Political Quotes

“I rise to praise my colleague from Rhode Island for producing this amendment. I look forward to seeing it offered. I certainly am honored to be able to cosponsor it. I thought I would share with him a story that goes back to my days as a member of the Oregon legislature. When I came to the Oregon legislature, I had a lot of folks in my house district saying: Wouldn't you do something about payday lending and other high-interest lending? How is it possibly reasonable to have payday loans, which are secured by the next paycheck at over 500 percent interest; and how is it reasonable or fair that I am being lent money through my credit card at 25 or 30 percent when the interest I am earning is just 1 or 2 percent? And I had no good answer for why it was fair, because it wasn't fair. It wasn't right. So I proceeded to start working on this issue. When I went down to legal counsel, they advised me: Well, Representative Merkley, it works like this. You, at the State level, can apply rules to payday lending and to pawnbrokers and to title loans and to local consumer lending companies but not when it comes to credit cards. They explained to me the story that the Senator from Rhode Island just shared, that those rules are set by the States issuing the credit cards. Well, certainly any State that has reasonable standards for a credit card, they are not going to be issued from within that State. Thus, we come to the race to the bottom my colleague was describing.”