Political Quotes

“I am pleased to join my colleagues Senator Heitkamp of North Dakota and Senator Klobuchar of Minnesota. I represent New Hampshire so I think we have three major regions of the country represented to talk about why we need to make the appointments to allow the Ex-Im Bank to continue to do their transactions. As my colleagues have said, Ex-Im has a five-member Board of Directors. In order to consider transactions that exceed $10 million, they have to have a quorum--three people. Right now, again, as Senator Klobuchar and Senator Heitkamp explained, there isn't a quorum so they cannot continue to do transactions worth over $10 million. That is having a real impact on companies across this country. After a period where Ex-Im was not reauthorized in 2016, where they were not able to do business, we finally got that legislation through. They were able to begin operating again. In 2016, they were able to support about 52,000 U.S. jobs by authorizing more than $5 billion in transactions--2,000, almost 3,000 export transactions. At the same time, Ex-Im returned $283.9 million to the U.S. Treasury and maintained a default rate of 0.266 percent. That is a pretty good record, but, by comparison, the last year that Ex-Im was fully operational, they authorized more than $20 billion in almost 4,000 transactions in 2014 when they were fully operational. Those transactions supported 164,000 U.S. jobs and returned $674 million to the Treasury.…”