John Kerry: “I join my colleague from Oregon in expressing support for what we have achieved here. I begin by thanking Senator…”

“I join my colleague from Oregon in expressing support for what we have achieved here. I begin by thanking Senator McCain, Senator Sarbanes, and Senator Hollings for their leadership. They helped to create the climate within which we were able to finally get together with the House leadership. But also I thank the distinguished Senator from Oregon. He is extraordinarily knowledgeable in this arena and very creative. And he works hard at it. He really has helped to shape the outcome of this in a significant way. I think he has done a very good job of outlining the tensions that existed here. Many of us thought, at the outset of this endeavor, that we could accomplish this quickly. We ran into, as he said, complications along the road. The key to many of us was that even as we provided the legal capacity for electronic signatures to take place and certain recordkeeping to take place, we did not want to diminish the rights of our citizens to have access to information about them, we did not want their ability to be able to make corrections to be diminished somehow. We did not want to diminish their right to know about themselves or about their own transactions in a way that would diminish their position in the marketplace. And that is a difficult thing. We worked through that. I think we are still going to be working through that for some time.”