Political Quotes

“Mr. President, before long, two must-pass pieces of legislation will come to the floor, a highway bill and a government- funding bill. It is like ringing the dinner bell for Wall Street banks. The lobbyists are swarming this place. They want to roll back financial regulations, and they are working every contact they can to attach these rollbacks to anything that moves. It is a pretty neat trick. They probably can't get a rollback of financial regulations passed out in the open where Americans can see what is happening and see which Senators and which representatives voted to gut the rules for Wall Street banks. So they slipped these rollbacks into must-pass legislation, which gives the financial industry's friends in Congress a lot of cover. Of course, it is not just Wall Street that is trying this. Lobbyists and their Republican allies want to weaken the rules protecting workers, retirees, and our environment. They want to defund Planned Parenthood, attack civil rights laws, and shove all kinds of other provisions that would be terrible for our country. But, as in so many things, Wall Street is the true master of this strategy. It has been almost 1 year since Citigroup lobbyists wrote a provision to blast a hole in Dodd-Frank and, at the last minute, got it attached to a government funding bill. Since the government would have shut down if the funding bill hadn't passed, that Citigroup amendment made it through tacked on the back of the funding deal.…”