On the recordMay 20, 2010
in the final hours of debate on this bill, I think we should be asking ourselves why we started the whole exercise in the first place. What is the purpose of financial regulatory reform? I wish to address that for a moment this morning. Presumably, we all agree the purpose should have been to tackle the problems that led to the financial crisis in the first place. That means serious reform must address root causes: most prominently, too big to fail--ending that and reining in the two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that had a lot to do with causing the problem in the first place. Amazingly, despite its size-- and this is the legislation--and all of the hype that has attended it, the bill before us fails to address these root causes. Moreover, even though Main Street didn't cause the problem, the bill is so extensive in its regulatory reach, it creates new burdens on Main Street while continuing the recent pattern--and one, by the way, Americans are very fed up with--of using every crisis as an excuse to involve government in almost every sector and every aspect of American life. Republicans had hoped that once the bill came to the Senate, improvements would be made and the final product would be less partisan. We offered amendments to improve the bill, but almost all of these have been defeated. Along the way, Democratic amendments have been adopted that actually make the bill worse.
