I want to thank all of you for your presence here today. This is a very distinguished panel.

I applaud you on your nomination and welcome you here.

You are embarking, each of you, in somewhat different ways on a career of public service that will entail a lot of hard work, a lot of late hours.

Today's hearing will focus on corporate boardrooms and try to help us better understand the misaligned incentives.

This Subcommittee has held several hearings in recent months to focus on gaps in our financial regulatory system.

We have also examined problems that resulted from regulators simply failing to use the authority they had.

This hearing will help determine where the corporate governance structure is strong, where it needs improvement, and what role the Federal Government should play in this effort.

I hope that if we do anything on corporate governance, I hope that it is modest and we realize that at the end of the day, a lot of factors led to the failures that we have had today.

I hope today's hearing will allow us to examine these and other proposals, and take needed steps to promote corporate responsiveness to the interests of shareholders.

We need to find ways to help public companies align their compensation practices with long-term shareholder value and, for financial institutions, overall firm safety and soundness.

The fact that over and over and over again career prosecutors resigned rather than pursue prosecutions under the military commissions as they previously existed is a sign that something really was wrong.

I would urge you to take a look at the way in which the counsel for folks at Guantanamo are treated.

Colin Powell has never been a Member of Congress, and he is a person who I think America has confidence in on national security matters.

That is not a great track record.

But certainly since Congress is not interrogation experts, it would be a mistake for us to foreclose your ability to apply Miranda warnings where the case-by-case and fact-intensive determination made by the professionals suggested that it…

We do not need it and it is causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.

I think you have said that you look at these matters case by case and you make a very specific fact-intensive determination based on the particular circumstances of each case, correct?

This is wrong. We know this material. This is wrong.