Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this week, we will be voting on an important piece of bipartisan legislation that recently passed out of the Senate Banking Committee, led by our colleague, Chairman Mike Crapo. The bill is called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. The purpose of the bill is to rightsize the onerous regulations that are currently imposed on community and independent banks and that stifle their ability to loan money to people who need access to credit in order to start a business or to grow a small business. Under the current law famously known as Dodd-Frank, these smaller banks are often treated just like the largest banks and financial institutions in our economy. That doesn't make any sense at all. Main Street, we need to remind some of our colleagues, is not Wall Street. The bill would make changes to reflect that important distinction. I can't tell you how many of my small bankers in Texas have told me they had to hire additional personnel, not to make more loans, just to comply with the onerous overregulation coming out of Washington, DC. Unfortunately, we lost over 2,000 banks nationwide since the end of 2010. Two thousand banks have gone out of business, either as a result of a merger with a larger bank that could sustain the additional cost of complying with these regulations or those that have just given up and said: We can't cut it because of the costs, and we are hanging up our spurs.…”