Political Quotes

“So it is pretty much as plain as the nose on your face. I am even surprised we have to make the case. So I thank my colleague from California. I will try to complete these remarks. I know others have other matters they want to be heard. I thank Sheila Bair from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Many of us know her, having worked with the Republican leadership for years as legal counsel, of course; being an appointee of the Bush administration. She talked about our bill today, saying this bill has been written specifically to end any notion of any kind of a bailout by the American taxpayer. It makes [bailouts] impossible, and it should. We worked really hard to squeeze bailout language out of this bill. And she is right, working together. The construct is you can't bail out an individual institution--you just can't do it. Our bill stops bailouts by imposing tough new requirements on Wall Street firms. Being too big and too interconnected will cost these firms dearly. And, should that not be enough, under our legislation regulators can use new powers to break up those firms before they can take down the economy. It stops bailouts by forcing firms to write their own funeral plans and to pay for their own liquidation in advance so taxpayers do not have to pay a dime. They shouldn't. If that is not enough, our bill stops bailouts by literally eliminating any possibility for the government to bail out these firms.”