Political Quotes

“Let me begin by thanking the majority leader for his work. I thank the minority leader as well. This has been a bit acrimonious over the last 10 days or so as we tried to get to the floor with this bill. Of course I thank Richard Shelby. He and I, as he points out, have been working together over the last about 37 months during my stewardship of the Banking Committee that I inherited in January of 2007. I noted the other day there are some 42 measures we brought out of our committee and 37 of them have become the law of the land. This is a good result. We will now be on this bill, which the American people want us to be on. This is an important issue. As I pointed out this morning, we had the headlines, the hearings here yesterday involving mortgage deals and the other headlines about Greece and its debt. Its bonds were sinking, causing economic problems in Europe and potentially here. These problems are huge. As Senator Shelby has said and I have said over and over, this is a complex area of law we are talking about and it has to be gotten right. We have had very good conversations on a number of issues, but on this over many weeks, going back, obviously, and clearly we both share, as everyone does in this Chamber, our determination that we never again have institutions that become too big to fail where there is that implicit guarantee that the Federal Government will bail them out.”