[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 24014]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          WALL STREET BAILOUT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Foxx) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  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.

                              {time}  1515

  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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