Carolyn Maloney: “I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his leadership. Madam Chair, this is a terrible bill. This shortsighted…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his leadership. Madam Chair, this is a terrible bill. This shortsighted legislation affects every corner of our government and keeps Federal agencies from issuing rules critical to our economy and health and safety of Americans. It sets a ridiculous arbitrary benchmark of a 6 percent unemployment rate before an agency can issue rules. For example, I think it goes in the opposite direction of making the Securities and Exchange Commission more efficient and more effective for the American people. The bill could place extremely high procedural barriers in the agency's way as it seeks to enact all of the rules as directed in financial reform with a limited budget. With this bill, my colleagues across the aisle seem to somehow believe that the final years of the prior administration were just a rousing success, that the near collapse of our financial system never happened, that the outrageous abuses that we saw in the mortgage lending industry never occurred, and that the abuses in consumer lending that the Federal Reserve labeled as unfair and deceptive were just business as usual. But we know that those things actually happened and that they crippled our economy. It was in response to events of 2008 that we gave agencies like the SEC tools that they had been lacking to monitor the financial system and to protect our overall economy.…”