Martin Hoke: “under rule of law, the House Banking Committee is required to hold an oversight hearing on the Resolution Trust…”

“under rule of law, the House Banking Committee is required to hold an oversight hearing on the Resolution Trust Corporation 30 days after the release of the Thrift Depositor Protection Oversight Board's report on the activities of the RTC. Although two oversight hearings are required each year, the last hearing took place in March of 1993. The committee should have held the next hearing in December of 1993 but that hearing was never scheduled. It is now May 1994 and the statutorily mandated hearing is some 150 days behind schedule. Madam Speaker, the end of this month marks the deadline for the next statutorily-mandated oversight hearing. We do not even have a precedent on how to proceed when one unscheduled statutorily-mandated hearing overlaps another unscheduled statutorily-mandated hearing. This blatant circumvention of the law is one more symptom of the lack of disclosure surrounding what has become known as Whitewater and it highlights one of the reasons why the public holds Congress in such contempt. Madam Speaker, it is the worst kind of hypocrisy when Members of Congress who write the law do not obey the law.”