Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this bill, with all due respect to my friends, Mr. Poliquin and Mr. Hill. The Iranian Leadership Asset Transparency Act is one of those bills that sounds like a good idea. And I am sure many of my colleagues are thinking, Why not? Transparency is a good thing. The Iranian regime is a bad thing. Let's support this thing. What could possibly go wrong? I have a couple of points to make in that respect. The first one is that--again, with all due respect to my friends on the other side--this bill, if it is intended to get at the wealth of the Iranian leadership, will fail, and it will fail in an embarrassing and spectacular and almost laughable fashion. The reason I say that, of course, is that the bill specifies that the estimated total funds or assets held in accounts at U.S. and foreign financial institutions shall be enumerated. Funds are defined as cash, equity, and bonds. So if we pass this bill, we are going to know that the Supreme Leader has a thousand shares of IBM down at the local Merrill Lynch office. But European real estate, private jets, boats, piles of gold bars, stacks of unrefined heroin, Swiss watches, shell businesses in South America, we won't know about any of them. I ask my colleagues: How many shares of IBM do you think the Iranian regime has down at the local Merrill Lynch office? Probably not a lot. We froze their assets for a very, very long time.…”