Melvin Watt: “several days after the events of September 11, some of my insurance company representatives who are based in my district…”

“several days after the events of September 11, some of my insurance company representatives who are based in my district approached me and described what would become a very, very serious problem. Essentially, they said that most of the reinsurance in this country, a lot of it is being done by off-shore reinsurers, and that those people were not going to reinsure against terrorism after the events of September 11. It became obvious that there was a serious problem that would need to be addressed, and I committed to work to try to address that problem, both in the Committee on Financial Services and in the Committee on the Judiciary, both of which I am a member of. We did that in the Committee on Financial Services. We reported out a bill that received virtual unanimous support. Unfortunately, just like the PATRIOT bill, the antiterrorism bill that the Committee on the Judiciary had reported out unanimously, the leadership got its hands on the product of our committee and rewrote the bill. They inserted provisions that had little, or nothing, I would submit, to do with the problem that the insurance companies had described to me in that initial meeting, the one dealing with reinsurance and the necessity for reinsurance. This bill has been hijacked, unfortunately, the same way that the so-called PATRIOT bill was hijacked by the leadership, and provisions have been placed in this bill which actually just make it unsupportable.”