Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise to oppose the audit the Fed bill. One of the things that we learned around here as new Members of the House and Senate--and I served with the Presiding Officer almost my entire time in the House, and we learned this--is that if you can name the bills here, you have a tremendous advantage. You call the estate tax the death tax, even though about 1 percent of Americans pay it, and you may have won the debate. Calling this bill audit the Fed--and how can you be against auditing the Fed--may win the debate, but this time I don't think so. I am concerned in this way. It won't make the Fed stronger. It won't make the Fed more effective. It won't make the Fed more accountable. It will impair the Fed's functions. It will give conservative Members of Congress more tools to second-guess the Fed's decisionmaking. It will make the system ultimately less sound, flexible, and responsive. Think about what happened in 2009. President Obama took office. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Congress passed the Recovery Act, passed the auto rescue, which mattered so much to the Presiding Officer's State, to my State, and, frankly, to the Senator from Kentucky and his State too, but then, with the changing time and the elections of 2010, this Congress engaged in austerity, and we saw what that meant. It took a Bush-appointed Federal Reserve Chair, Ben Bernanke, who engaged in enough pump priming, if you will, through low interest rates and then QE to get the economy going.…”