Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this is striking a balance. If I were king for a day, I might write a different approach than either the Corker or the Carper amendments. But I am 1 of 100 people in this Chamber. Our goal is to try to find common ground on a very difficult issue. This is a complicated question. It isn't just about Main Street and Wall Street; it is about how we enforce laws, how to make sure we don't overreach and create unnecessary duplication and raise costs. We are trying to balance what should not be necessarily competing goals. One is to have stronger consumer protections. I hope I don't have to make that case again. What got us into this mess to begin with was the lack of consumer protection. It was bad mortgages, no documentation, luring people into deals they could never afford, people making decisions to jump into deals they couldn't handle. For all those reasons, this problem mushroomed out of a mortgage problem into a large, now almost global, problem we are confronting. So, clearly, as to consumer protection, we are doing that in this bill. For the first time in the history of our country, we will now have an agency exclusively dedicated to protecting the average consumer in this country when it comes to financial services.”