Barney Frank: “I thank my colleague. And we've had several hearings on this subject. Again, the timetable here has been forced by the…”

“I thank my colleague. And we've had several hearings on this subject. Again, the timetable here has been forced by the bill we adopted last fall with the support of the Republican leadership and the President as well as the Democratic leadership. And as a concession to Members, we put in there that once the President asked for the second $350 billion it would trigger a 15-day period in which we had to act. And we believe it's important for the House to make clear what it wants to do here during that period. But we've been having hearings on this since the fall. We put into the bill last fall some good oversight. The Government Accountability Office put out a report last year very critical of the failure to demand that the financial institutions that received funds make clear what they were doing with them, and particularly to show to what extent they were re-lending. That was because we put into the bill that the GAO would be there from the first day in their offices. We had a hearing with Mr. Kashkari, the Bush appointee to run the program, and the GAO to deal with it. We had a further hearing on this subject in the fall. We then had the long hearing that the gentleman from Massachusetts talked about earlier this week to go into this in great detail on Monday. We have invited all Members as of Friday to submit amendments. A number of Members did so.”