCare, zombie 
healthcare bill that came to this floor. It was going to wipe out 
healthcare for 22 million Americans. Then it came back in a different 
form that was kind of the fake insurance form, and it was defeated 
again. Then it came back as the skinny bill, and it was defeated again. 
All of these bills wiped out healthcare for millions and millions of 
America's families.
  Well, now we have a tax bill coming to the floor that, once again, 
has a provision put in it to wipe out healthcare for millions of 
American families. That is why we call it the zombie bill--the fact 
that we kill this thing, try to put a stake through its heart, knowing 
that we are supposed to be here serving the people--not the most 
privileged, the people. That is what is in our Constitution. That is 
the vision of this Nation, but apparently it is not the vision for 
those who control the bills that come to this floor because this bill 
has been waiting for 46 days to be addressed.

  There is a bipartisan bill ready and waiting to be brought to the 
floor right now. Senator Hatch and Senator Wyden have worked together. 
They passed this bill out of their committee. It would extend the 
Children's Health Insurance Program through 2022. We could take up that 
bill right now and pass it. It had the full support of the committee. 
The Republicans and the Democrats were on board. So why isn't it here? 
Why are we disrupting healthcare for America's children?
  To my colleagues: Set aside your ambition of ripping off the Federal 
Government to deliver benefits to the top 1 percent of Americans and 
pay some attention to America's children. That is our responsibility. 
That should be our mission. That is the purpose of our Constitution. 
Let's get it done. Nine million American children are waiting.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I rise to speak in opposition to the 
nomination of Joseph Otting to be Comptroller of the Currency.
  I appreciate Mr. Otting's willingness to enter public service. That 
said, he is not the person we need in this very important financial 
watchdog roll. We have learned lessons from the quality, the attitude, 
and the work of the person in this office, and I am virtually sure he 
is not the right person. We have made a lot of progress in the last 7 
years since we passed Wall Street reform. The last thing we need is 
someone leading the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency working 
to weaken or eliminate important safeguards, instead of looking out for 
workers, borrowers, and the stability of our financial system.

  The financial watchdogs, including the previous Comptroller, Thomas 
Curry, took significant steps to right the wrongs that led to the 2008 
financial crisis. It is important that we not have this collective 
amnesia that seems to permeate this body about what happened to this 
country 10 years ago. Working together, Comptroller Curry and other 
financial watchdogs strengthened rules for the largest banks. 
Independently, the OCC enhanced the supervision and examination of 
these banks, took enforcement actions against bad actors, and took 
steps to address concerns that the agency had been captured by the 
industry. There was clear evidence of that by previous people in this 
job.
  This administration is putting the banking industry back in charge of 
policing itself. We should have learned from that a decade ago. Mr. 
Otting is yet another bank executive who profited from the financial 
crisis and is being rewarded by the Trump administration with a 
powerful job overseeing our Nation's banking system. This is a man who 
worked at OneWest and made a fortune kicking military servicemembers, 
seniors, and working families out of their homes, all while pocketing 
$2.5 billion--that is billion with a ``b''--from the FDIC to protect 
his bank from any losses.
  The bank, OneWest, in this behavior, in this money from FDIC, in this 
action of kicking military servicemembers and seniors and working 
families out of their homes--this all might sound familiar to my 
colleagues; it certainly sounds familiar to the people in the Finance 
Committee and the Banking Committee. It is the same place that Mr. 
Mnuchin--now-Secretary of the Treasury--worked, doing the same kinds of 
things and work that Mnuchin did.
  Mr. Otting and his former boss, Secretary Mnuchin, refused to provide 
Senators State-by-State data on OneWest's foreclosures on seniors, 
servicemembers, and other borrowers. They refused to answer questions 
about OneWest loan modifications. I think Ohioans--and I hope enough of 
my colleagues to constitute a majority--would like to know what they 
are hiding.
  It was pretty amazing to sit in the Finance Committee and listen to 
Secretary Mnuchin and watch Secretary Mnuchin--then-Secretary-Designee 
Mnuchin--refuse to release information, refuse to disclose information. 
In fact, he had forgotten about a $100 million investment he had when 
he testified in front of the committee. We found out later that he had 
this investment that he forgot to disclose; $100 million is a lot of 
money. Even to Secretary Mnuchin I think that is a lot of money. Even 
to this administration, that is a lot of money.
  What we do know, thanks to important work by our independent press, 
is not pretty. What we do know about what OneWest did is not pretty. In 
January, the Columbus Dispatch--the most conservative newspaper in my 
State, the second largest paper in our State--ran a front-page story on 
that bank's abuses. Their investigative journalism found that OneWest 
used so-called robosignings on mortgage documents. According to the 
Dispatch, in its fine investigative work, under Mr. Otting's watch from 
2009 to 2015, nearly 2,000 Ohioans in our six largest counties were 
foreclosed on by OneWest. The abuses were so bad that Mr. Otting signed 
an OCC consent order--a legal agreement that a bank and its regulator 
enter into when illegal practices at the bank force the government to 
step in.
  If you are signing an OCC consent order, it is a pretty serious 
problem. In any other administration, this would

[[Page S7249]]

have been disqualifying. In any other administration, Mr. Otting--or 
for that matter, Mr. Mnuchin, who was engaged in the same kind of 
practices--would have withdrawn their name. In any other 
administration, if the nominee didn't withdraw their name, the 
administration would have told them to withdraw their name, but not in 
this White House. Frankly, when you walk into this White House, it 
looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives and people like OneWest 
executives and people who foreclosed on home after home and, frankly, 
have almost no contrition and paid almost nothing, suffered almost no 
consequences for their action.
  The consent order documented OneWest's breathtaking list of 
foreclosure abuses, gouging borrowers with excessive fees and unfairly 
evicting servicemembers on Active Duty. Think about that. They not only 
evicted servicemembers, they evicted servicemembers on Active Duty. In 
some cases, I assume the wife was serving overseas and the husband was 
evicted because he couldn't make the payments, partly because his wife 
is paid so little as a member of the Armed Forces.
  Mr. Otting was held accountable for one of the major abuses, 
robosigning, by the bank's regulator in 2014. But during his Senate 
Banking Committee confirmation hearing, he continued to deny 
wrongdoing, even when faced with a legal document proving otherwise.
  One of the things that amazes the American public is that nobody went 
to jail for what they caused in the last decade, what they caused in 
2007, 2008, and 2009--the pain and the hardship, the pain of plant 
closings and lost jobs, the hardship of losing your home, the terrible 
consequences of losing much of your retirement savings. The people who 
caused this suffered almost no consequence. The American public, first 
of all, can't believe none of them went to jail. Maybe they are not so 
surprised anymore that there is no contrition. Then, we reward these 
people by making them Secretary of the Treasury or Comptroller of the 
Currency.
  Mr. Otting was held accountable. In all of these legal proceedings--
and I am not a lawyer so maybe I don't exactly understand this, but 
these people signed some document, but they never really admitted they 
did anything wrong. Mr. Otting followed that process. Even though we 
had this documentation, he continued to deny wrongdoing, even when we 
presented him with that legal document.
  Instead of helping families recover from the financial crisis as CEO 
of Secretary Mnuchin's--not Secretary then--OneWest Bank, Mr. Otting 
contributed to devastation. So this administration has chosen him to be 
in charge of one of the key agencies protecting ordinary Americans from 
Wall Street. I will say that again. He was a big part of the problem, 
as CEO of OneWest Bank. He has committed wrongdoing; we presented him 
with a legal document proving that. Yet the administration chooses him 
to be Comptroller of the Currency.
  It is a job most of America doesn't know much about. I didn't either 
until I came here. I acknowledge that. It is a job that most Americans 
don't think much about. It is a job that most Americans don't think has 
a great impact in their lives, but Americans know what happened 10 
years ago. I live in ZIP Code 44105, Cleveland, OH. My ZIP Code in 2007 
had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of 
America. I can't leave my house, if I go more than about 300 yards, 
without seeing the devastation caused by people like Mr. Otting--people 
who lost their homes, people who lost their jobs, people who have 
suffered and lost their life savings because of Wall Street 
malfeasance, because of companies like OneWest. I am guessing that Mr. 
Otting doesn't think about this, and I am guessing that most people 
here don't think about this.
  Pope Francis, soon after assuming the Papacy, admonished parish 
priests to go out and smell like the flock. It wouldn't hurt all of us 
to do that a little more around here, to talk to somebody who has lost 
a job. It typically happened, in my neighborhood near Slavic Village, 
Cleveland, OH, where the spouse lost her job, and then the husband's 
plant closed, and then they couldn't keep up with the payments. Then 
they had to tell their teenage daughter: Honey, we are going to lose 
our home. First, they had to give away their family dog, probably, 
because owning a dog costs money, and they were squeezed. They knew 
they were in trouble. Then they had to explain to their daughter that 
she is going to go to a different school district--and all the things 
of life have turned upside down. Your life turns upside down if you are 
foreclosed on or if you are evicted.
  I am guessing Mr. Otting doesn't think a lot about that. I am 
guessing Secretary Mnuchin doesn't think a lot about that, as he 
travels on private planes and his wife brags about her expensive 
clothes. I am guessing very few in this White House think about that, 
but maybe they should. If he is confirmed--and I assume he will be 
because the Republicans in this body generally do whatever Wall Street 
and whatever companies like OneWest want them to do in confirming 
nominees like Mr. Otting, but I wish Mr. Otting would think about a 
little bit more about the devastation to which he contributed.
  Right now at the OCC, Keith Noreika--previously, a big bank lawyer--
has spent his time rolling back rules to protect Americans from 
predatory payday lenders. He has worked against a Consumer Financial 
Protection Bureau rule that would have allowed customers to take their 
banks to court when they were cheated.
  Mr. Noreika has done all this as Acting Comptroller. He wasn't 
confirmed by this body. Get this: His temporary role as a special 
government employee means he doesn't have to live up to the same ethics 
or conflicts of interest rules as everyone else. He takes this job as 
Acting Comptroller while we wait for Mr. Otting; he takes this job as 
Acting Comptroller, and he does the bidding of all of these financial 
service interest groups, all of the payday lenders, and all of the 
people who are preying on working families and preying on low-income 
people. He leaves and joins some of these companies, and he is very 
amply rewarded, and he doesn't have to live under any ethics rules.
  The people who run watchdog agencies are supposed to be independent 
voices who protect workers in the economy from financial crisis, not 
banking industry lapdogs who help their former boardroom buddies on 
Wall Street. If his record is any guide, certainly Mr. Noreika didn't 
serve the public. He served as a lapdog. He served the banking 
industry. If his records are any guide, I am concerned that Mr. Otting 
will be no different, that the OCC's independence will be compromised 
under his leadership. He worked side by side with Secretary Mnuchin at 
OneWest Bank. Mr. Mnuchin hand-picked Mr. Otting for this job.
  We are already seeing signs of Wall Street influence at some of the 
agencies, consistent with Secretary Mnuchin's agenda. They have pulled 
back on Wall Street reforms. They have attacked other agencies for 
doing their jobs.
  For wealthy bank executives and private investors like Mr. Otting, 
the crisis wasn't a life-changing event. Think about that. The crisis 
for Mr. Otting wasn't a life-changing event, but those people who live 
in ZIP Code 441, in Slavic Village in Cleveland, for those people whose 
homes I drive by every day, people who lost jobs because of the 
financial crisis, people who lost homes because of the financial 
crisis, people who lost their life savings because of the financial 
crisis, those weren't just life-changing; those were life-destroying 
kinds of events. Yet Mr. Otting and Mr. Mnuchin go forward, and they 
pocket their tens of millions of dollars, and then they are appointed 
by the President of the United States to watch over these financial 
watchdogs.
  They saw the crisis. The crisis was life-changing to my neighbors. 
They saw a crisis as an opportunity to profit by flipping failing banks 
bought at rock-bottom prices, but not before foreclosing, as the 
Columbus Dispatch said, all while raking in taxpayer dollars.
  If confirmed, Mr. Otting will be in charge of ensuring that all 
national banks, including Wells Fargo--we certainly heard about Wells 
Fargo's abuse of millions of its customers. His job will be to ensure 
that all national banks, including banks like Wells Fargo, are 
complying with the law, that they operate in a safe and sound

[[Page S7250]]

manner, and that they protect customers.
  To be real, do we think we can trust him to do that after the worst 
financial crisis since the Great Depression, the financial crisis that 
devastated Ohio, Colorado, and Massachusetts families? After people 
lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, Mr. Otting clearly 
isn't the right person for this job.
  Yesterday, the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, 
Marty Gruenberg, said:

       I confess to having a certain sense of deja vu. Banking 
     conditions today are strong and the possibility of a serious 
     downturn anytime soon is generally viewed as remote. That was 
     certainly true during the pre-crisis years as well. If I have 
     one key point to make today, it is that we should guard 
     against the temptation to become complacent about the risks 
     facing the financial system.

  I would comment on Mr. Gruenberg's comments that 11 years ago or so--
10, 11, 12 years ago--it didn't seem all that likely to many, at least 
to those in the Bush administration, that there would be an implosion 
of the economy and an implosion of the banking system, a crisis; that 
there was, in fact, the new head of supervision at the Federal Reserve 
who pretty much said, as late as 2007: We really shouldn't be concerned 
about a housing crisis. It is only going to hit the higher, upper end 
of homeowners, and it will not affect the economy. Those are the people 
this President has put in charge to be the watchdogs of our financial 
system.

  Again, Mr. Gruenberg said: If I have one key point, it is this. We 
should guard against the temptation to become complacent about the 
risks facing our financial system.
  We need to take Chair Gruenberg's warning seriously. Confirming a 
banker to the OCC--a banker who will give Wall Street its wish list--is 
a high price for working families to pay who are still feeling the 
impact of the last financial crisis.
  I urge my colleagues to vote no on Mr. Otting.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Ohio for his 
leadership in impressing on the American people to take a look at Mr. 
Otting, who has been named to be the head of the OCC. I rise and join 
my voice with his in saying that this is a bad nomination for America.
  Donald Trump promised during his inaugural address to fight for the 
``forgotten men and women of our country.'' Yet, even before his bags 
were unpacked at the White House, he started bringing Wall Street to 
Washington, importing the worst of the worst bankers who had gambled 
away the economy, putting them in charge of regulating the same 
companies they once worked for. It is a long list.
  It is the former Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, to lead the 
National Economic Council and Wall Street fat cat Wilbur Ross to lead 
the Commerce Department. Randal Quarles went straight from his private 
equity fund to the Federal Reserve, where he is now responsible for 
regulating our biggest banks.
  Maybe the most important and most ridiculous of all of the Wall 
Street imports is Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Mnuchin spent 17 
years at Goldman Sachs. As the financial crisis was sweeping across the 
country, Mnuchin organized a team of billionaires to purchase IndyMac 
Bank out of Federal receivership. He rebranded the bank as OneWest and 
put himself in charge. Then Mr. Mnuchin and OneWest acted swiftly and 
decisively to boot more than 36,000 families out of their homes all 
over the country.
  The Senate should never have confirmed that kind of person to run the 
Treasury Department, but it did. Now, among other things, he leads the 
Council that is responsible for making sure Wall Street does not blow 
up our economy again. I know it actually sounds like a joke, but the 
risks for the rest of us are way too serious.
  Republicans don't seem to have any problem with any of this. In fact, 
they are doubling down. Today, they plan to confirm Mnuchin's former 
OneWest business partner, Joseph Otting, to lead the Office of the 
Comptroller of the Currency and take another seat on that same Council.
  The OCC is one of the most important regulators you have probably 
never heard of. It is the main bank overseer of the United States. It 
charters, regulates, and supervises more than 1,400 banks. The OCC 
writes rules to make the economy more secure, and it puts examiners 
inside the big banks in order to catch new tricks and scams before they 
harm consumers or, worse, before they crash the economy, and when banks 
mess up, it is the OCC's job to enforce the law.
  Mr. Otting is buddies with the Treasury Secretary from their days of 
leading OneWest Bank. I guess that is why he got this nomination, but 
if you care about making sure regulators watch out for families, 
businesses, and our economy, it is hard to think of anyone worse for 
this job other than Steve Mnuchin. We all know a segment of the banking 
industry specialized in squeezing American families, particularly after 
the financial meltdown, but OneWest may have been the worst of the 
worst, especially when Otting was president and CEO from 2010 to 2015.
  What happened on Mr. Otting's watch?
  OneWest ran a notorious foreclosure mill that threw thousands of 
families out of their homes and illegally--underline ``illegally''--
foreclosed on dozens of servicemembers. The OneWest crew didn't just 
hurt families; it destroyed whole communities when it foreclosed on 
dozens of properties in the same neighborhoods, making it even harder 
for families to start over and rebuild. OneWest stole homes out from 
underneath families, lying to homeowners who were legally entitled to 
modify their mortgages and keep their homes under a government program 
and telling them the only way forward was through foreclosure.
  OneWest treated all of its homeowners like garbage, but its treatment 
of minority homeowners was particularly disgusting. OneWest was nine 
times more likely to foreclose on a homeowner who was in a community of 
color than to offer him a mortgage.
  All of this went down while the bank was busy vacuuming up more than 
$1 billion in taxpayer bailout money during the financial crisis. These 
scams at OneWest devastated a lot of American homeowners and, at the 
same time, put Mr. Otting in the same room with a lot of regulators.
  After an investigation by the Treasury Department found that OneWest 
systematically cheated in foreclosure proceedings, including by lying 
in sworn statements to judges, cutting corners, and failing to check to 
make sure they had the right documents before foreclosing on families, 
Mr. Otting signed a consent decree with the government to agree that 
OneWest would pay more than 10,000 people for improperly throwing them 
out of their homes, but that is not all. In 2015, OneWest forked over 
more than $89 million in fines to the Department of Justice for 
defrauding the government and illegally putting taxpayers on the hook 
for the loans if they went bad.
  So what happened to Mr. Otting after hurting all of those families, 
after lying to judges, after admitting to defrauding the U.S. 
Government? He got a nice $12 million severance check and a call from 
Donald Trump, asking if he wanted a corner office right here in 
Washington.
  It is crazy to expect a banker who has broken the law to turn around 
and fight to enforce it. It is like putting criminals in charge of the 
police station and expecting them not to look the other way while their 
buddies keep stealing. There is nothing in Mr. Otting's record to 
suggest he would protect consumers from financial fraud or take the 
steps needed to rein in the banks or avoid future financial meltdowns.
  You may not have heard of the OCC, but I promise you that when this 
agency refuses to stand up to the big banks and enforce the law, 
American families get hurt. It is as simple as that. Before the 
financial crisis, the OCC buddied up with the banks they were supposed 
to regulate, and everybody knew it. The result was the 2008 financial 
crisis that cost our economy $14 trillion. Millions of families lost 
their homes. Millions lost their jobs. Millions lost their savings and 
their retirement money. Nearly a decade later, many American families 
are still hurting. Now the Trump administration is ready to take us 
back to the bad old days, in which banks made gobs of money off risky 
bets while the regulators just looked the other way.

[[Page S7251]]

  Confirming Mr. Otting is kicking dirt in the faces of every one of 
OneWest's victims. It is a gut punch to every American who was hurt in 
the financial crisis. Even if none of that matters to you, it is a 
terrible idea because leaving Mr. Otting in charge of bank regulation 
will endanger our economy. American families and businesses need and 
deserve a cop on the beat who will fight hard to keep them safe. 
Everything we know about Mr. Otting says he will be out there fighting 
for the big banks.
  I will be voting no on Mr. Otting's nomination, and I urge all of my 
colleagues to do the same.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.