Political Quotes

“I am here today to talk about the bill before the Senate, a 2-year extension of the TAG Program. As everyone knows, this will be the second 2-year extension of a program that was put in place as an emergency measure taken during the height of the financial crisis. It was also meant to end once the crisis passed. I have exceptionally high regard for community bankers in Tennessee, as I know you do for those in Pennsylvania. They have had to deal with the financial crisis of 2008, a recession that had been left in its wake, and if that is not bad enough, since the passage of Dodd-Frank, they have had to deal with an onslaught of new regulations. Many of these regulations, no doubt, were ill-conceived. If we remember, a lot of those were put in place as aspirational goals. All of them have dramatically increased the compliance burden of being in a small banking institution. Yet none of them has been on the table to be fixed or improved by us in the Senate since 2010. Obviously, there are a lot of reasons for this, but from a standpoint of community bankers, there is no doubt this has been a shame. I am very hopeful that in the next Congress we will have a meaningful dialog about striking a better balance in terms of bank regulation, particularly as it relates to our community banks. Some of what we passed in Dodd-Frank makes a great deal of sense, but much of it does not, and it is for us to devote energy to fixing and improving the law where there are flaws.…”