Jim Sensenbrenner: “I went to Puerto Rico in March. I have been involved in negotiating this, at the request of the Speaker, literally since…”

“I went to Puerto Rico in March. I have been involved in negotiating this, at the request of the Speaker, literally since the first of this year. This is difficult. This is something that nobody is happy with. This is something where everybody is going to take a haircut because the depth of the problem is so bad. What we heard right after this Congress began its session this year was: Why don't we just give them a super chapter 9 bankruptcy? That would have been bad for the future of Puerto Rico, because super chapter 9 would have dumped the $72 billion of debt and had it wiped out. And there is no way that Puerto Rico, having stiffed $72 billion worth of bondholders, would ever have been able to access the bond market again. {time} 1630 Bond market access is essential to any type of State or municipal financing. So what do we have? A choice of doing nothing, and we have heard about the severe consequences if we do nothing, or going with something that worked in the District of Columbia, which is the oversight board. Now, sure, they are unelected. One of them has to be from Puerto Rico. But the Puerto Rican Government, which has been elected, is the one that caused this problem to begin with. They have increased just about every function of spending on the Island except debt service, and they have borrowed more and more and more and more, and they don't have the money, or wouldn't appropriate the money to service the debt.…”