Political Quotes

On the recordJuly 24, 2012
I thank the gentleman for yielding. I rise, obviously, in strong support of this legislation. I don't know how anybody could be against transparency. They want secrecy, especially when the secrecy is to protect individuals who deal in trillions of dollars, much bigger than what the Congress does. And these trillions of dollars bail out all the wealthy, rich people; the banks and the big corporations; international, overseas banks; bailing out Europe; dealing with central banks around Europe and different places. And to say that we should have secrecy and to say that it's political to have transparency, well, it's very political when you have a Federal Reserve that can bail out one company and not another company. That's pretty political. I think when people talk about independence and having this privacy of the central bank means they want secrecy, and secrecy is not good. We should have privacy for the individual, but we should have openness of government all the time, and we've drifted a long way from that. The bill essentially removes the prohibitions against a full audit. To audit, we should know what kind of transactions there are. We should know about the deals that they made when they were fixing the price of LIBOR. These are the kinds of things that have gone on for years that we have no access to. Congress has this responsibility. We are reneging on our responsibility. We have had the responsibility and we have not done it, so it is up to us to reassert ourselves.…
Said by
Rand Paul
Republican · Kentucky

Share & report

More from Rand Paul

Jul 13, 2025

I don't think there's an answer that they're not revealing to us.

cbsnews.com
Jul 24, 2025

I think without question, they can get him on lying to Congress.

breitbart.com
Sep 3, 2025

A guy that is so far … out of the mainstream, I think most people in America would discount his opinion because of the things he said in the past.

msnbc.com
Jul 16, 2025

It might not have cut all that I would have liked to see, but it's a start at reining in Washington's crazy spending

reason.com

Other voices in this conversation