Tom Feeney: “I would say this bill tonight proves at least two maxims about Congress: One is that we have two speeds: zero and that…”

“I would say this bill tonight proves at least two maxims about Congress: One is that we have two speeds: zero and that we overreact; and the other is that the law of unintended consequences means that often the adverse or the harmful consequences of the things we do in Congress are much more meaningful than the positive things that we would like to accomplish. Let me give one example. Back in the early sixties and seventies and eighties, and all the way through the nineties, there were lots of complaints that low- and middle-income people, especially minorities, didn't have access to loans, that they didn't get the same opportunity that other people of above-modest means had to own a home in America. So the Community Redevelopment Act was enacted in 1977, and at that time one of the things that Congress had the power to do was to oversee and look at every single lender in America in order to determine that they were aggressively making loans in low and poor and minority neighborhoods so that we could measure those institutions so we could insist that there be more access to homeownership. We got exactly what we asked for, and part of that was the subprime loan crisis.”