Madam President, our Nation has been at war for nearly a decade now in Afghanistan and nearly as long in Iraq and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the men and women who have fought on the front lines as well as to their families who have…

Eighty percent of the cost in the post office is labor. You cannot fix this problem without looking at all the costs.

It's become en vogue to crucify the insurance companies.

The reason why we need another bill is because we don't have competition in the health care industry.

If we don't attack the real problem, and if we refuse to use competitive markets...

We did nothing in the new health law about $250 billion worth of medical tests that nobody needs.

We see over and over again that OTS dedicated a great number of hours and personnel to the supervision of WaMu, yet problems never got truly addressed.

The lesson of OTS is not that we necessarily need more regulators, because clearly regulators can suffer the same flaws as banks--selfishness, shortsightedness, ineffectiveness.

I come to the conclusion that actually investors would have been better off had there been no OTS

Was it common practice at OTS to issue recommendations to banks and then simply take their word?

Because now we have become criminally negligent if, in fact, we are using selective tools of enforcement for one thrift organization as to another.

OTS relied largely on WaMu management to track progress in correcting examiner-identified weaknesses

But the data that we showed showed that the people on the ground, the ones that are actually doing the auditing, actually were following guidelines, were they not?

Madam President, I appreciate Senator Reid working with us. We are going to try to work through the amendments we have left today and hopefully get this taken care of tonight. Our intent has not been to slow down but to pay for this. I…

That is my amendment as well. Thank you. Yesterday we defeated, by a vote of 51 to 46, actually smart financial management that would have paid for all the costs for the next 60 days for the unemployment insurance. What we were doing was…

So there was no secondary follow-up by OTS to changes that were requested by OTS.

Where was the Congress in looking at OTS? What was the last time Congress did an oversight hearing on the effectiveness of the OTS or the FDIC prior to this downfall?

In both of your assessments, as you looked at this and you look at OTS--and this is a huge example of regulatory failure.