Barney Frank: “The gentleman misunderstands my point, and I will correct it. I am taking back my time. I was not referring to the…”

“The gentleman misunderstands my point, and I will correct it. I am taking back my time. I was not referring to the gentleman's de facto defense of the salary; I was referring to the gentleman from Texas' statement. He denigrated the product of this legislation because it would produce a nonbinding resolution. In fact, he sneered at it as a sense of the stockholder, sense of the shareholder resolution. And my point was aimed at his argument that the notion of a sense of the resolution is meaningless would invalidate a lot of what we do. So that is the issue I was making. Let me just say in closing, Members on the other side sometimes get separation anxiety when they are forced to differentiate themselves from particular corporate abuses. They brought themselves to do it with Sarbanes-Oxley, but they are having in various ways buyer's remorse there, I think excessive buyer's remorse. Members say we don't like corporate excesses, but we can't do anything about it. Well, no, Congress should not substitute its judgment for the market, Congress should not set the salaries. What Congress can do is to empower the shareholders who own the companies to express their opinion. It is not a right that the shareholders uniformly have now.”