Political Quotes

“Madam President, it has been over 2 years since Bear Stearns failed. It has been over 18 months since Wall Street collapsed and the economy teetered on the brink of depression. It has been almost a year since the administration offered a detailed proposal to reform Wall Street. It has been 4 months since the House passed its version of Wall Street reform. Yet, unfortunately, the minority party, the Republicans in the Senate, still want to delay any Wall Street reform. They want to put off Wall Street reform for another day. Yesterday, the Republicans in the Senate had a chance to vote to end their filibuster on Wall Street reform so that we could start to debate this issue and consider amendments from both sides of the aisle, almost the way we remember learning about the Senate in school: a real place where there is a real debate, differences of opinion, votes, winners, losers--an amazing concept. We don't see much of it anymore, do we? There are a lot of empty chairs here. There is very little actual debate leading to a vote. So yesterday we said to the Republicans: After all this time since this started, after 2 years since Bear Stearns failed and all we have been through, isn't it about time for us to roll up our sleeves and get down to work? Shouldn't we bring some reform and transparency to Wall Street so we don't have to go through this ever again? Wall Street got away with murder and the taxpayers ended up holding the bag, remember?…”