John Ensign: “I have a very simple second-degree amendment actually supporting the underlying amendment. But what my second degree…”

“I have a very simple second-degree amendment actually supporting the underlying amendment. But what my second degree does is it simply says that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be subject to the same limits. Everybody has been talking about too big to fail. That is one of the problems. All of this interconnectedness of our financial markets, when one is too big to fail, draws the entire market down. That is why TARP was needed. That is why people have justified a lot of bailouts. I don't think there is anybody who can legitimately argue that Fannie and Freddie aren't too big to fail. What this second-degree amendment says, very simply, is the 3 percent of GDP that we are limiting the banks to, we limit Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to those same limits. We saw yesterday afternoon that Freddie Mac said they needed another $10 million in taxpayer bailouts. There is no question it is too big. There is no question that if we actually put their debt on our balance sheets, we look much worse, the deficits on our balance sheet, we look much worse. What we are seeing over in Greece with the rioting and how that is affecting our financial markets, we need to be honest in our accounting, but we also need to make sure these things don't continue to get larger and larger. Back in December the President took the limits off of Fannie and Freddie--took the limits off. That is saying they can grow and keep borrowing and keep doing the irresponsible things they did in the past.”