On the recordJune 9, 2010
I appreciated the initial comments by Mr. Sessions and a number of the other Republicans about the bill that is before us--or hopefully will be before us, the FHA Reform Act of 2010, which is a bill that provides more accountability to FHA, saves money, $2.5 billion over 5 years with FHA, and FHA has had to fill a vacuum left by a lot of the subprime lenders that made lousy loans and are now out of business. So it is a substantial agency that helps move housing in America, it is done in a prudent fashion, and the reforms in the bill make it even more prudent. Now, my friends on the other side want to turn it into a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bill, but that's not what is before us. Apparently, they want to do it because they have a lot of guilt that they didn't do it 5 years ago when we could have saved this country $100 billion or more, but it wasn't done. Even the chairman, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services at that time, wanted to see some reforms, but the Republican Senate and the Republican administration under Mr. Bush didn't want to. And you can't be more descriptive than Mr. Oxley was when he spoke of the reception that the reforms got from the White House when he said we got a one-finger salute. I mean, that's about as descriptive as it gets. They didn't want to reform it. Now they want to reform it, and they want to forget about history. We're here, though, on the FHA bill. We're here to help turn this economy around.
