Pete Sessions: “I first want to say, ladies and gentlemen who are here, thank you for being here. I am from Dallas, Texas, and I stand…”

“I first want to say, ladies and gentlemen who are here, thank you for being here. I am from Dallas, Texas, and I stand in sorrow for my fellow Texans and the country, for those from Sutherland Springs, Texas, outside of San Antonio, who suffered the mass shooting of this weekend. Mr. Speaker, I rise today also to highlight an issue that is impacting first-time home buyers in America. Over the past 8 years, the Department of Justice has penalized many mortgage lenders who participated in the Federal Housing Administration's mortgage insurance program, a program that provides access to mortgages for some of America's first-time home buyers. Unfortunately, the Department of Justice still continues, even today, to use the False Claims Act to impose penalties on mortgage lenders, many of whom were guilty of only material deficiencies in the loan applications, minor issues that, years later, people came back and tried to find a mistake so that they could pin the tail, pin a fine on some mortgage lender. My colleagues and I have objected to these actions by the Department of Justice because many of the shortcomings in these loan applications were never intended as efforts to defraud anyone, but merely technical oversights, perhaps facts that might have not been completely known at the time of the loan application.…”