Barney Frank: “I offer this amendment, but I do not intend to push it today. I will be withdrawing it with the consent of the body. I…”

“I offer this amendment, but I do not intend to push it today. I will be withdrawing it with the consent of the body. I was not as careful as I should have been in supervising or making clear my intentions in what I wanted. I do believe one of the two most controversial items in this is preemption. Very few people think we have done preemption just right. Fortunately, a lot of us are here. A lot of other people think we have done too much or too little. The question of preemption is really twofold: one, should you preempt; and, secondly, having preempted, having prevented the State from acting, have you put sufficient rules in there to defer bad behavior. I think we probably didn't, as I read this over. That is, I think we have preempted, as we have clarified it, the right amount: not too much and not too little. But we have not put into the preemption enough in terms of deterrence. We do have the policies and procedures in the safe harbor exemption. But what I think we should have and what this amendment was meant to embody is the ability of aggrieved parties or representatives, Attorneys General of the States, others, to go to the regulator of the entity in question and say, Look, there's been this pattern of abuse. When we have a pattern of abuse, you act. We did not want to make the liability for any one violation too heavy. We didn't want to overkill.”