On the recordMarch 29, 2011
I yield myself 2 minutes. I regret the chairman's refusal to allow me to answer the question he asked. Yes, we just filed the bill because we are restoring a provision that was in the financial reform bill. The gentleman, who has shown very little regard for the taxpayer in his own vote sending money to Brazilian cotton farmers--and, by the way, I wish he had listened to Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen and not voted to force on them money for weapons systems they didn't want. They said those things when they tried to get the Congress not to give them weapons they didn't want, but many of my Republican friends, the majority, disregarded that. But in the TARP legislation we said that in 2013, when this program ends, any penny that was spent and not returned to the taxpayers will come from the banks, will come from the hedge funds. And we can anticipate Republican opposition to that, because in the financial reform bill last summer, already passed, not recently introduced, we say that for many of these programs to recover the costs of the foreclosure mitigation and dealing with the results of foreclosure, we would get it from large financial institutions. The Republicans objected to that, and the Republicans insisted in the Senate that it be knocked out. So every time we have tried to get money from the large financial institutions to pay for the costs of the damage their irresponsibility inflicted, the Republicans have opposed it.…
