Melvin Watt

All right. Well, let me try to pick up essentially where I was without offending anybody else. There's some conveniently forgotten items that I think we need to be reminded of. Number 1, that it was President Bush who requested the…

I move to strike the last word. The Acting CHAIR. The gentleman from North Carolina is recognized for 5 minutes.

Can the Chair tell me how much time remains in my 5 minutes? The Acting Chair. The gentleman from North Carolina has 3 minutes remaining of his 5 minutes.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. As best I can discern, the argument about the HAMP program is we should terminate it because it's run inefficiently. That seems a fairly strange argument for most of us around here because we know that…

There is little disagreement that online theft of intellectual property is increasing and negatively impacting the rights holders and our economy.

I don't understand the rationale of my colleagues. And it would be something else if this bill were going to see the light of day in the Senate. It's not going anywhere. This is a message bill, Mr. Chairman. That's all this is about. Let's…

I think we need to put this in perspective. Yesterday, my colleagues were proposing to terminate the FHA Refinance Program that helps people refinance mortgages under FHA. Next week, we'll be back on the floor out of our committee with a…

Let me just first be clear that we are not expanding anything in this amendment. The statute says exactly what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is supposed to do. This amendment just allows the funding to enable them to do it. This…

Discovery and innovation is the engine of economic growth and development domestically and throughout the world.

I think that is an honorable objective. The problem is that this debate has wandered off into a discussion about whether the SEC effectively did what it was supposed to do with respect to Bernie Madoff. And when I hear my colleague, Mr…

If we want to take it back, we ought to do it directly rather than trying to do it by chipping away.

I don't think this hearing is about creating jobs. It is about the independence of the Fed and whether we are going to politicize the decisions that they are making.

I suspect the second panel will be bashing Fannie and Freddie and the decisions that they have made rather than about promoting economic recovery and job creation.

We have to deal with this. We have to deal with it forthrightly if we don't think the Fed ought to exist or if we think the Fed's mandate should be changed, we should change it.

Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

I oppose the estate tax provisions in this bill, and I'm thankful that the rule would allow us to vote against this estate tax. But I also oppose the extension of the high income tax cuts, and I oppose the way we are doing the Social…

I want to thank my colleague for the time and for his leadership in this tremendous effort. I would like to spend some time just challenging a notion that is out there that this whole meltdown was unforeseeable by anybody, that nobody…

All of that is in this bill. If we had had this kind of legislation in effect when we first started introducing it back in 2004, we could have avoided this. Don't let anybody say that this was an unforeseeable chain of events that led to…

I am honored to welcome Reverend Dr. Roderick D. Lewis, Sr., as the guest chaplain for the United States House of Representatives for today. Since July of 2001, Reverend Dr. Lewis has served as pastor of Parkwood Institutional CME Church…

But at the same time, I am a great respecter of this division of powers that we have here.

The best protection to the prerogatives of the legislative branch is for us to legislate.

It seems to me that a lot of what we are talking about today is appropriately before the judicial branch of our government.

Would you argue with the notion that somebody in our government ought to show up every day with the prime responsibility for protecting or dealing with the issues of consumers in their financial matters?

It cannot be acceptable in a democratic society that a group of unelected individuals are vested with important responsibilities without being open to full public scrutiny and accountability.

I think we have erred way on the side of criminalizing things that could be more appropriately handled...