Scott Garrett: “Mr. Chairman, just before this meeting out here on the floor, I was in my office back in Cannon meeting with and on the…”

“Mr. Chairman, just before this meeting out here on the floor, I was in my office back in Cannon meeting with and on the phone with constituents back at home discussing the fact of the difficult plight we find ourselves and the economy in in this country right now, specifically with regard to homeowners, the problems that they are having with paying their mortgages and the like, the difficulty overall with the economy, with the rising unemployment rates, the problems in the credit markets and the like. The question they ask, of course, is what is Congress about to do with this situation. The conversation always turns around to what has Congress done in the first place, and, of course, we know what that is. Several months ago, I guess it was in September, this Congress was told by the administration and agreed to by the other side of the aisle that unless Congress acted expeditiously, the sky was going to fall in, and that what Congress had to do was authorize and appropriate $700 billion to bail out the situation. Well, we have since that time spent $350 billion of that sum, and the callers that I heard from from home that I was just referring to before are saying, what did it achieve? What did we accomplish? Unemployment is still high, the housing market is still tight, home prices are still falling, and all that we really did was to bail out Wall Street, is the way some people couch it.”