the notion--when we lost sight of the--three great things done by the Depression Era Congress and Administrations were the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance…

We need an independent, single-focused mission Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

I concur that there have been failures in the systems and that we need to figure out how to do a better job on consumer protection.

I have struggled with that with my dairy farmers in Virginia, who ship their milk greater and greater and greater distances primarily because of the nature of this policy and the way it works.

I believe that needs to be overhauled.

The cap-and-tax legislation that the Congress passed a few weeks ago, I think ignores the need to increase domestic production of oil and natural gas and nuclear power and so on.

I am also very concerned about the direction that our government is taking in terms of increasing the input costs to dairy farmers.

I share some concerns about some of the Administration's proposals.

But if at the end of the day the ramifications of buyers making bad choices around the credit markets is that we, the taxpayers, are ultimately going to bail them out, don't we have some responsibility to perhaps put some either ring…

No prudential regulation on the whole nonbank sector of the----

we also need to have the active commitment of President Barack Obama and his administration to find emergency stimulus dollars for immediate assistance with these infrastructure issues.

It is a great privilege for me to sit up here and welcome back to this committee our distinguished former chairman, Tom Davis.

Without Tom's visions, this Congress would never have come up with the idea of a $150 million matching grant.

I believe that if Congress acts to finalize the $150 million for fiscal year 2010, that D.C., Maryland, and the Commonwealth of Virginia will all find the matching funds to bring together $300 million annually for each of the next 10 years.

This is an issue that has come out of the regional delegation's examination of the tragedy of June 22nd, this anomaly in Federal regulation where we do regulate for hard railcars on railroad systems, but not for transit.

And is it also true, to your knowledge, that there is no Federal standard in terms of crashworthiness and safety of passengers on transit systems; there is for rail systems like Amtrak, but there is not for transit?

This is the Nation's Capital. It's arguably been called the capital of the free world. And the Federal Government has some responsibility, beyond the initial construction costs, to help make sure that system remains healthy and safe.

So the users are, in fact, certainly paying their fair share.