Chris Van Hollen: “Thank you, Mr. President. I want to start by thanking my friend and colleague from Rhode Island for pointing out why we…”

“Thank you, Mr. President. I want to start by thanking my friend and colleague from Rhode Island for pointing out why we have a jury system, a system of our peers who can listen to all sides of an argument in a fair way and render justice. What this resolution does is prohibits many consumers around the country from having the choice of going before a jury as part of a group of people who have been wronged. For months, the American people had been hearing stories of how big banks, big financial institutions, have engaged in various schemes that harmed consumers and cheated consumers out of millions and millions of dollars. The most notorious recently, of course, was the case of Wells Fargo, which opened up a lot of fake accounts--meaning they opened accounts without consumers asking them to open accounts--and then charged consumers for those accounts. It is a fact that Wells Fargo in many cases tried to use forced arbitration to prevent those people who had been wronged from getting access to justice, from being compensated for their harm. We also heard about the Equifax case. Equifax is a credit reporting agency. They collect gobs of information on all of us--on over 170 million Americans--without our permission. We don't say: Equifax, go out and dig up as much information about us as you can and put it on your computer system. They go out and do it.…”