Political Quotes

“I very much hope this can go with bipartisan support. Senator Cochran on the Republican side is a cosponsor as well. It is a bipartisan amendment. This is a situation that the Congress never voted on, the situation that is here to cure. We never made a decision that an out-of-State bank should be able to come into your State and violate your State's law about interest rates. We could have. That is within Congress's power to say. But we never did. We are in that circumstance, however, for an unusual reason--because many years ago, 30 years ago, the Supreme Court made a technical decision about the National Banking Act, determining that when you have a transaction between a bank in one State and a consumer in another, where is the transaction located for regulatory purposes? They decided to locate it where the bank is. They had to pick one or the other. That didn't seem very systemically important at the time. But the big banks--the Wall Street banks--have very crafty lawyers. The very crafty lawyers saw the loophole that this innocent technical decision opened. So they started moving their credit card businesses, their divisions, into States that had the worst consumer protection laws--the ones where you could charge any interest rate you wanted, where there was the worst protection for the consumer.”