Protecting small lender access to the secondary market is an important area of bipartisan agreement.

do you commit to being independent from the Administration?

Perhaps, as Lincoln said, we all need to get out and get our public opinion baths more than we do as elected officials and as regulators.

as Pope Francis said, admonished his parish priests, 'Go out and smell like the flock.'

I urged, first, the President to secure commitments on labor and environmental standards before the talks begin.

I appreciated your honesty, but I was disappointed by the answer.

Whether it is NAFTA or any agreement, the importance of trade, getting trade talks right, right from the beginning, cannot be underestimated.

I could not agree more that a new approach is needed, and I hope you will follow through on that commitment during the NAFTA talks.

That principle of sovereignty should cut across all political lines, from conservatives to liberals.

We cannot stop the flow of jobs to Mexico without addressing Mexican labor standards.

We know what causes outsourcings: it is low wages, it is exploited workers, it is weak or nonexistent or unenforced environmental protections.

They need to know that that is a condition of any real progress in these agreements.

I would add that my fellow Ohioan, Senator Portman, is a cosponsor of this. Special thanks go to Senator Graham-- this is the Graham-Brown NATO amendment--also to Senators McCain, Rubio, Casey, and Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse from…

I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes, evenly split between Senator Corker and me, to speak on the NATO amendment. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection? Without objection, it is so ordered.

Weakening regulatory standards and effectively incapacitating FSOC, the Federal Reserve, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and other Federal regulators will put us much closer to another financial disaster.

Thanks for walking the Committee through the work USDA does on the opioid crisis.

Education promises one of the best paths to a better future for a Veteran and their dependents.

By my count, the report includes about two dozen of The Clearing House's recommendations.

If we screw up either effort, whether it is Dodd-Frank, whether it is housing finance reform, whether it is health care, clearly the economy pays a price.

The Committee should, therefore, reject the financial industry's unsubstantiated claims and requests for massive deregulation and demolition of the Dodd-Frank Act.

I can assure you that families in my home State still remember and continue to live with the consequences of the crisis.

last week the Senate passed the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, but this legislation does nothing to address one of the most critical problems at the VA. To improve the healthcare our…

I thank the Democratic leader. I thank my friend, the chairman of the Banking Committee, and also Senator Shaheen. Hardly a week goes by that we don't learn more about the efforts of the Russian Government to sow the seeds of dissent…

In my view, basically if we roll back these regulations, what we will have on our hands will be another crisis, and everybody in this room should be warned about that.

I am concerned that some seem to have forgotten that we even had a financial crisis a decade ago.