Political Quotes

“Madam President, I do not see another speaker on our side so I would like to take a few minutes and just respond to some of the remarks of my colleagues. First of all, let me say I am very pleased to see that we have strong support across the aisle on a bipartisan basis for two of the three key parts of this legislation, the reauthorization of TRIA--or the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program--and the NARAB provision for the insurance industry. It appears that the focus of the debate between us or disagreement between us is going to come down to that part of the bill that deals with the end user exemption under the Dodd-Frank legislation. So I would like to talk about that for a little bit, because in some of the arguments about this provision there has been the implication that this is an effort to help strengthen Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. The reality is just the reverse. This is an opportunity to try to stop unintended and bad legislative language from hammering Main Street under the guise that it was to protect us against Wall Street. Let me explain what I mean. Derivatives are--I am reading right now from the summary of the House bill, which is the version of the language we are going to be voting on today. I will be reading and summarizing some. But derivatives are contracts whose value is linked to changes in another variable, such as the price of a physical commodity.…”