Political Quotes

“I also rise to discuss financial reform and, to be blunt, to try to set the record straight about some misleading statements that have been made on this floor about both the process and the substance of the bill that the Banking Committee reported out recently. Under Chairman Dodd's leadership and working with ranking minority member Senator Shelby, I have worked hard, since coming to the Senate, to understand the root causes of the crisis we are only now beginning to emerge from economically but to recognize that we have to have a robust solution in place to make sure we are never again confronted with the type of crisis and the lack of preparation this Nation faced back in the fall of 2008. I also come to this body, as you know, as someone who spent an awful lot of time around the capital markets. Quite candidly, I will put my free market, procapitalist credentials up against anybody's in this body. But I come to the floor as well as someone who has tried to recognize that the financial crisis--perhaps more than any other issue we have addressed--doesn't have a Democratic or a Republican root of origin, nor does it have a partisan solution set. We have to recognize that, perhaps on this piece of legislation more than ever, we have to have a bipartisan basis to establish a long-term financial framework for the next hundred years. I am very proud of the fact that we have worked so far in a bipartisan way.”