Political Quotes

“I thank the ranking member for yielding me time. I rise today in opposition to S.J. Res. 57, which provides for congressional disapproval of CFPB guidance on discrimination in the indirect auto lending industry. As the only Ph.D. scientist in Congress, when I come to the floor, it is usually to debate science or important technical details of financial service regulations. But I am also the son of a civil rights lawyer, a scientist who stepped away from his career in science and became a civil rights lawyer. My father actually wrote much of the enforcement language behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The issue of minorities being systematically overcharged when purchasing automobiles is not a small issue, and, unfortunately, it is not going away. This issue was first documented academically in the Chicago metropolitan region in the early 1990s when it was found that if you were a non-White person you were, on average, charged over $500 more, in today's dollars, than a White person was. In a recent study in the D.C. suburbs, it was found that non-Whites were charged an average of $2,500 more than White people. I understand this is a subject for some debate. I urge my colleagues to actually read the report that some are calling junk science here. It is a report that, frankly, as a scientist, may not have the statistics that I would like in terms of a large number of test cases, but the effect is so large that it cannot be a statistical fluctuation.…”