Sherrod Brown

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Portman and Senator Blumenthal for their work on this. Senator Portman and I have spent untold hours, and he has been a leader on this. I thank him for his leadership, in Toledo and Cincinnati, but especially in Toledo, where the sheriff, the community, Celia Williamson, and so many others have been so important in combating this terrible affliction in our society. I thank them. Wall Street and American Workers Mr. President, last week, the House passed another giveaway to Wall Street, siding with special interests and rolling back accountability on some of the biggest banks at the expense of taxpayers. It comes on the heels of last year's tax giveaway that will benefit those same megabanks. This Congress bends over backward to help Wall Street while working families continue to struggle. It is not just that we are helping Wall Street with tax breaks, we are helping Wall Street with rolling back regulations. Let me outline what exactly all that means. In a series over several months, I am laying out the case for how Wall Street undermines America's workers and some of the changes we need to make in this country to grow our middle class and make work pay off. Remember, one of the points I made was that American Airlines announced that they were going to increase workers' wages, as did Chipotle, and Wall Street hit them with a lower stock price as a result. In each installment of this series, we have talked about these issues. I want to talk specifically this time about what Wall Street's war on workers does to employment. You can follow each installment on my medium page at www.medium.com/@SenatorBrown. Last time, I talked about workers' paychecks. Today, I want to talk about layoffs. Wall Street's singular focus on padding their own pockets is bad enough, but worse, it comes at the direct expense of American workers. Corporations focus almost exclusively on their quarterly performance on the stock market. That is how a CEO's performance is evaluated. They are compensated in large part with company shares. They do better when their stock price goes up. They do things to make their stock price go up, and then they do even better because they are compensated in large part with company shares. Wall Street analysts like it when corporations minimize their cost to boost their short-term profits; hence the stock price goes up even when the company is already profitable, and that leads directly to layoffs. Corporations lay off workers to show they are serious about cutting expenses, and their stock prices often rise as a result. Wall Street's war on workers means not only smaller paychecks but also pink slips for those workers. How did we get to a point where stock prices are more important than workers? It didn't happen overnight. I was talking with Senator Whitehouse about this, and whether it is Cranston, RI, or Mansfield, OH, companies used to consider their employees, their customers, and even the people in the town they did business in, as stakeholders. They cared about their community, they cared about their workers, and they cared about their customers. They felt a duty to fulfill obligations to a broader community, not just their own corporate board members and their own corporate executives. I grew up in Mansfield, OH, a city of about 50,000 in North Central Ohio halfway between our State's two largest cities, Cleveland and Columbus. I remember that there were so many companies in our town. I didn't know those company presidents--they were the big people in town, and I was a kid--but I do remember what those companies did. They sponsored Little League teams. They were involved in local Kiwanis clubs. They cared about workers, and they cared about the community. They cared about their customers. They weren't always interested in shareholders; they were interested in stakeholders, in all of us as a community. All the workers, all the customers, and all of the community were stakeholders. But now the focus has narrowed to just shareholders. As Wall Street's influence has grown, corporate priorities have shifted from shareholders kind of writ large, and the way success is measured has changed fundamentally to stockholders. Businesses have become beholden to those quarterly earnings reports. They have left employees, communities, and customers behind in many ways. They do everything possible, including laying off workers, to make sure their balance sheets and profit margins look as good as they can--the impact on the workers and the long-term health of the company be damned. In the 1980s, investors began to pursue hostile takeovers of companies that failed to maximize profits. Executives at other companies began to fear takeovers if they didn't keep profits and stock prices high. The pay packages of top management became greater and greater and became more and more closely tied to short-term stock performance. Wall Street's and Main Street's interests began to diverge. Folks in the corporate boardroom were no longer forced to consider what was in the long-term interests of their workers and of their small-time investors. For top corporate executives, workers became nothing more than a line item in the budget, a cost to be minimized. By the 1990s, even profitable companies started laying off workers to boost profits even further. Look at what happened to Xerox, an iconic American company that had never had a major layoff in its history. In 1993, the company announced plans to cut 10,000 workers despite being profitable. The company was doing fine. It wasn't a case of an industry moving south, facing an agonizing decision with bad options, but the CEO justified the job cuts as necessary ``to compete effectively'' and to have a ``lean and flexible organization.'' He also said he expected to see higher profits because of the layoffs the following year. Xerox wasn't alone. In the first 10 months of 1998, when the economy was booming, corporations laid off over half a million U.S. workers-- 200,000 more than were laid off the year before. This is the definition of profits before people, and things have gotten worse and worse since the late 1990s. In 2015, Sysco announced a 3-year plan that included reducing its workforce--corporate-speak for laying off workers. It might have made sense if the company had experienced a year of sluggish sales, but guess what--the opposite was true. Their sales had increased. They generated $1 billion in cash flow, and they were able to pay $700 million in dividends to the company shareholders. If the large dividend payout the year before wasn't generous enough, the CEO said that one of the goals of the 3-year plan and its layoffs was to ``maximize shareholder returns''--not stakeholders, not employees, not the communities, not the customers, but shareholder returns. The next year, 2016, Tyson Foods announced layoffs despite having a good quarter in beef sales. The following year, the company's president touted ``exceptional financial results.'' What was the reason for those results? Cost-cutting. It is always cost-cutting--more corporate-speak for laying off workers. Do you know what else he cited as the company's good health? Not great sales, not new products or investments in more workers, but the ability of the company to buy back billions of dollars of its own stock. So an accounting trick that funnels money to executives is what the company cited as a measure of its success. Buying back means executive compensation goes up. That is the key to what it was doing with cost-cutting. The company buys up shares of its own stock to drive up the price and increase the value for shareholders and the compensation for executives whose pay is tied to stock performance. Sounds familiar. It is no coincidence that since the biggest corporations reaped their tax windfalls in September, they have announced billions of dollars in buybacks. It is always about the executives--about the executives' tax cuts, about the executives' compensation, about the executives' buybacks. Again and again, we see Wall Street consider workers as simply a cost to be cut but executive pay as essential to a company. Last year, Humana announced that it was eliminating 2,700 jobs despite $13 billion in revenue. In the same call that the CEO announced the layoffs, he also announced an increase in executive pay. Workers lose their jobs to pay for more money for corporate executives. Sound familiar again and again and again? And the cherry on top? A month later, Humana announced $3 billion in stock buybacks. Again, what is that about? Higher executive compensation. Of course, cost-cutting measures typically include workers losing their jobs. Cost-cutting measures almost never include pay cuts for corporate executives. In each of these examples, the company cited cost cuts that were so necessary, they had to fire workers, upend thousands of employees. I wonder how many of those executives and how many of those corporate leaders actually brought some of those workers into their offices and looked them in the eye and told them they were laying them off. My guess is that they had a much lower paid employee make that announcement and face the media and, more importantly, face the employees who lost their jobs. How many of these executives actually listened to the story of an employee who loses her job, loses her house, whose total life is upended? How many of them ever listened to the stories of what happened to their workers who got fired? The company cited cost cuts that were so necessary, they had to fire those workers. The shortsighted approach to running a company may work for top executives who can squeeze as much value out of the company in the short term without considering the business's long-term value. It is not just bad for the employees and communities, it is usually bad for the long-term health of the company. Making short-term decisions pays off if you are already well paid, but it doesn't work for those employees. Mainstream investors and workers only make a profit when a company's stock value continues to rise over time, but the corporate executives are no longer forced to consider what is in the long-term interest of workers and small-time investors. As long as Wall Street's analysis of one-size-fits-all measure of corporate success continues to be cost-cutting, workers are at constant risk of losing their jobs. As long as CEOs get paid based on stock prices instead of the company's long-term success, workers will keep getting fired from hostile companies. We need to break this cycle of greed between Wall Street and CEOs. In the end, companies can't be profitable without good workers. We need policies that restructure our economy so workers share in the profits they create and Wall Street doesn't determine when workers keep their jobs or how much is in their paycheck. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Madam President, I particularly appreciate, in light of my comments in a moment, Senator Klobuchar's service. She has been a pioneer as the first woman Senator from Minnesota. And I believe the Presiding Officer, Senator Fischer, is the first female Senator from Nebraska. Tribute to Marcy Kaptur Madam President, I rise today to honor my colleague and my longtime close friend, Marcy Kaptur. Marcy Kaptur serves down the hall on the other side of the building. She has dedicated her life to serving the people of Toledo and northern Ohio. This Sunday, she will make history. She will officially become the longest serving woman in the history of the U.S. Congress in either House. On Sunday, she will have served in the House of Representatives for 35 years, 2 months, and 18 days, breaking a record that was set in 1960 by I believe a Massachusetts Congresswoman. For 3\1/2\ decades, she has been principled and she has been passionate about her family, her community, and our country, and she has advocated for Ohioans. She serves like nobody else. She is the granddaughter of Polish immigrants. That is important to her. She comes from a working-class family. That is important to her. She is a practicing Roman Catholic. That is important to her. That describes much of who Marcy is--Polish immigrant, working-class family, Catholic faith. Her father was a trucker and autoworker who became a small businessman. Her mother worked at the Champion spark plug factory, where, of course, she helped to organize a union. I say ``of course'' because of Marcy's not just understanding of the importance of the labor movement but her feeling it in her bones, that a unionized workforce is good for those workers, good for the company, and good for the community, and we need more of that. Marcy's story echoes that of so many of our generation. Her parents worked hard. With the help of a union card, they earned their way to a better life for Marcy and her brother. She became the first in her family to graduate from high school and then college, and then she ended up in the U.S. Congress. What a great country we live in. Marcy has never forgotten those roots. If you want to know one thing about Marcy Kaptur--who, as I said, works down the hall at the other end of the building--know that she has never forgotten her roots. That is what drives her. That is who she is. That is why she is such a terrific public servant. That is why she is going to break the record of 35 years, 2 months, and 15 days. She remembers her roots in Ohio's Polish and Ukrainian communities and how much they matter. Unemployment reached 19 percent in Toledo in the early Reagan years when Marcy first ran for office. She said it was ``the condition of working people that drove me to change my life and run for office.'' She has lived up to that ideal, fighting for working families in Ohio for every one of the nearly 13,000 days she has served in Congress. In my first year in the House, Marcy was a mentor to me. I worked with her to fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement. She showed me the way in understanding these trade agreements because she knew they would mean job losses in Ohio. She knew these trade agreements would push down wages. That is sort of the untold story-- something I don't think the President quite understands when he talks about NAFTA even though he is right that NAFTA was bad for our country. What NAFTA has done, which Marcy explained to me and understood for 25 years, is NAFTA also pushed down wages and is one of the reasons working-class Americans, whether they are in Omaha or Cleveland, so often don't get a raise. Unfortunately, Marcy was right. Since then, as we have fought bad trade deal after bad trade deal, Marcy has been a reliable ally and leader in our fight for a trade policy that puts workers in Toledo and everywhere else in this country first. We have also worked together to protect another very important love of Marcy Kaptur's, and that is our greatest natural resource, Lake Erie. We fought for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. We joined with Senator Portman on a bipartisan basis to stop the President's all but elimination of the--why would the President of the United States want to stop our cleanup of Lake Erie? That is why Marcy steps up. She works to protect the lake from invasive Asian carp; she works with farmers to prevent runoff into Lake Erie--all to protect the lake. It is what the lake means to us in terms of drinking water, jobs, commercialism, commercial development, and people just enjoying the beauty of the lake. She has gone to bat time and again for the auto industry. When some called the auto industry dead, she fought back. Never bet against American workers. Never bet against the American auto industry. Never bet against Marcy Kaptur. That scrappy, fighting spirit is one of the qualities I love most about Ohio, and you find it in abundance in Marcy Kaptur. No one fights harder for people in her district. Because of absurd redistricting, her district now goes from Toledo all across northern Ohio, only a few miles wide along the lake, all the way to the city of Cleveland. In only 5 years, the people of Cleveland have gained the same affection for Marcy as the people from Toledo have. You can see the love and respect they have. I remember once going to a rally in Toledo for President Obama. People were excited to see him, of course. I guess a few people may have noticed I was there too. But when Marcy walked in, someone screamed ``Marcy,'' and there was pandemonium. Everyone got to their feet as if a rock star had just taken the stage, because in Toledo, a rock star had taken the stage. She fights for the people of Ohio. She fights for her district. She fights. She is known, more than anything, as a fighter for working families. It is so fitting that she reaches this milestone during Women's History Month. When she first joined the House, there were fewer than two dozen women serving. She helped blaze a trail for others. She even told the stories of the women who paved the way for her in her book ``Women of Congress: A Twentieth Century Odyssey.'' Having Marcy in Congress matters for so many reasons. It mattes for the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans she serves. It matters for the perspective she brings as the daughter of working-class parents. As I said, she was first in her family not just to go to college; she was first in her family to graduate from high school, right in the industrialized heartland. As in Nebraska, Madam President, it matters to the little girls in Toledo, who for 35 years--do you know how, when you are in school, there is often a map or a chart of the Presidents? There was a calendar in Brinkerhoff Grade School when I was a little kid in Mansfield, OH. Every year, there was a calendar with all the Presidents' pictures on it. When I was in school, all the Presidents looked alike. Some had whiskers; some didn't. But they all looked alike because they were all White guys. Right? That changed in 2008. I was hoping it would change in 2016. It didn't. That is beside the point. Marcy Kaptur--because she is the Congresswoman for Toledo, little girls growing up in Toledo since 1982 have realized there is someone to look up to. In Scottsbluff and in Lincoln and in Kearny, NE, they will now look up to having a woman Senator from Nebraska. Ohio has never had a woman Senator or woman Governor, but they have had Marcy Kaptur. That has mattered to little girls for 35 years, as they see a picture of their Representative in the local paper, the Toledo Blade. It is not just another man in a suit but someone who looks more like them, someone they can grow up to be. I want to thank Marcy. She is not in the building now, but I want to thank Marcy for her service to Ohio. I hope we get to keep working with Marcy Kaptur for another couple of decades. The voters would have to approve that, but I am hopeful that we will. Tribute to Rachel Petri Madam President, I also want to talk about somebody else who is sitting in this Chamber who will continue, as her career advances, to be a role model for the people of this country and the people of her community. A daughter of Eastern Ohio, Rachel Petri has done communications work for me for a number of years. She is leaving our office to, of course, return to her home State of Ohio. She has been a joy to work with. She has been a pleasure to work with. She is so smart and so committed, with an incredible work ethic. I am honored that she has spent part of her life working with me in our office in Washington, DC, and I thank her for her service. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, 10 years ago today, March 14, Bear Stearns was on the verge of collapse. Despite its 85-year history, despite its relationship with nearly every bank on Wall Street, the bank suddenly found itself on the brink. On this very day, March 14, Bear Stearns lost $3.5 billion in market value. The bank was in the midst of a free fall. In the course of one week, Bear Stearns went from trading for $65 per share to being bought for $2 a share in a sweetheart deal orchestrated by the Fed over the course of a weekend. Nearly overnight, one of Wall Street's most prestigious, almost 100-year-old banks fell apart. Across the country, families sat at their kitchen tables and started to wonder: Will one of us lose our job? Will we have to move? Will we be able to retire? Will we lose our house? Will we be able to send our kids to college? On this day 10 years ago--March 14, 2008--a headline from CNN read: ``Job Losses: The Worst in Five Years.'' The story talked about how the economy was hemorrhaging jobs. The article warned that the crisis was building, quoting one analyst who said the real estate and credit crunch ``was whipping its way through the U.S. economy like a Midwestern tornado.'' In hindsight, we know that things would get a lot worse before they got better. Some people say nobody could have possibly seen this coming. Some people say the 2008 financial crisis was like the weather--like that Midwestern tornado--something out of control that we wouldn't have seen, but we know better. Advocates in communities--the people who are actually dealing with the consequences of this crisis--were sounding the alarm. For years before the crisis, they predicted what would happen if Washington didn't rein in Wall Street, and clearly they were right. A few people in Washington, like Ned Gramlich, saw the problem for what it was; that Washington didn't stop the crisis, after it began, after it intensified--Congress at least responded. We passed a law that created important protections for the financial system, for taxpayers, for homeowners to hold banks and watchdogs accountable to prevent another crisis, but Wall Street wasn't even close to being ready to quit. There was no contrition. Nobody went to jail. In fact, on the day that President Obama signed Wall Street reform--what we know as Dodd- Frank--on the day that bill was signed into law, the top financial service lobbyists in this town said: Now it is half time. Now, what would that mean: Now it is half time? It meant they lost the first half. They lost the battle where people in this Congress actually had the guts and the backbone and sloughed off their campaign contributions and were unwilling to listen to bank lobbyists tell them what to do. They stood up to the bank lobbyists and stood up to Wall Street and they did the right thing, but this lobbyist said it was half time. So the lobbyists lost the first half, but they were back at it, going to the regulators, trying to convince the regulators to weaken the rules and not implement the bill. Not long ago, another bank lobbyist told us their game plan: ``We don't want a seat at the table, we want the whole table.'' This bill gives them that. The same group that warned us about the last crisis-- this is what I ask my colleagues to listen to. The same group that warned us about the last crisis or that were the regulators who tried to fix the last crisis--those same people are opposed to the bill the Senate is considering today. That doesn't seem to matter to about 65 of my colleagues. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the list of the range of civil rights, labor, and consumer advocacy groups that oppose S. 2155.

Mr. BROWN. People who cleaned up the last crisis are warning us not to pass this bill. Experts from both parties are warning us, the authors of Wall Street reform. Barney Frank said he would vote no if he were in the Senate. Chris Dodd, in an op-ed today, writes that the bill's changes amount to ``chipping away at the ability to conduct comprehensive and effective oversight.'' Now, people are saying this isn't a major scale-back of Dodd-Frank, but Senator Dodd and Congressman Frank both say they would vote no because they recognize it as damaging to the work we all did. Experts like Paul Volcker, head of the Federal Reserve; Sheila Bair, head of FDIC, Republican appointment by President Bush, used to be chief of staff for Senator Bob Dole; Dan Tarullo, who was effectively the head of supervision of regulation for the Federal Reserve, wants us to vote no. Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was at the Federal Reserve and then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury; Gary Gensler, who is head of the Commodities Future Trading Commission; Tom Hoenig, a Republican who is at FDIC and earlier was the Fed president; Antonia Weiss at the Treasury Department; Paul Tucker, international banker from England-- international regulator; Phil Angelides, a former California State Treasurer who ran the Commission that examined what happened in the bank crisis--they all wrote to the Senate. They all outlined a combined 28 pages' worth of concerns about this bill, and my colleagues just say: Oh, this is just helping the small community banks and some of the regional banks a little bit. Well, not exactly. That is what happens here. We start off wanting to help the small banks; we start off helping some of the midsized regional banks that generally do a good job--banks like Huntington and Fifth Third and Key Bank--but then Wall Street gets involved, and Wall Street drives a bigger and bigger hole in this bill and gets more and more help and more and more breaks and look where we are. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record letters from two of these financial experts.

Mr. BROWN. So the question is, Why do we ignore these pleas? Let's recap the problems with this legislation. First, the bill puts American taxpayers at risk of another bank bailout. It weakens stress tests for all large banks. In spite of what my colleagues say, everybody that has commented on this bill--so many experts that have commented on this bill understand that this is not just about community banks; it is not just about the regional midsized that go up to $250 billion. We can stress test for all large banks; JPMorgan Chase, $2.5 trillion in assets; Bank of America, $2.3 trillion; Wells Fargo, $1.9 trillion. As if they haven't had enough-- done enough, made enough mistakes, violated the public trust enough times. Citigroup, $1.9 trillion. These four banks--JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup--hold 51 percent, more than half of all industry assets, $8.6 trillion. These banks have had a really good run since the crisis, since the bailout. Remember, people didn't go to jail even though people in my ZIP Code, in my community, in my State and in Pennsylvania and all over the country--people lost savings, their homes, and their jobs. These banks, which are more profitable than they have ever been in the last couple of years, got a huge tax break just last December, and now we are doing them a favor by weakening the stress test. All the country's biggest banks took about $239 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Without rigorous annual stress tests, taxpayers can once again be on the hook if too-big-to-fail banks collapse and we don't have the right tools in place to see it coming. Second, this bill opens the door to weaker oversight of foreign megabanks operating in the United States, the same banks that repeatedly violated U.S. law. These are banks like Deutsche Bank in Germany, the Trump business organization's personal bank; Santander in Spain, Barclays in Britain, Credit Suisse, and UBS in Switzerland. These are banks that violated Iran sanctions. They are banks that repossessed cars from American service men and women who were serving overseas. These are banks that were fined by the Federal Government, and we are doing these foreign banks a favor in this bill. Third, with the change of just one word, this bill forces the Fed to weaken the rules even for the largest banks with more than $250 billion in assets. Former CFTC Chair Gary Gensler wrote to the Senate this month and said this change ``may subject the government to additional lobbying and possible litigation from individual banks seeking specially tailored rules.'' We know all of these regulators put in place by the Trump administration--most of them with ties to Wall Street, and we know the White House now looks like an executive retreat for Wall Street executives--we know these regulators are going to bend over backward for the big banks, and if they don't, they are going to be sued by the foreign banks and by other big banks to open up those loopholes even more. Senator Dodd, one of the authors of the original bill, identified this $250 billion threshold as the No. 1 reason he can't support the bill. He said: ``It raises the danger of a cascading economic effect.'' Fourth, this bill makes another change to allow big banks to borrow more money than they can afford, which, once again, puts taxpayers and our economy at risk. The New York Times described this provision as weakening rules ``aimed at keeping banks from being able to take big risks without properly preparing for disaster.'' The Washington Post reported that JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup may get a combined $30 billion windfall--$30 billion windfall--if this provision passes. I am not making this up. This is what analysts are saying this bill will do. Fifth, this bill chips away at key mortgage rules put in place after the last crisis. It includes provisions that weaken transparency, inclusiveness, and fairness in mortgage lending. The bill makes it easier for lenders to mislead families into mortgages they can't afford, and takes away those families' right to take the bank to court. It strips away key data used to monitor trends in mortgage lending and spot discrimination against communities of color. There was an amendment to fix that from Senator Cortez Masto that the Republicans will not allow us to offer. We know that in too many places across the country, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan for no good reason. Without this data, we will not know when that redlining is happening. Sixth--and this may be the most awful of all. For reasons I can't even pretend to understand, this bill helps Equifax. It is the same Equifax that let hackers steal 148 million Americans' personal data. More than half the adults in this country had their personal data breached because of Equifax--their birth dates, Social Security numbers, and addresses--the same Equifax whose former executive was just today charged with insider trading for dumping his stocks just before the company announced its data breach failure. In exchange for a small provision helping servicemembers watch their credit, this bill forces them to give up their right to take Equifax to court the next time the company's recklessness exposes sensitive financial data. If that weren't bad enough, the bill also gives Equifax a big new business opportunity. This will give a company that put half the American population at risk of identify theft the power to decide who can get a mortgage. What do the American people get in exchange for these goodies to big banks and to Equifax? They get to pick up the check. The Congressional Budget Office confirmed that this bill would increase the probability of a big bank failure and a financial crisis adding to the deficit. Even after the addition of language offsetting some of the costs of this bill, the legislation would increase the deficit by $455 million. Let me repeat that. The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office found that this bill will increase the probability of a big bank failure and a financial crisis. So don't tell me this bill doesn't roll back Dodd- Frank for the biggest banks. In this town, no one seems to be able to find a single dollar when we need to solve our pension crisis or invest in infrastructure or remove toxic lead from kids' homes, but when the Big Bank lobbyists come calling, the Senate waives its budget rules to do Wall Street's bidding. Let me also remind my colleagues how hard it was to enact the reforms we passed after the last crisis. Do you remember that lobbyist said that it was only halftime after one of the few times in this body's recent history that Wall Street actually lost, when we did the right thing 10 years ago? In the move up to that bill, the Senate considered 14 separate Republican amendments, where there were votes taken, to Dodd-Frank and another 12 from Democrats. Of those 26 amendments, 5 of them were adopted, 5 Republican amendments, 10 Democratic amendments. They were voted on in a Senate where the Democrats were in the majority and gave both parties the opportunity to amend the bill.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.

Mr. BROWN. During the conference committee, televised live on C-SPAN for 48 hours, 17 Senate Republican amendments were accepted and 22 amendments from Senate Democrats. Contrast that with today: No subsequent amendments were adopted. I credit Chairman Crapo for at least allowing amendments, but that is as far as it went. On the Senate floor, it has been worse. Democrats and Republicans alike were completely shut down, not able to offer a single amendment. We know how this place has worked the last year. All decisions are made down the hall in the majority leader's office. The tax bill was written there. The healthcare bill was written there. This bill was written in a way that there are no amendments allowed on the floor, no debate, no deliberation, no changes. Lastly, fundamentally, the problem with this bill is that we are entrusting the profiteers from the last crisis, the deniers of the last crisis, with implementing big-bank giveaways. I am not willing to put blind trust in the people who failed us before. Regulators Quarles, Mulvaney, Otting, and Mnuchin are the people we are expecting to regulate and save us from another bailout, save us from another financial crisis, and save us from another implosion in our economy. These are the people who failed us so spectacularly in the past, with such grave consequences, and we are expecting them to protect us the next time. Nothing in their public record has earned them this trust. This is the collective amnesia crowd--the crowd who forgets what I talked about at the beginning of the speech about what happened 10 years ago--but Ohio families haven't forgotten. People across this country still struggle. People who have lost savings haven't been able to entirely rebuild them. People who lost jobs are often in lower paying jobs as a result. People who lost their homes--in my part of Cleveland, I still see the devastation caused by this financial crisis, the tens of thousands of homes in Greater Cleveland that were foreclosed on. These are the people we are sent here to serve. What this bill does for them and the issues facing their lives is impossible to see. I urge my colleagues to reject this bill. I urge my colleagues to fundamentally ask themselves whose side they are on. Are you going to vote yes on this and side with special interests and Wall Street, or are you going to vote no and side with taxpayers and homeowners and students and workers? Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I would like my colleagues to take a trip down memory lane. Go back a decade or two to 2006, 2007, 2008, and look at the decade before that. My State of Ohio, for 14 years in a row-- from the late 1990s through the year 2010--experienced almost a decade and a half of foreclosure increases leading up to the crisis. That meant that in Ohio, literally every year for 14 years, there were more foreclosures than the year before in my State. Predatory and irresponsible lenders made dangerous, subprime loans. They often ignored whether borrowers had the ability to repay that loan. The incentives were these: We will keep writing these; we will keep underwriting; we will keep collecting fees. We don't care if the borrower can pay. We can see that is a setup for disaster. Because of the lack of standards for underwriting, we learned a painful lesson that not all mortgage lending is created equal. Look at some headlines from that period. On September 18, 2008, the front page of the Wall Street Journal featured three headlines. This was September 18, 2008, so just slightly less than 10 years ago: ``Mounting Fears Shape World Markets As Banking Giants Rush to Raise Capital.'' ``Bad Bets and Cash Crunch Push Ailing AIG to Brink.'' ``Worst Crisis Since `30s, With No End.'' On the same day the Washington Post reported: ``Markets in Disarray as Lending Locks Up.'' How did we get to that crisis? Banks forgot the essential rule of lending. A borrower needs to be able to pay back the loan. It is pretty simple, but a forgotten dictum. Instead, lenders offered loans that required no documentation. They offered loans with teaser interest rates that shot through the roof after 2 or 3 years. They offered loans where borrowers never paid down their principal or they stripped their home's value through cash-out refinances. So borrowers had these mortgages where they simply paid the interest with the belief the home would go up in value more and more and more, never paying the principal. The homes didn't go up in value, and look what happened. All of these practices had devastating results for families and communities and the economy. My wife Connie and I live in ZIP Code 44105 in Cleveland, OH, just south of Slavic Village in the great city of Cleveland. Eleven years ago, in the first half of 2007, 44105 had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America. I can still see the blight brought on by those foreclosures--what it did to individual families, what it did to the neighborhood, what it did to the city of Cleveland. Think about--and we don't do that very much here. We don't really think all that much when we talk about things like this. We look at numbers. We look at statistics. We read analyses and data, but we don't really think about individual families. Think about what happens when somebody suffers a foreclosure. First of all, these families understand that things are getting tighter. It is harder and harder to pay their mortgage. Their spouse may have been scaled back to half time, depending on the economic circumstances. The first thing they do is often get rid of the family pet. It costs too much to take the dog to the vet. The second thing they do is cut back on everything. They just start cutting back on everything. Eventually they have that sit-down with their 12-year-old daughter and their 14-year-old son and their 15-year old son, and tell them: We are going to have to move. We don't know where we are going or what school district we will be in. We don't know how much we are going to get; we have to sell the car. We don't know how much you are going to be able to see your friends. They think about the personal side, but we don't do that much here. Pope Francis used to admonish his parish priests to go out and smell like the flock. We don't do that very much here. We look at data and ideas, and we don't think about our policies and our votes and the impact they have on individual human beings. So thinking back to ZIP Code 44105, if those faulty mortgage products weren't bad enough on their own, they were targeted to communities of color. The neighborhood my wife and I live in, ZIP Code 44105, is mostly African American, but pretty diverse. A lot of people look more like me, but there are a lot of people with moderate to low incomes. These mortgage products were targeted to communities of color. In those communities in particular, even those who qualified for no- frills, no-surprises prime mortgages were often instead steered into subprime loans. Why? Because the lender could make more money on a subprime loan than a straightforward loan that most Members of the Senate generally sign up for. So even African-American and Hispanic borrowers with higher incomes than other borrowers found themselves-- because the banks put them there--with subprime mortgages. These practices of discrimination, which went on for years, stripped a generation's worth of equity from communities that had fought hard for equal access to home ownership. Think about this: The household wealth of communities of color simply hasn't recovered from the last decade. Middle-class Black and Hispanic families lost half of their wealth from 2007 to 2013. In 2016, it was $38,000. The numbers are similar for Hispanic households: $85,000 in 2007, $46,000 in 2016. They all sound like numbers, but what that does to a family who has lost half its wealth, particularly because their wealth is generally in the home that they own--think of what that does. My colleagues talk about how hard the banks have it, how hard it is to be a banker now, and how hard it is for Wall Street. I would like to revisit what happens when banks stop following the rules. Borrowers with these higher cost loans were foreclosed on at almost triple the rate of borrowers with standard 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages. Between 2006 and 2014, more than 9 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure in distressed sales or surrendered their home to the lender--9.3 million homeowners. What does that mean to us? Do we know any of them? Do we ever talk to any of them? Do we listen to their stories about what happens when you get thrown out of your house? Do we sit there and patiently listen and ask them questions and ask them to tell us about what has happened during the last 10 years of their lives? Because when you get thrown out of your home, whether you are evicted or whether you get put out because of foreclosure, you don't just give away the family pet. You don't just cut back on everything. You lose a lot of your possessions because you can't take things with you. You start again in your life, and you start again in debt. Does anybody here care about that? They talk about how hard it is for the banks and how Wall Street is suffering, but they don't think about the individual homeowners who struggle. Some of them get foreclosed on. Some of them are just struggling. Some of them have lost half of their wealth. It is not just families of color who lost half their wealth; a whole lot of working class White families have lost a lot of their wealth. Does this place seem to care? Not a whole lot. It wasn't just subprime mortgages. The crisis revealed a host of other harmful practices, like steering borrowers to affiliated companies, kickbacks for business referrals, inflated appraisals, and loan officer compensation based on the loan product. If you have a certain loan product that might be more profitable, even though it is a little sleazy and a little underhanded, you make a little more money because you steer people into those loan products. It might lead to the ruining of their lives or it might lead to their foreclosure, but they are making more money. So what does that mean? It means the worse the loan was for the borrower, the more money the lender made. In 2008, the worse the loan was for the borrower, the more money the lender made. That is what our laws were. We fixed that, and we are going to undo some of that in this bill. After the dust settled, this country realized how twisted our mortgage lending market had become. Congress finally stepped in to do what the market and regulators refused to do for too long. I believe in free enterprise. I believe in the dynamism of capitalism. But when the market and the regulators did nothing except encourage this kind of behavior--that is why government is involved. That is why government steps in. That is why we did Wall Street reform. It established a commonsense rule that lenders should evaluate whether a borrower has the ability to repay a home loan. The ability to repay rule means that lenders can no longer make a loan based on the home's value or ignore the fact that an adjustable rate mortgage will become unaffordable in a year or two. A mortgage is the largest financial transaction most families will make in their lifetime. It is a big deal, central to the economic life and the life overall of a great majority of people in this country. Requiring that the mortgage process, services, and fees be transparent and understandable to borrowers is essential. We don't all have great sophistication when we get a homeowner's loan. That is why it is so important that it be transparent and understandable to borrowers. But the bill before us today chips away at that principle. It includes several provisions that, when taken together, weaken transparency and inclusiveness and undermine fairness in mortgage lending. The bill says lenders need not consider whether a borrower can afford an adjustable rate mortgage after the interest rate adjusts. Banks and mortgage companies make more money when they write more loans. I get that. They should. But when the incentive is only that and there is no requirement that the borrower be able to afford an adjustable rate mortgage after the interest rate adjusts--we know what will happen. The bill also allows the largest banks to acquire small banks and retains these legal protections for the larger banks. I spoke to a member of a bank board in Mansfield, OH, yesterday, a longtime friend of our family's. That is where I grew up. I know the locally owned banks in Mansfield, OH. I know that Mechanics Bank works hard for their enrichment. I know they work hard for their customers. They know their customers. Small banks work with their customers. If they lose a job or face a sudden illness, the bank can try to work with them to figure out how to avoid foreclosure. Would a megabank in Cleveland, Columbus, or Dayton do the same thing? Based on the record of Secretary Mnuchin's bank, OneWest, and others during the crisis, we can be pretty sure we know the answer to that, and the answer is no, they won't. The bill before us also gives lenders a pass on the requirement to escrow for taxes and insurance when making subprime loans. It doesn't cost real money to the lender to put money aside for taxes and insurance; it is part of the calculation when you buy a house. Most of us want our taxes and insurance included so we have a more predictable stream of outflow, so we know how much we are paying next month, and it doesn't change. It may change once a year, but it doesn't change often. By definition, someone taking out a subprime loan is at a higher risk of default. Also, escrow helps a borrower plan for the expenses of taxes and insurance, and it protects the lender from unexpected losses. That is in the bill, and we are stripping that out of the law. Former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, appointed by President Bush, is a terrific public servant. She was a high-ranking employee--I believe chief of staff--for Senator Dole when he was a Member of the Senate. She steered the FDIC through the worst of the financial crisis. She raised her opposition to this provision in a letter to me. This bill exempts 85 percent of banks from reporting the HMDA data they are collecting and reporting today. I credit Senator Cortez Masto, who, as the attorney general of Nevada before she joined us in the Senate 14 months ago, saw up close what happened with foreclosures. She is a strong, outspoken opponent of this bill. She has had those discussions with people who have lost their homes. She understands how it happened. She doesn't have the amnesia that apparently a majority of my colleagues have, forgetting what happened 10 years ago and learning almost nothing from what happened 10 years ago. Her amendment would fix HMDA data collection. Without this data, we can't monitor trends in mortgage lending, particularly in rural areas. Without this data, it will be even harder to see who has access to affordable mortgage credit and who does not. We know that redlining is still happening. The latest report from the Center for Investigative Reporting analyzed tens of millions of mortgage records and found that across the country, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan even when you take into account factors like their income and the size of the loan. Without this data, we won't know when redlining happens. It will make it more difficult to show that community lenders go the extra mile for their customers. That is why the NAACP, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, Unidos, National Urban League, Rural Community Assistance Corporation, and more than 170 State and national organizations have objected to this devastating new hole in lending data. Why in the world would Congress want to keep us from getting that information, keep us from getting that data, so we, in fact, understand better what goes on? Part of our problem in 2007 and 2008 was that we had a whole bunch of regulators who were asleep at the switch, we had a Congress that was oblivious, and we had a national media that was not paying enough attention to this. Part of that was that the regulators didn't have the information they needed. That is why the head of supervision at the Federal Reserve, Randal Quarles, who was in the Bush administration then, could see nothing but roses and candy in the years ahead. He said that in 2006 and I believe in 2007. He had no idea what was going on, partly because he maybe didn't want to know but partly because we didn't have the data collected that we are starting to collect now. So we are going to say we don't care about that. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the letter from former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair and the letters from civil rights groups in opposition to this provision be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks. Any one of these provisions is bad enough, but taken together, they add up to riskier loans for American families and more foreclosures on American families. Think about this: If this bill passes, a bank could make a subprime loan without considering whether a borrower could afford the higher interest rate when the teaser rate expires. The first 2 or 3 years, you are paying rate X, and then in the third or fourth year, you are paying X plus two or X plus three, and then the next year, maybe X plus that number plus one, to the point you can't afford your mortgage anymore. What happens? You get foreclosed on, and your life turns upside down. If this bill passes, a bank could make a subprime loan without considering whether the borrower could pay the higher interest rate. A bank wouldn't have to collect taxes and insurance on a monthly basis, making a loan look affordable when it may not be because you have insurance and taxes. Why not put that in the monthly payment so people can predict more and understand their finances better? The homeowner loses her right to take the bank to court for removing her from her home even though the bank made a loan it knew she could never repay. So the bank makes a loan to a homeowner. The homeowner perhaps doesn't have the sophistication the banker sitting across the table has, doesn't quite understand what the teaser rate will mean to the cost of her house. Then the bank doesn't do the escrow adding insurance and taxes, and the bank convinces this perspective homeowner, the borrower, that she can make these payments, no problem. Then she loses her right to action if she is foreclosed on. She has no recourse even though the bank sold her something that a good banker wouldn't have. It is a recipe for disaster. It is a recipe for more families ending up in homes they were misled into thinking they could afford. Is it too much to ask a lender to consider whether a family can afford the loan they are getting? Are we back here already? The cherry on top is this bill eliminates data we need to determine whether banks are targeting certain communities for these risky loans. We know this administration and the heads of Departments are not concerned about accountability for financial institutions' equity, lending, and inclusivity. We learned that HUD is considering changing its mission statement to delete references to inclusive communities. Imagine that, Secretary Carson, that you would do such a thing. I am concerned this bill will put more families at risk of poor housing conditions, particularly in rural communities that are so often ignored in this town. The bill reduces the frequency of required inspections for units overseen by rural public housing agencies that administer 550 or fewer units of HUD public housing and section 8 rental vouchers. For many of these so-called PHAs, HUD will inspect their property once every 3 years rather than every 1 or 2 years. This bill would allow PHAs to inspect more voucher-assisted units just once every 3 years. A lot can happen to an apartment in 3 years that could put residents' health and safety at risk. In my neighborhood, it is in the 90 percent rate, those homes that have toxic levels of lead, and it gets worse as the house gets older and the paint chips. And we are not going to inspect these places. I understand that PHAs face many challenges in maintaining high- quality housing for families. Due to years of underfunding, public housing alone faces an estimated $26 billion backlog of repairs. My Senate Democratic colleagues and I have proposed an infrastructure package that includes funding for public housing repairs and revitalization to help address these challenges. We have an obligation to make sure these struggling families have safe and decent housing. I have been clear throughout this process that I want to help community lenders and housing providers better serve their customers. We don't do that by reducing accountability. We don't do that by returning to the freewheeling housing market that led to millions of families losing their homes. When we talk about escrow and lending requirements, it sounds kind of boring, it sounds dry, and it may sound like legalese that don't matter, but it matters when it comes to the biggest, most important purchase most Americans will make. It just seems that particularly when people buy that first home and they don't really know much about how to do that--maybe they don't have a lot of political sophistication; they are 25 or 30 years old or whatever age they are--we shouldn't make it more complicated, we should make it less complicated. Bankers should not be incentivized only by how much money they make by writing more and more mortgages but instead should walk through what this is going to cost: Here is the escrow. Here is what your insurance costs. Here is what you are going to pay if you have a teaser rate. We are going to make some decisions, and this house may be a little too expensive for you because of that teaser rate, because of what you will be paying 3 years from now in addition to the escrow, the taxes and insurance that you hadn't really planned for. Weakening a standard here or granting an exemption there will end up causing real pain for real families. Growth in the housing sector is only sustainable if families can afford their loans and homes are maintained. I know families in my ZIP Code can't afford a repeat of the housing crisis. I know what it has done to my neighborhood. Some of them are still digging out. Let's stop listening to the big-bank lobbyists and start listening to the people we serve, the families across this country who remember all too well what foreclosures and job losses mean to them.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I first wish to thank Senator Whitehouse, one of my best friends in the Senate. We came to the Senate on the same day. He will go down in history as the best advocate in this body or perhaps the greatest moralist of our time combatting climate change. He has educated Members of the Senate-- some more resistant than others. He has taken to the floor over and over. He has continued to make sure that people listen to something important, and we all appreciate that leadership. Climate change affects Ohio jobs that rely on Lake Erie. The Great Lakes are vital to our industrial heartland, as the Rockies are to the West, as the Atlantic coastline is to New England, as the Gulf of Mexico is to the Presiding Officer's own State of Florida. In fact, 84 percent of America's freshwater is in the five Great Lakes. Only polar icecaps contain more freshwater than do the Great Lakes. Lake Erie is one of the biggest lakes in the world. It is also the shallowest of the lakes. This is an amazing statistic. Lake Erie is the shallowest and among the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area. Lake Erie contains 2 percent of all the water in the Great Lakes, yet it contains 50 percent of the fish in the Great Lakes because it is warmer and shallower and conducive to aquatic life and fish life. Its shallowness makes it particularly vulnerable to storm water runoff and the algae blooms that it causes. The Maumee River runs through Toledo. The Maumee River Basin is the largest drainage basin of any of the Great Lakes, and the largest river that empties into the Great Lakes is the Maumee. Climate change makes these algae blooms off the coast of Toledo in the western base of Lake Erie. Climate change makes those blooms worse. It contaminates our lakes, and it threatens the Ohio businesses and communities that rely on Lake Erie. Three summers ago, we had to get bottled drinking water to the citizens of Toledo and the surrounding areas of Northwest Ohio because the water was not potable at that time. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we know that one effect of climate change in the Great Lakes region has been a 37-percent increase in the gully washers--the heavy rain events that contribute to algae blooms. I talked to farmers who have been farming in the Western Lake Erie Basin for decades. Just a few weeks ago I did a roundtable in that part of the State. My staff member Jonathan McCracken has done a number of roundtables before. Since talking to these farmers, they tell us they are experiencing heavier rain events more often and with greater intensity compared to even 15 years ago, let alone in the lifespan of many of these farmers. Hotter summers and shorter winters make this worse. The effects of algae blooms have a profound effect on the ecosystem. That is why this matters. Protecting our lakes is one of the biggest environmental challenges facing the entire Midwest. It is the biggest challenge facing Ohio. We have made some progress over the last 8 years, thanks in large part to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The GLRI is working. Everybody knows it does. Nobody claims it doesn't. I remember how polluted Lake Erie was when I was growing up. I grew up an hour or hour and a half from there. My family, a week or two in the summer, would drive north to Gem Beach. I remember the dead fish. I remember the smell of the lake. I remember that this lake was in big, big trouble. We have made progress cleaning up its tributaries. We increased access to the lake. We approved habitats for fish and wildlife. It has been a bipartisan success story, and it took the Federal Government to do it. The city of Cleveland couldn't do it, nor the city of Lorraine, the city of Sandusky, the city of Port Clinton, the city of Ashtabula. They couldn't clean up the lake. The State of Ohio didn't have the ability and the resources to clean this lake up. It took the Federal Government and the U.S. EPA to have the strength and the dollars and the mission to clean up this lake. That is why it has been a bipartisan success story all over our country. We need to make sure that GLRI has the funding it needs to keep up its work and not eliminate it, as the President again proposed in his budget. Taking a hatchet to GLRI would cost Ohio jobs, and it would jeopardize public health by putting our drinking water at risk. If you are over 50 years old, you remember what that lake looked like. You remember what that lake smelled like. You remember how people didn't swim there, how people's drinking water was threatened. You remember that before EPA, before there was this bipartisan commitment to clean up one of the greatest of the Great Lakes. You remember that. Obviously, this President doesn't know this. This President won his election based on winning these Great Lakes States, and he has abandoned these States by drastically cutting funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Those of us along the Great Lakes didn't stand for a budget that eliminated GLRI last year. Nothing has changed this year. Ohioans on both sides of the aisle will go to the mat for our lake. I am working with Senator Portman--I am a Democrat; he is a Republican--and my Ohio colleagues from both parties to protect it. Budget cuts are terrible for this; climate change will only make it worse. When I was young, people wrote off Lake Erie as a polluted, dying lake. As I said, I remember seeing it. I remember smelling it. I remember hearing people talk about it. Many, many people thought that there wasn't much future for this Great Lake, that it would be impossible to clean up. People in the past have had a habit of not just writing off Lake Erie but also writing off my State. We have proved them wrong time and again. We proved them wrong back then, we proved them wrong today, and we will prove them wrong in the future. Our lake is improving. It is supporting an entire industry. It supports the jobs it creates. It is providing drinking water and recreation and so much more to communities across our State, and we can't allow climate change to ruin that progress. We cannot write off Lake Erie. We cannot write off the millions of Ohioans and people from Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota who depend on these five Great Lakes. I see it up close. I live only 5 or 6 miles from the lake. I know what it means for my community. I know how important this is for the future--the environmental future--of our country, the economic future of my State. It is important for all of us to come together on a bipartisan basis.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, when you went to a local bank in Mansfield, OH, to buy a house 30, 40, or 50 years ago, you knew the lender, and the lender knew you. You saw him or her at the grocery store. Maybe they went to your church or synagogue. Your kids probably went to the same school. You knew that your deposits at the bank helped fund your neighbor's house or the hardware store down the street. A lot of banks and credit unions don't work this way. The 2008 crisis taught us that finance has changed. Now a mortgage in Zanesville, OH, is diced and sliced and sold to an investor in Zurich, Switzerland. Banks in Frankfurt place bets on loans in Fostoria. When the system went bust a decade ago and predatory loans began to fail, Ohio taxpayers picked up the tab, including for foreign banks headquartered an ocean away. The Federal Reserve opened up a spigot of cheap money to keep the global economy from tanking. Banks in Spain, France, Japan, Canada, and Korea all came to the United States for help to weather the financial storm. Think about this. An analysis of the Fed's lending from February 2008 to 2009 showed that the vast majority of loans went to foreign banks. After the crisis, records released to the public showed that foreign banks took more than 70 percent of the Fed's loans during the crisis and 65 percent of loans from other emergency programs. Under one bailout scheme, British Barclays alone borrowed $232 billion from the Fed at a sweetheart interest rate--the kind of rate a hardware store in Hillsboro, OH, could never get on a loan to keep them afloat back in 2008. Think about that. British Barclays got a sweetheart deal, a better deal than a hardware store in Ohio could get from a bank. After the crisis, Congress responded with a law, the Wall Street reform act, to ensure that taxpayers would never again have to send bailout money to British and Swiss megabanks. We ordered the Fed to keep a closer eye on the big banks--to use their power to make sure the largest global banks did not again crash the economy. Congress instructed that the Fed apply the strictest protections to the biggest banks--those with more than $50 billion in assets. We know that. When the Fed implemented these rules, they applied some standards to banks that have more than $50 billion across the globe, but for global banks that have more than $50 billion in the United States, the Fed applied the strongest standards. For foreign banks with not only trillions worldwide but systemic operations in the United States, the Fed wrote rules that are as strict as those for our domestic megabanks, standards that former Fed Governor Dan Tarullo called ``special prudential measures.'' They are standards that ensure that we only import Swiss chocolate, not Swiss bank failures. These special measures are important. Last year, the Office of Financial Research released a report showing that foreign banks in the United States are riskier than similarly sized U.S. regional banks. Hear that again. Foreign banks in the United States are riskier than similarly sized U.S. regional banks. Think of that in terms of what this bill that we just voted cloture on actually does. This legislation threatens to undo important rules protecting us from risk. The legislation puts taxpayers on the hook for bailouts. That is what the Congressional Budget Office said. Under this bill, foreign banks that took billions in bailouts would be able to take more risk under a less watchful eye. Who are some of them? Deutsche Bank, Santander, and UBS would all be treated more like they were an Ohio regional bank. Deutsche Bank, the Trump family's personal business bank; Santander, the bank in Spain that repossessed the cars of hundreds of service men and women cars while those service men and women were serving our country overseas; UBS, the Swiss bank that illegally financed Iranian activities--they would all be treated more like they were Huntington in Columbus, or Fifth Third in Cincinnati, or KeyBank in Cleveland. What is right about that? What is fair about that? What is smart about that? Don't take my word for it. Secretary Mnuchin sat right in front of the Banking Committee; Senator Crapo, the chairman, and I, as the ranking member, looked straight at him just a few weeks ago. He confirmed that this bill would treat foreign banks with up to $250 billion in assets the same as U.S. regional banks. So they are up to $250 billion, just like Huntington, just like KeyCorp, just like Fifth Third in Ohio. Secretary Mnuchin said: We are going to treat those foreign banks the same if they are up to $250 billion in assets. That may be the first direct answer I have ever heard from Secretary Mnuchin. I sit on the Finance Committee and the Banking Committee, and he has trouble giving direct answers. He did at least that time. It makes sense because he was just confirming his intention. From what he and the Treasury Department wrote in a report last year, that is precisely what this administration wants to do. That is what they said in this report that we should do--deregulate these foreign banks that have assets under $250 billion in the United States. They wrote it into their banking deregulation blueprint back in June. I give credit to Secretary Mnuchin, and I give credit to the Trump administration. While I don't give them credit for the White House looking like a retreat for Wall Street executives, I do give them credit for at least finally owning up in that report, in the legislation, and in his answer to my question in the Banking Committee hearing that, yes, they are going to deregulate these foreign, huge megabanks--Deutsche, Santander, UBS, and Barclays--as long as they have under $250 billion of assets in the United States, and they do. Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Fed, is worried, as I am, that this bill deregulates the U.S. operations of foreign banks. Sarah Bloom Raskin, former Fed Governor and Deputy Treasury Secretary, said this bill ``removes necessary guardrails that were installed to reduce the chances of foreign megabanks drawing on U.S. bailout funds.'' I have watched the Presiding Officer--the junior Senator from Oklahoma--serve with integrity and honesty. I don't think you, any of my colleagues on this side of the aisle, or anybody else wants to face the voters 5 years from now, 10 years from now if what we voted on today and will vote on this week results in our bailing out foreign banks. Americans were angry that we bailed out the big U.S. megabanks. Imagine the anger if the story is focused more precisely on the fact that we bailed out foreign banks--which we actually did--but the story was more about Wall Street. Imagine if that were the story. Former Treasury officials Michael Barr and Antonio Weiss are worried that this bill is rolling back rules that protect the U.S. economy from foreign bank risk. The former CFTC Chairman, Gary Gensler, thinks we need to amend this bill to make sure that foreign banks don't get a windfall. These are across-the-board regulators, present, past, Republicans, Democrats. That is quite a list of watchdogs, but what is most interesting: Do you know who else is under the impression this bill helps foreign banks? Foreign bank lobbyists. I offered an amendment during the committee markup to close the loophole. I am offering it again on the Senate floor if Republican leadership allows amendments on the Senate floor. My amendment would have ensured that foreign megabanks in the United States are watched over just as closely as Wall Street banks. They are roughly the same size; some are bigger, but because their assets are smaller in the United States, we are going to treat them like Huntington and Key and Fifth Third rather than treating them like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Foreign bank lobbyists--they are American citizens. They are lobbyists for foreign banks; they are not foreign lobbyists, a difference. These lobbyists for foreign banks, representing Deutsche and UBS--most of them--wrote a letter opposing my amendment, saying it was unfair for me to try to keep these rules in place. They said their banks should be treated like U.S. regional banks, not like the global giants they are. That amendment was defeated in the committee; we will leave it at that. Now, why is that such a problem? Let's look at the rap sheet on some of these foreign banks. Santander, a Spanish bank, failed a stress test 3 years in a row. It would have its rules rolled back under this bill. Stress tests are exercises, as my colleagues know, to ensure that a bank can survive an economic downturn without a bailout. So this Spanish bank, Santander, failed not once, not twice but three times. What that failure means--most people, if they fail three times, they flunk out. If they fail three times, they get in this bill, and they get a potential bailout. What is smart about that? What is honorable about that? What is good economic policy about that? What is fair about that? What is just about that? In addition to failing its stress test, it is a bank that illegally repossessed cars from 1,100 American service men and women while they were serving our country. I spend a lot of time at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the largest employer in Ohio. I see all kinds of financial institutions that prey on those young airmen and their families. Airmen and women, young Americans serving in the Air Force-- particularly when they are 18, 19, 20, 21 years old--are more financially vulnerable. They are a little less sophisticated than somebody 10 years older. They don't make much money. Their families are always anxious when their husband or wife or mother or father serve overseas. This Spanish bank repossessed the cars of 1,100 American service men and women while they were serving our country. We are going to give them a break? This is a bank that overcharged racial and ethnic minorities for car loans. It is a bank that violated a Federal order to keep more capital and instead improperly paid out money to its shareholders, and we are going to give them a break? I don't pretend to understand the thinking of that. This bill helps Deutsche Bank, which the IMF called ``the most important net contributor to systemic risks'' of all worldwide banks. Deutsche Bank, a German bank, one of the biggest banks in the world, the International Monetary Fund called it ``the most important net contributor to systemic risks'' of all worldwide banks. Deutsche Bank is the only bank that would lend to the Trump family economic empire. Even after all of its failed business deals, they kept lending, for whatever reason, to businessman Trump and the family. This is a bank that every week is met with a new request for information on shady financial arrangements with people in the White House. I don't think my colleagues and I were sent here to serve Deutsche Bank. I am thinking none of us goes back in our campaigns--I am on the ballot this year. I am not going to go back and say: Please reelect me so I can help Deutsche Bank, so I can bail them out, so I can pass a bill that will actually give them something they don't deserve. This bill would also help banks like Barclays and UBS and BNP Paribas--banks that have rigged interest rates, helped people avoid paying taxes, violated U.S. sanctions against Iran and Sudan, and manipulated energy markets. These aren't banks down the street lending to homeowners in Sandusky or businesses in Findlay or small companies in my hometown of Mansfield; these are some of the most complex global banks. They hold $1.4 trillion in assets. That is $1,400 billion--$1.4 trillion--in assets in the United States and more than $14 trillion in assets abroad. Listen to Paul Volker, listen to Sarah Bloom Raskin, listen to Gary Gensler, listen to Michael Barr and Antonio Weiss. Believe Secretary Mnuchin when he tells you what he wants to do. Believe the lobbyists for these foreign banks when they say that is what they want. That is why they oppose this amendment. This bill gives them exactly what they want. Let me talk about one change made to the substitute amendment. Because I have come to this floor and some others have joined me in objecting to this foreign bank provision, the leadership--Senator McConnell and his office, I assume, down the way--I assume they huddled and thought: We have to answer this somehow; we have to at least look like we care about prohibiting a bailout of foreign banks. So they made a change in the substitute. The new version of the bill came out last week. There is a new provision that provides some window dressing. It is a figleaf protection to try to convince the public that this bill doesn't do what it actually does. It doesn't actually help Santander; it doesn't actually help UBS; it doesn't actually help Barclays; it doesn't actually help the President's bank, Deutsche Bank--but it actually does. The provision provides some vague, ambiguous language and puts the question to the Fed: You can regulate the foreign banks or not; it is your choice. It doesn't require the Fed to deregulate. It doesn't stop the foreign banks from suing if the Fed doesn't obey their requests. Why not just prohibit? Why not just say: No, we are not going to do it. But they don't want to do that. They want to keep that door open because they know the regulators on FSOC, whether it is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Jay Clayton, whether it is Mr. Otting of the SEC, whether it is Secretary Mnuchin, or whomever they put at any of these, we know what they are going to do. They have already said what they are growing to do. Even a writer at the Wall Street Journal agrees, saying it will be up to the Fed to decide whether Deutsche Bank ``deserves a tighter leash.'' So we are expected--we, in a pretty much party-line vote, because most Democrats think you don't want Wall Street people in these positions regulating the banks, in a party-line vote, Randal Quarles was confirmed. His job is to be the Director of Supervision at the Federal Reserve. So we are expected to trust Randal Quarles not to weaken the rules in the foreign banks--to trust Quarles, even though he himself missed the last crisis. He predicted as late as, I believe, 2007, as a member of the Bush administration, that the economy was great, the banks weren't under duress, any of that. It might have been 2006, but I think 2007. He missed the last crisis and, I might add, he personally profited from Wall Street malfeasance. I am not saying he did it on purpose, but he personally profited because of Wall Street malfeasance. We are supposed to trust Quarles, even though just last week he spoke at an international bankers conference, where a lot of those foreign bank representatives and lobbyists were in attendance, including CEOs and other executives, and he promised those bankers regulatory relief. So we have the head of supervision at the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States--one of the most powerful people in this country-- speaking to an international bankers group saying: Yes, we are going to give you regulatory relief. Aren't you lucky you came to this conference because I am in charge of these issues at the Federal Reserve, and I am going to help you get regulatory relief as a foreign bank. Congratulations. Finally, this last point is technical, but it is important. The bills make sure that a globally systemic U.S. bank will not benefit from any deregulation, even if it has fewer than $250 billion in assets, but the bill doesn't even do the same for foreign banks. Let me repeat. State Street has fewer than $250 billion in assets. State Street is called a custodial bank, located in Boston, as the Presiding Officer knows. It has fewer than $250 billion in assets. The bill says, because that bank is systemically significant, it doesn't get a free pass. This legislation says that about State Street, but it doesn't say the same for similarly--or, I would argue, way more--risky foreign banks in the United States. My amendment would close that loophole. It treats systemically risky foreign banks like systemically risky U.S. banks. Why? Because why treat Barclays and Santander and UBS and Deutsche Bank better than we treat Huntington or Fifth Third or Key or Regents in Alabama or any of these regional banks--many of which we want to help. If we want to help community banks and credit unions and our regional banks to do the right thing, let's help them. Foreign megabanks shouldn't get another chance of a handout from American taxpayers--never. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, well, not exactly. Yesterday I spoke about the big banks that have violated our banking laws time and again, banks like Wells Fargo and Citigroup. I talked about foreign banks like Santander and Deutsche Bank--the President's personal German bank, I might add. Santander, a Spanish bank, has foreclosed on the cars of American service men and women when they are overseas serving our country, and we are rewarding that Spanish bank. We are rewarding a Swiss bank that has broken international law in support of Iran. We are rewarding these foreign banks. I liked this bill at the beginning. I have been working on these issues with Chairman Crapo, whom I respect--I really do--for some years, and we worked on coming up with a bill that would help community banks and the midsized regional banks, three of which are located in the Presiding Officer's boyhood State and my State of Ohio--Fifth Third, KeyCorp, and Huntington. We wanted to do those things. You know, in this place, when we work on something to help the small guy, the big guy thinks: Well, don't leave me out. I want to be part of this. I want to get my things too. So we start helping community banks, we start helping the little guy, and all of a sudden, Wall Street gets its hand out, just like on the tax bill. I guess I believed my colleagues on the tax bill when they said it was a middle-class tax cut bill. Well, it kind of didn't end up that way. By the end, 81 percent of the tax benefits went to the richest 1 percent. That is what we do. We start here. We go back home, and we talk about helping the middle class and helping the little guy. No matter whether she punches a time clock or works construction, we want to help middle- income people. But you know what--by the time the lobbyists swoop in, by the time they are here, and they start talking to their friends and start doing what they do, then all of a sudden, these bills help the big guy. They help Wall Street. It is no surprise; it has happened here before. I particularly think we would learn about it when it comes to what happened 10 years ago. There are some pretty smart people in the Senate, but they have some kind of illness that I don't entirely understand called collective amnesia. They forget. They forget what happened 10 years ago. Where I live, Cleveland, OH, and where the Presiding Officer grew up in greater Cleveland, in my neighborhood, ZIP Code 44105, in early 2007, in the first half of that year, more people lost their homes through foreclosure than any other ZIP Code in the United States of America. The neighborhood that I live in is not a gated community. I live in an area of about 200 relatively new homes. When I drive about 500 yards in any direction, I see the blight that came because of what Wall Street and, frankly, this Congress and the regulators, the Bush regulators--I can mention names; it is all public record--did to our economy. And 10 years later, we have kind of forgotten about all that. Well, the people who lost their homes haven't forgotten about it. The people who lost their jobs haven't forgotten about it. The people who lost their retirement savings haven't forgotten about it. It is just a bunch of Members of Congress, a bunch of Republican members of the Banking Committee, a bunch of Members on that side of the aisle--almost all of whom, I believe, are supporting this bill--they seem to have forgotten what happened to the economy 10 years ago. After starting with a relatively simple and benign, let's help the community banks and the credit unions--which I want to do, too, and have a voting record to prove it--and help some of the smaller regionals, such as Huntington and Fifth Third and Key Corp in my State, it just sort of got out of hand. Well, now they are coming back and saying: Well, we will make a couple of changes. Let's talk about these couple of changes that Houdini would be proud of, sort of some sleight-of-hand kinds of changes. In fact, these changes have made the bill worse, and I will explain. Last September, we learned that Equifax had allowed hackers to exploit a known security flaw and make off with names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and all matter of private information of 143 millions Americans. There are probably 50 people in the Gallery. If the national averages hold out, 25 of them were wronged by Equifax. They were fraudulently or incompetently--perhaps through incompetence-- attacked by Equifax. In my State, it was about 5 million people. Around the country, it was about 143 million. In fact, most of the people in the Gallery are adults, so it is more than half the adult population that was wronged by Equifax. Half the country is vulnerable to identity theft. Americans are furious with Equifax, as they should be, but this amendment that apparently is in the substitute bill for reasons I can't fathom includes provisions designed to help Equifax. It is not just that this body doesn't punish Equifax and that these executives have no contrition--of course nobody went to jail. The people we send to jail in this country--we almost never send people to jail for financial fraud. They dress well, they are sophisticated, they belong to the right country clubs, and they would never go to jail. Let me back off on that for a moment and talk again about Equifax. Equifax and other credit reporting agencies apparently have been upset about a proposal to give men and women in the military credit monitoring. Think of that. Equifax executives didn't like that there was a proposal to give the people serving this country credit monitoring. I understand what Santander did; they repossessed autos of men and women from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton and from other places who were overseas serving. They repossessed their cars, and we rewarded them, so I guess Equifax thought, well, there is a good trend here, a good precedent there. We don't want to give men and women in the military credit monitoring. So we have an amendment to fix that. A small gesture to the people who serve our country, though, seemed too much for the Republicans and too much for Equifax. In exchange for this token benefit, they demanded that consumers and servicemembers give up their right to take Equifax to court. So Equifax is willing to do a little bit for people, just a little bit, but damn it, you can't sue us then. That was the deal--you can't sue us. We will give you a little bit of credit monitoring, but in return, you can't sue us for anything. I am not a lawyer, but that is called a right to action. So the next time the company's recklessness exposes sensitive financial data, sorry, you can't sue us. Sorry about that; that is the way it goes. In the end, Equifax--shocking--got exactly what it wanted. Equifax let your data loose and ruined your credit score, but you won't be able to sue them. Sorry about that. It gets worse. Equifax--a company that can't even safely store consumers' data--and that is their job; that is what they are hired to do, even though we don't individually choose them. The company spent nearly as much on executive salaries as it did on cyber security. So this company's job is to protect private data, but they didn't really invest that much in cyber security because, for whatever reason, they paid their executives about the same amount of money. Now Equifax wants in on the credit-scoring business. Along with two other major credit reporting agencies, it has created a product to compete with Fair Isaac's FICO score. The Federal Housing Finance Agency has a process in place to try to broaden the factors it looks at in determining creditworthiness, but, as Director Mel Watt testified in the Banking Committee, it is complicated and it is time-consuming. Understandably, FHFA wants to get it right, and so do the lenders that sell loans to Fannie and Freddie. But instead of allowing FHFA to take the time it needs to get it right, this bill ignores that, and it sets up its own process. We have not taken any testimony on this legislation from market participants or from the government agency. I have my hunch, though, as to who is pushing for it. Guess who is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this change. The pages would know the answer to that, if they are listening. Equifax, of course. I know my colleagues were well-intentioned. It would be great if we had additional ways of determining whether someone is creditworthy and if we could give more Americans the opportunity to become homeowners. But determining creditworthiness and balancing access to credit with the need to make sure we don't end up with millions of foreclosures is complicated. That is why we have FHFA, and that is why we have a process in place. We know there are problems with the current system, and more data would improve our efforts to combat discrimination in housing. The Center for Investigative Reporting just completed a valuable study of tens of millions of mortgage records and found out that across the country, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan, even when you take into account factors like income and the size of the loan. I will repeat that. Holding all things equal except for race, people of color are far more likely to be turned down for a loan. We know that. The trade associations for lenders argued that the study was flawed because more data--data like credit scores and debt-to-income ratios-- was needed to prove discrimination. The good news is that Dodd-Frank did that. It required this very kind of data to be collected, and beginning in January, banks and credit unions began reporting it. Problem solved, right? Well, once the more detailed data set is available and large enough, watchdogs can then undertake better analysis, target the bad actors, and allow the good lenders--and most of them are--to continue with their business without a regulator knocking on their door. But who are we kidding? This bill wants to do away with that too. I thought we had solved the problem. The substitute would repeal the reporting required by Dodd-Frank for 85 percent of all banks. Backers of the substitute will claim it has addressed complaints that this effort will undermine enforcement of civil rights laws, but it hasn't. Backers will point to a provision which says that banks that flunk the Community Reinvestment Act exam and get a rating of substantial noncompliance are ineligible for the reduced reporting of mortgage data. That sounds good, but in all of 2017, out of the thousands of Community Reinvestment Act exams, only two banks out of thousands flunked. When we have reason to believe banks all across the country are discriminating in their lending, even if it is unintentional--and sometimes it is--looking at data from two banks out of thousands isn't going to tell us a whole lot. The substitute would maintain current laws for banks that are given a ``needs to improve'' rating on their CRA exam over two consecutive exam cycles. Let's say a bank is engaged in discriminatory lending. The examiner gives it a ``needs to improve'' rating. This amendment says: No harm, no foul; the first one is free. Really? A few years later, when the next exam rolls around, if the bank is still discriminating, only then will it have to submit to the amount of data required today. So this amendment says it is OK for a bank to engage in legally sanctioned discrimination for years before it faces any consequences. Why would we do that in this bill? In sharp contrast to the slow-motion response to discrimination, when it is the bank that wants the data from the Federal Government, the sponsors of this bill can't move fast enough. It is like everything around here--when Wall Street says ``jump,'' most of this Senate jumps, and frankly, straight down the hall in the House of Representatives, they jump faster and higher. There was a bill introduced just this Monday, referred to the Finance Committee, that would allow credit card companies to tap the Social Security Administration database to verify identities. There hasn't been a hearing on it, and it hasn't gotten attention, but guess what-- it is in the substitute bill. So the banking majority can move very fast when it comes to helping the banks; they can't move so fast when it comes to prohibiting discrimination against people of color. I suppose I understand why, but that is pretty outrageous. The demand on SSA would explode. Will the system be able to handle it? Will the public interfere? Will this public interface be one more way that hackers could gain access to the Social Security database? I don't know because there has been no time for the Finance Committee to look at this bill. Protecting people's Social Security numbers is the last place--the last place--where we should be rushing things to please the big banks. Whether it is a State as conservative as Tennessee or as liberal as California, I am guessing most Americans don't want Congress to rush something through that might expose their Social Security numbers without really understanding it through congressional hearings and examination. This would all be bad enough, but it is not just Equifax that gets goodies in this bill. This bill is a gift to foreign megabanks. Yesterday we saw a new provision on foreign banks included in the substitute to clarify the legislation, but it doesn't fix the issue. The substitute includes a figleaf to try to convince the public that this bill doesn't do what it actually does do. This provision provides some vague and ambiguous language that puts the question to the Fed. In this bill, we say: You can regulate the foreign banks or you don't have to regulate the foreign banks; it is up to the new Federal regulators. It is your choice. The legislation doesn't require the Fed to keep strong rules in place that are already in place. It doesn't stop the foreign banks from suing the Fed if it doesn't obey the request. We are expected to trust Randal Quarles to be tough on foreign banks--most of you don't know Randal Quarles. I have had conversations with him. He is a smart man. He is well educated. He is a nice guy--but that is not a bet I want to make. That is not a bet Congress should make. Just this week, Governor Quarles spoke at an international banking conference, and he promised--it was an international banking conference. That would probably not be with Wells Fargo, probably not JPMorgan Chase, probably not Bank of America; it would probably be with Santander, UBS, Swiss Bank, or Barclays--the British bank--or the President's personal bank, the German bank, Deutsche Bank. Those are who attended. He said, if we really want to fix the foreign bank issue--he said he plans to deregulate those foreign banks. I know the supporters of this bill think they can sort of obfuscate-- I don't think they are lying. I think they are just obfuscating and not really being straightforward about what this bill does for foreign banks, and I know they did this for foreign banks because I asked Treasury Secretary Mnuchin--Senator Corker was in the room with the Banking Committee--and he said: Yes, we plan to deregulate the foreign banks. We know that. We know that from other former regulators: Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve appointed by both President Carter and President Reagan; we know that from people like Sarah Bloom Raskin, who was a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve; we know that from professors and other regulators. I know Sheila Bair, a Republican nominee appointed by President Bush to run the FDIC, is concerned about this bill. We know that. So if we want to fix the foreign bank issue, let's just adopt my amendment. Let's fix it. It is simple: No favors for the biggest global banks here in the United States. Don't give the regulators the option because we know whom the regulators for the banks are. We know most of the regulators for the banks used to work on Wall Street. You go to the White House, and the White House looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives. We want to write strong laws, clear laws. We don't need to place blind trust in the people who have failed us before--Quarles, Mick Mulvaney, Otting, and Mnuchin. We are expecting these people who have been strong in their public announcements to be right in their public actions? We are entrusting these people who have profited--I could name the names. We are entrusting these people who now have public service jobs and who have profited from Wall Street malfeasance to protect our economy and our country from Wall Street malfeasance. I take the side of Paul Volcker, Sheila Bair, Tom Hoenig, Barney Frank, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Phil Angelides, Antonio Weiss, and Michael Barr. They are all people who have counseled us--all good public officials, all former regulators. Not quite half, but a number of them are Republicans, and some are Democrats. They are all people who counseled us to vote no on this bill and whose concerns have not been addressed by this substitute. In addition, the substitute raises $675 million to pay for the privilege of deregulating the banks, but all it could manage on lead poisoning in housing was a report from HUD. Where are our priorities? The Congressional Budget Office said this bill makes it more likely they will need a bailout, more likely to lead to a bailout for the big banks. So $675 million of taxpayer money is squandered instead of doing infrastructure, instead of dealing with lead. That is part of the issue we dealt with in our committee. That is why I supported Secretary Carson for his confirmation, because I thought he was going to do something about lead. Shame on me for believing that, when I have seen nothing so far. Instead of those $675 million going to Wall Street, wouldn't it be great if we could direct those hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent children from developing developmental disabilities brought on by lead? Remember, I talked about my ZIP Code, 44105. Look at those houses. Drive through Cleveland. Drive through Memphis. Drive through Omaha. Drive through all kinds of cities in this country. You will see houses that were built in 1950 or before, and 80 or 90 percent of them have toxic levels of lead. We have sentenced millions of American children to live in those homes. This is called the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. We have done nothing in this committee for the last 5 years--not a damn thing--about getting that lead out of those homes and stopping the poisoning of children. We could be doing that but instead we are giving more to Wall Street. This substitute doesn't make this bill better. By papering over its fundamental problems, by treating servicemembers as second-class citizens--think of Santander, think of the amendment Senator Reed from Rhode Island is working on--we are opening up the Social Security system to possible threats. It represents a step backward. I urge my colleagues to reject the substitute and the underlying bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BROWN. Thank you, Mr. President. The legislation we are considering today has been portrayed as modest, not that big of a deal, that it doesn't matter that much, that it is something narrow to help community banks and credit unions and regional lenders like the three institutions in my State--Huntington, Key, and Fifth Third--all pretty much things I support. Unfortunately, that is really not the only thing this bill does. I tried for months to work with Chairman Crapo, whom I respect and admire--and I mean that. People say those things on the floor, but I actually mean that. I tried for months to work with Chairman Crapo on a commonsense package of reforms aimed at community banks and credit unions and small and midsized financial institutions. We had a lot of agreement on that. Then the creep began. Then the expansion began. Then leaking into this process were all kinds of help for all kinds of bigger banks. These are the local lenders that we want to help to fuel home ownership and small business in our community. I get that. These are the community banks in Lakeview, Cleveland, Milford, Parma, and West Chester, the banks that we lost when the big banks crashed the economy a decade ago. I know people in this institution--especially those who get lots of money from Wall Street--like to blame Dodd-Frank for so many community banks going out of business, but it was really what led up to the crash, including the crash, that caused so many community banks to go out of business. Here is how this place works. I think most Senators understand this. If they don't understand it, they don't want to understand it. When the big banks and when Wall Street and the lobbyists--and there are hundreds of them for big banks in this town--when the big banks spot some legislation crawling through this body, when they see a bill in front of the Senate or the House that might help some small institutions, do you know what they do? They see an opportunity. They see an opportunity to grab more for themselves. It is the history of this country. We know what happens whenever Congress listens to Wall Street and listens to the big banks and Wall Street and the big banks get their way. Inevitably, the economy stumbles or, worse, crashes because we have given too much to the big banks. They put too much risk on the system, and in places like my ZIP Code in Cleveland, OH--ZIP Code 44105--my ZIP Code in 2007 had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America. That is not because people in my ZIP Code have anything about them that they deserved this; that is just what happens in an economy when the big banks get too powerful, when Wall Street runs Congress, and we see what happens. Now we see Wall Street moving in, trying to grab more for themselves despite the fact that some of these big banks wouldn't exist today without taxpayer bailouts of a decade ago. We remember what happened. This body bailed out the biggest Wall Street banks, which didn't deserve it, to be sure. But we didn't bail out the big banks--at least most of us didn't--to help the big banks, we bailed out the big banks to help Main Street, to help the economy. So these Wall Street lobbyists have swarmed into this institution to grab more for themselves despite the fact that they wouldn't exist today without taxpayer bailouts, despite the fact that Wall Street banks are now making record profits, and despite the fact that the tax cut this body just jammed through Congress--81 percent of the recent tax cuts from the end of last year, 81 percent of that bill over time will go to the richest 1 percent of the people in this country. You have taxpayers bailing out the big banks, then you have this huge tax cut go to the big banks, and now they want more. They want this legislation that will weaken rules and make the big banks even more profitable. They always want more. Understand, it is American history. It is what we have seen in the last 10 years. It is what we have seen since the Great Depression seven decades ago. The big banks always want more, and it is always at the expense of everyone else. This legislation gives them exactly what they want. Listen to this. Not long ago, a bank lobbyist--one of the top bank lobbyists working for the American Bankers Association--said: We don't want a seat at the table, we want the whole table. They are about to get it under this bill--the whole table. This bill weakens stress tests for the 38 biggest banks in the country, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Citigroup. You know these banks. These banks in the aggregate are almost half of the assets of banks in our country--banks that together took $239 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Now, $239 billion--that is 239 thousand million dollars. That is a whole lot of money. Stress tests are the best tool we have to make sure another bailout never happens again. This bill weakens these tests. It changes the requirement from present law--semi-annual stress tests. So instead of having these tests twice a year, they are now going to be periodic. What does periodic mean? Well, we don't know. The bill doesn't define it. Former Fed Governor Dan Tarullo, the architect of many of these post-crisis reforms, has called this provision ``quite vague, with little indication of what kind of test is contemplated for these banks.'' We also know something else. When Congress writes vague laws using words like ``periodic''--vague, versus specific--``semi-annual''--when Congress writes vague laws, bank lawyers, who are really good, very smart, and very well paid, can drive a truck right through those loopholes. We know that. Do we really want to give the current crowd in charge more leeway--a White House that looks like a retreat for Wall Street executives? We are talking about an administration stocked with former bank executives. Are these really the people we want to give the opportunity--are these the people we want to trust to interpret vague words like ``periodic''? This legislation weakens oversight of foreign banks operating in the United States, many of which have a track record of breaking U.S. laws. Think about that. We are not only deregulating a number of these large banks in this country, we have singled out that we are going to give a break to foreign banks. Let me talk about the rap sheet of some of these foreign banks. Santander, a Spanish bank, illegally repossessed cars from members of the military who were serving our country overseas. Think about that. We have somebody from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who is serving overseas. Santander repossessed her car or his car when he or she was serving overseas. Yet we are going to give a break to that Spanish bank? Deutsche Bank, the President's favorite--President Trump, the businessman Trump's favorite bank--Deutsche Bank manipulated the benchmark interest rates used to set borrowers' mortgages. So we are going to give Deutsche Bank a break? We are going to deregulate part of Deutsche Bank? Barclays, a British bank, manipulated electric energy prices in Western U.S. markets. My constituents don't live in those areas that were hurt by that, but a whole lot of people do in this country. Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, illegally did business with Iran. I know what the Presiding Officer, the Senator from Arkansas, thinks about Iran. Yet we are going to vote--he is going to vote--all of us are going to vote for a bill that rewards a Swiss bank that illegally did business with Iran? Is that the message we want to send? I guess it is. UBS, another Swiss bank, sold toxic mortgage-backed securities. It goes on and on and on. We are rewarding these foreign banks that have defrauded our constituents and our government and clearly don't have much regard for U.S. law, and we are going to give them breaks. Again, we have heard from Governor Tarullo, we have heard from former Fed Chair Volcker, we have heard from former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Sarah Bloom Raskin on this. They don't want to loosen foreign bank oversight, and they are joined by Republican former regulators, like Sheila Bair, Tom Hoenig, and others, who think this bill doesn't make sense. The bill also requires the Fed to further weaken the rules just for the dozen or so banks with $250 billion in assets. It subverts the Fed's independence; it subjects the Fed to pressure from FSOC and the Treasury Secretary--the same Treasury Secretary who foreclosed on 40,000 Americans at OneWest. We are giving more power to help the banks to a Treasury Secretary who, before he became Treasury Secretary, played a major role in foreclosing 40,000 homes, including hundreds of homes in my State of Ohio. It opens the door for more lawsuits when banks try to avoid the rules they don't like. The former Commodities Futures Trading Commission Chair, Gary Gensler, wrote to the Senate last week that this change ``may subject the government to additional lobbying and possible litigation from individual banks seeking specially tailored rules.'' Back about 10 years ago, when President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank law, that same day, the top financial service lobbyists in this town-- the day Obama signed the bill, the day the President signed Dodd-Frank, the head of the top financial services lobbyists in this town said: Well, folks, now it is halftime. What did he mean? He meant, OK, we lost the first half, but we are going to go to work to do everything we can to block and misinterpret and reinterpret and eventually scale back and repeal as much of this law as we can. They went to work on the agencies. This is the culmination of their efforts. They now have a pro-Wall Street majority in the Senate, a pro-Wall Street majority in the House, a President whose office looks as if it is a retreat for Wall Street executives, and they are ready to go to help Wall Street, even though--I don't know when; maybe the Senator from Massachusetts knows--1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years from now, it makes a bailout more likely. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office recently said that this bill will make a bailout more likely and that it is a $672 million giveaway to Wall Street. This bill makes another change to big bank rules that now stops them from borrowing more money than they can afford. The New York Times described this provision as weakening rules ``aimed at keeping banks from being able to take big risks without properly preparing for a disaster.'' Just let that sink in, because Ohio families know how bad a disaster can be; ``aimed at keeping banks from being able to take big risks without properly preparing for a disaster,'' isn't that what we want? Don't we want bank regulators, don't we want bank rules to stop the big banks from taking risks that could end up in a disaster? As I said, my neighborhood knows what disaster is. As I said, in 2007, there were more foreclosures in my ZIP Code in the first half of that year than in any other ZIP Code in America. Families in my State were hurt by this. People lost retirement accounts, people lost their homes, people lost their jobs, plants closed--all of that. Wall Street lobbyists came out of that last disaster just fine. I am thinking that probably none of them had their houses foreclosed on. I know that nobody who tanked the economy went to jail. So folks in New York and Washington, most of them are doing fine. They might not appreciate what disaster means when we talk about the economy, but Ohio families who lost their homes and their life savings know what that means. Do you know what else? For 14 years in a row, there were more foreclosures in my State each year than there were the previous year. OK, that is a statistic, and maybe you don't know any of those people. Well, the fact is that every time that happened, people lost their possessions. Their lives were turned upside down. Their kids may have had to go to a different school. They probably lost their family pet because they couldn't afford it. It was one thing after another for those families. We don't think much about them. Here is how to think about this rollback. Bank capital requirements are like a dam that keeps the risks inside the bank. It keeps the risks from flooding out into the rest of the economy. So if the banks are going to take risks, you want to keep them contained in the bank so that only the bank gets hurt, but this bill punches a hole in that dam by loosening the rules on five of the biggest banks. Once the dam starts to leak, it is more likely that bad decisions by those banks could spill out and harm taxpayers and retirees and bank customers. These banks have $5 trillion in combined assets. Should we feel safer with a weaker dam around a potential $5 trillion flood of banking assets? If that weren't bad enough, we have a team of lapdogs at our financial agencies who think this bill is just a starting point. Think about who they are. I don't come to this floor and attack individual people, but I do come to this floor and point out the history of some of these regulators. Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin was a bank executive who ran a bank that foreclosed on thousands of customers, many of them unfairly or possibly illegally. One of his top people, Mr. Otting, is the new Comptroller of the Currency. Mulvaney is the new Director of the Consumer Bureau, and he thinks the Consumer Bureau shouldn't even exist. Those are the kinds of regulators we see. Randal Quarles is the head of supervision at the Federal Reserve, and he said as late as 2006 or 2007 in the Bush Treasury Department that things were fine in our country. These are the people we have entrusted to do the regulations, to hold back this dam that they have weakened legislatively. They are the ones who are charged with holding it back. If we want to help community banks, let's help community banks. Let's not try to sell it the same way this majority sold the tax cut bill. They said that it was a tax cut for the middle class, but 81 percent of the benefits over time went to the wealthiest 1 percent, so it wasn't a tax cut for the middle class any more than this was a bill for community bankers. The community bankers will get some help. I want to do that. I know Senator Warren wants to, and I know all of us on the floor want to do that, but that is not what this bill really does. If we want to help community banks, let's help community banks. If we want to help credit unions, let's help credit unions. If we want to help regionals like Fifth Third and Huntington and KeyBank in my State, let's help the regionals like that. Why do the biggest banks have to say: Give me more; give me more; give me more. Let's take Wells Fargo. What has Wells Fargo done to deserve an ounce of leniency? This is a bank that created more than 3.5 million fake accounts, including hundreds in my State. It is a bank that illegally forced unwanted auto insurance on its customers and charged homeowners improper fees to lock in their mortgage rates. So why would we want to help them with this bill? Just last week, the bank disclosed yet more problems with its money management unit. So why do we want to help Wells Fargo with this bill? It is a bank that outsources jobs. Six hundred call center jobs have been sent overseas by Wells Fargo just in the last year. So why do we want to help that bank in this bill? For those lucky enough to keep their jobs, it is a bank that mistreats its workers, punishing them with a high-pressure sales culture, and some of them lost their jobs as a result. Yet this bank, like the other big banks--they want more, more, more. I don't know why, but this Congress wants to give it to them, apparently. What has the Senate done to respond to Wells Fargo's misbehavior? Well, first of all, Republicans a couple of months ago passed a $1.5 trillion--that is 1,000 billion--tax cut, and one of the biggest beneficiaries was Wells Fargo. What did they do with that money? They say that they gave a little bit to employees. They say that maybe they will invest a little more. What they really did--they announced that they are going to buy back $22 billion of stock this year. When they buy back stock, the price of the stock goes up, and executives and shareholders are enriched. So the stock buyback investment--the $22 billion they are spending to buy back stock--is 288 times what Wells Fargo will spend on pay raises for its workers. So it gives a little bit to its workers. Whatever it gave to its workers, multiplied by almost 300--that is what the executives and the shareholders are going to get. So why are we doing favors for Wells Fargo in this bill? I don't mean to pick only on them. It is not just Wells Fargo. What has HSBC done to deserve special treatment? Since the crisis, the Department of Justice prosecuted the bank for laundering money on behalf of the Sinaloa drug cartel. In the midst of an addiction crisis, we are going to reward a bank that illegally laundered money for a drug cartel? Why are we doing any favors for Citigroup? Last month, Citigroup announced it had systematically overcharged almost 2 million of its customers on their credit cards. Why are we giving a single ounce of help to these big banks? They are repeat offenders. Not only are they repeat offenders--and as we help these big banks in this bill, we say we want to help the community banks--these repeat offender big banks are banks that compete with our local lenders and probably will put more and more of them out of business as these bigger banks get more and more powerful. The four biggest banks held 6 percent of industry assets in 1984. In 1984, 33 years ago, 34 years ago, the four largest banks in the country held 6 percent of industry assets. Today, the four largest banks hold 51 percent of industry assets. So what we are doing is giving them more--what we are doing is giving them more. Think about that. Thirty- plus years ago, the biggest banks held $1 of every $16 of banking assets. Now they hold $1 out of every $2. Think about how many community banks these big banks have been able to gobble up. This bill will lead to more consolidation, more concentration, fewer customer choices, less investor choice. One article from American Banker talking about this bill said it could ``kick-start bank mergers and acquisitions.'' What that means in plain English is that big banks will get bigger. So we are helping the big banks get bigger, and we are falling over ourselves this week to help these banks because they just don't have enough. But we are doing nothing for consumers this week. We are doing nothing for workers, nothing for those tipped employees that the Department of Labor is cheating out of their tips and basically legalizing wage theft. We are doing nothing for middle-class workers. We are doing nothing for those supervisors making $30,000, $40,000 a year, who are having their overtime taken from them. We are doing nothing for them. If we are trying to help our community banks and credit unions, why give favors to their big competitors--to the big banks? This isn't the weather. We can do something about the challenges Ohio faces. We can stop these crises that tear apart families and entire communities. We can do that by stopping this bill, to begin with. Don't take my word for it. The Congressional Budget Office says that the risk of another financial crisis is very low right now because of the rules we passed in Dodd-Frank. Just dwell on that for a moment. They said that the risk of another financial crisis right now is very low because of the rules we passed in Dodd-Frank, but they went on and said that this bill increases the risk of another bank failure and another bank bailout. All of my particularly conservative friends in this body always talk about how they hate bailouts. They are always against bailouts. They are against bailouts for middle-class families. Their voting record doesn't really show that they are against bailouts for the rich, but that is a whole other subject. This bill that we are about to vote on this week, this bill that the banking industry is salivating over, this bill that they just can't wait to pass and get to the President's desk--and we know all the advisers sitting around the President, all the people in the Oval Office, all the people in the Cabinet room are all whispering in the President's ear: Mr. President, you are going to sign this bill, and this is going to be great. The President said in his campaign: We have to go after Dodd-Frank. All the big bankers in the country know this is going to be a great thing. We are spending all this time doing this to help the big banks but, again, nothing for workers, nothing for middle-class employees, nothing for consumers, nothing for infrastructure--all the things we ought to be doing. I am just not willing to ask taxpayers to take that gamble of increasing the chances of another bank bailout. We don't have to. We could amend this bill just to help the small community banks and credit unions that we all agree should be helped. We could amend this bill in a modest way to help the regional banks that have generally been good actors in this equation. I am offering amendments this week that would do just that. We don't have to give the big banks more just because they come here, just because they have the best lobbyists, just because they ask for it. We don't have to be at their beck and call. Let's do this right this week. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I would like to have been here today to offer strong bipartisan support for a bill that would help with rules and regulations for the smallest banks and credit unions in the country. There is a real effort on the part of a lot of us to come to an agreement particularly aimed at those banks, the community banks and the regional banks. I have three. Senator Portman's and my State is the only State in the country that has three regional banks, the banks that have $50 billion, $100 billion, $150 billion--Huntington, KeyCorp, and Fifth Third. Unfortunately, this bill started off that way, but it has become something else, and the something else is that this bill seems to me and many others to be more concerned with the largest banks and Wall Street than it does with community banks. There are lots of things that can come out of this bill. The bill gives regulators way too much flexibility--regulators such as Mulvaney, Otting, Quarles, and others. It vests more power in FSOC--something that the Republicans didn't want to do until they got regulators like Mnuchin, Mulvaney, and people like that who are much more likely to side with Wall Street. The White House is increasingly looking like a retreat for Wall Street executives, and these are the people who are going to be doing the regulation of this bill. Republicans and Democrats alike who believe in the need for regulation are concerned about this bill or are opposed to this bill, people like Dan Tarullo, who used to be a member of the Board of Governors at the Federal Reserve in charge of regulation; Paul Volcker, a Federal Reserve Chair who was selected by a Republican and a Democratic President; Sarah Bloom Raskin; Gary Gensler; Tom Hoenig, a Republican; Sheila Bair, President Bush's nominee at the FDIC; Phil Angelides, who did a good analysis of what actually happened 10 years ago when Wall Street almost collapsed our economy. This body seems to have experienced sort of a collective amnesia. Take a look at what happened to the economy 10 years ago, and today we are giving relief to many of the largest banks in this country, relief that these things on the stress test--a weaker stress test, a less regular stress test, will mean many of the larger banks simply will not be under the intense examination that we have done in the past. What does that mean? What that means is those banks are more likely to jeopardize the safety and soundness of the banking system. Again, we know what happened 10 years ago when we had to bail them out. There is a Washington Post article that came out today. The headline is ``Senate banking bill likely to boost chances of bank bailouts, CBO says.'' The CBO says that the Senate banking bill is likely to boost chances of bank bailouts. Why would we do that when banks are doing very well? Banks of all sizes are very profitable these days. We just did a tax bill that gives the largest banks--the financial services industry overall but especially the Wall Street banks--huge tax breaks. So we are going to pass a bill that the Congressional Budget Office--a neutral scorer here, the referee--the Congressional Budget Office says that this will cost taxpayers $671 million, and it will increase the chances of a bailout. Why would we pass a bill to give the banks breaks and then give them $671 million of taxpayer dollars? I just don't understand why we as a Senate would want to do such a thing. Nobody in Ohio, except for some bank executives, are clamoring for this bill. Nobody is saying: Oh, we have to deregulate the banks. We have to help the biggest banks. We have to help these banks that drove us into the ditch 10 years ago. It simply doesn't make sense. I ask for a ``no'' vote on the motion to proceed. Cloture Motion

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, 10 years ago almost to the day, this country was on the verge of a financial crisis that would wreck the lives of millions of families. The experts--let's say the so-called experts--had their heads in the sand. They shrugged off the warnings. They told the public everything was fine. Jim Cramer was telling hard-working Americans to invest their money in Bear Stearns. Maybe younger Members of the Senate don't really remember what Bear Stearns was. Jim Cramer said: ``I'm not giving up on the thing.'' Bank of America was putting the finishing touches on its plan to buy the subprime lender Countrywide, which they called ``the best domestic mortgage platform.'' Hank Paulson, the last Treasury Secretary who got plucked from Goldman Sachs--we have had at least one since--downplayed homeowners' pain. He said: ``You know, the stock market goes up and down every day more than the entire value of the subprime mortgages in the country.'' Meanwhile, advocates in communities--the people who were actually dealing with the consequences of the crisis--were sounding the alarm. The fair lending group Greenlining began meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan at least once a year, starting in 1999--1999-- to warn about predatory mortgage lending. Attorneys general from across the country started to caution about troubling trends. In Cleveland, which is in the Presiding Officer's home State, we saw home prices climb 66 percent in 10 years, with the housing market juiced by ``flipping on mega-steroids,'' according to a government panel that investigated the crisis. City officials in Cleveland began to hear reports that predatory home refinances were being pushed on buyers regardless of whether they could afford to repay the loans. Those refinances mean fees to bankers. Foreclosures began to shoot up in Cuyahoga County--5,900 foreclosure filings in 2000, and by 2007, 15,000. My wife and I live in ZIP Code 44105, which includes Slavic Village in Cleveland, OH. In the first half of 2007, that ZIP Code had more foreclosures than any ZIP Code in the United States of America. The city of Cleveland went to the Fed and asked it to use its authority to restrain subprime lending. The Fed did nothing. The people in charge in Washington were too certain, too detached, and perhaps too comfortable to listen to the warnings from Ohioans and from people across the country. We saw what happened. All of these people who had the hubris to say that the economy could keep growing and keep growing and keep growing while the middle class was being looted--those people, thank you very much, weathered the crisis just fine. No one with a cable show had their home foreclosed on. Nobody on Wall Street who tanked the economy went to jail. In fact, many of these same people now have fancy jobs in fancy buildings and dress in fancy clothes and have fancy titles and work on Wall Street and in the White House. But in ZIP Codes like 44105, in Slavic Village and Cleveland, OH, and places like it across the country, parents were sitting down at kitchen tables to have painful conversations with their children. Think about what this means. You lose your job, or you can't keep up with your mortgage payment. The husband, the wife, two teenage children. You have a family pet, a dog. You realize you are falling further and further behind. You are still working and you are still trying, but things aren't going well. The first thing you do--your dog has to go to the vet. You can't pay for that. You simply don't have the money. You take the dog to the shelter. You do what a lot of families in Cleveland unfortunately do; you just try to give your dog away or do something. You then face your children. You say to your children: We are going to lose our home. We are going to have to move. We don't know where we are going to move yet. We don't know which school district. We don't know where your friends will be because we are going to have to move. I don't think people around here really think much about what foreclosures mean to families. Remember what I said--5,900 foreclosures in Cuyahoga County in 2000 and 15,000 by 2007. Hundreds of those were in ZIP Code 44105. Think what that does to those families. My colleagues, when we vote today and tomorrow and Thursday on whether we are going to pass this giveaway bill to Wall Street, just think about that. The CEOs and the boards at the banks and people in Washington who are supposed to be watching failed these Americans. That is why Congress, including some Republicans, did something about it 10 years ago, something to stop this from ever happening again. We passed a law. We created important protections for the financial system, for taxpayers, for homeowners. We held banks and watchdogs accountable to prevent another crisis. Fundamentally, we did it right a decade ago, but Wall Street never gives up that easily. They didn't like that bill. They opposed that bill--most of them. Big bank lobbyists, the same ones who were so sure the 2000s crisis wasn't going to happen, those who flippantly said that things are all right--remember what Hank Paulson said. Hank Paulson, the Bush Secretary of the Treasury, said: You know, the stock market goes up and down every day more than the entire value of subprime mortgages in the country. Well, Hank Paulson didn't pay much of a price. None of the regulators paid much of a price. Ten years ago, we did it right. As I said, the big banks never gave up. Big bank lobbyists went to work. Get this: The day the President signed the Dodd-Frank bill implementing these safety rules and regulations--implementing the consumer protections, making sure that the government was actually on the side of consumers and people paying their mortgage and homeowners-- the same day President Obama put his ``Barack Obama'' signature on the Dodd-Frank law, the top financial services lobbyists in Washington said: Now it is half time. In other words, we may have lost the first half. They passed this bill. We didn't want it, but don't worry about us in the second half. To these people, the economy is a game. They can't tell the difference between putting millions of Americans' lives and homes and savings at risk and a game of pickup basketball. Piece by piece, Wall Street has gone to the agencies, they have gone to the courts, they have gone to Congress to dismantle the consumer protections we put in place. The drumbeat is constant. It is ongoing. It has been happening for 10 years. They always want a new exemption, they always want a weaker standard, they always want a new tax break, and do you know what? They can always find a whole lot of Senators and House Members who will write a letter to the Federal Reserve, who will make a call to the Office of Consumer Counsel, who will go at it and will attack in public the Consumer Bureau. They can always find Members in this body who are fueled by lots of Wall Street contributions and a lot of allies in New York. They can always find people to do their bidding. That is why you see this drum. That is how you hear this drumbeat. They want a new exemption, a new weaker standard, a new tax break. The last year has been a really good time to be a bank lobbyist. After the crisis, we had created the Consumer Protection Bureau to represent the interests of regular Americans who have to fight with their bank or their credit card company. Now, in this administration, the Consumer Bureau, unbelievably so, is run by a guy who believes-- publicly said it--it shouldn't even exist. The Consumer Bureau's new protections are under attack. One quick story. All Democrats, even some Republicans, agreed we should protect consumers' right to take their bank to court. What is more American than that; if you think your bank cheated you, that you should be able to go to court. Bank lobbyists, with a lot of allies on this side of the aisle, convinced the Vice President of the United States to come to this very Senate Chamber late at night--late at night here, at 9 or 10, the public is not watching, but you can be damned sure the special interests are alive and well and watching in their offices and making calls and doing all that. The Vice President of the United States came to this Senate Chamber to break a tie, to cast a tie-breaking vote to vote against hard- working American families. Instead of protecting these families, the Vice President and his allies in the Senate--they voted for Wells Fargo, they voted for Equifax, they voted for Citigroup. The rule is gone. That rule to ensure that consumers have their day in court if their bank cheated them, that rule is gone, piece by piece by piece. The watchdogs who are supposed to be protecting Main Street all come to their jobs fresh from--surprise--Wall Street and K Street. The President's Cabinet looks like an executive retreat for Wall Street bankers. They have released blueprint after blueprint on how to dismantle all the rules put in place after the crisis, and they are putting their people in place to do it. They just rammed through Congress a bill to give Wall Street an enormous tax break that will cost American families $1.5 trillion, but it gives big bank CEO's a huge raise. That is 10,000 times more than what we spend at HUD every year to protect kids from toxic levels. Back to ZIP Code 44105, the health department of the city of Cleveland told me almost all those homes built before World War II, 99 percent of them have levels of toxic lead that will make children sick--99 percent of those homes. Yet we can do this big tax cut and not take care of those families. Not long ago, another bank lobbyist told us their plan: We don't want a seat at the table, he said, we want the whole table--and they are about to get it under the bill the Senate will consider this week. Piece by piece, they tear these protections down. This bill gives them the whole table. It leaves nothing for working families. If you thought the Secretary of HUD's $31,000 he spent to buy that fancy table for his dining room--31,000 taxpayer dollars--if you thought that was a bad deal for taxpayers, wait until I tell you about the billions and billions of dollars at risk that are packed into this effort. This bill puts Americans at risk of another bank bailout. The Congressional Budget Office, the independent, nonpartisan scorekeeper, confirmed yesterday that this bill would increase the probability of a big bank failure and a financial crisis. It will add $671 million to the deficit. The Washington Post said: ``Senate banking bill likely to boost chances of bank bailouts.'' It is bad enough we are going to pass--after banks have been so profitable the last decade, after they were bailed out by the public-- thank you very much--they have had a really, pretty darned good decade. Then they got a big tax cut. Now they want this and a little cherry on top. First, they get this bill, which is about to pass--which will be really good for bankers--but then they get $671 million extra from taxpayers. So, again, thank you very much, taxpayers, for taking care of the banks. So we are going to weaken the rules, and we will pay Wall Street for the privilege of doing it. This bill weakens stress tests for all large banks, even Wall Street megabanks that are designated as global, systemically important banks-- like JPMorgan Chase, $2.5 trillion in assets. Now, 2.5 trillion is 2,500 billion, and a billion is a thousand million. So $2.5 trillion-- that is hard to calculate, but that is a lot of money. So JPMorgan Chase gets a break. They get their $2.5 trillion in assets. Bank of America gets a break. They get $2.3 trillion in assets. Wells Fargo, which can't stay out of trouble--every week there seems to be something new--$1.9 trillion in assets. Citibank, $1.9 trillion in assets. These banks--and the Wall Street Journal, hardly a paper hostile to business or a bank that is really always close to Wall Street. Wall Street Journal headline this morning: ``[Wall Street] Banks Get a Big Win in Senate Rollback Bill.'' So don't let my colleagues--don't let anybody who supports this bill--tell you this is all for the community banks. The community banks get some things in this bill. I would love to support the community banks and make this a bill about community banks, about credit unions, even about the regional banks like the ones in my State that generally do the right thing--Huntington and Fifth Third and KeyBank. But this bill, this is the Wall Street Journal: ``Big Banks Get a Big Win in Senate Rollback Bill.'' This is about those four banks I mentioned: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup. These banks hold 51 percent--more than half--of all industry assets. They are a pretty darned big part of our economy, and we are doing things for them. As they are profitable, as their executives make maybe tens of millions of dollars, as they are doing stock buybacks to make even more millions of dollars, we are doing things for them. We are not dealing with infrastructure, we are not dealing with the opioid crisis, we are doing nothing here about guns, but we have time to do a lot for America's largest banks. With this deregulation, these are banks whose collapse could cause ripples across the world. Together, the country's biggest banks took $239 billion in taxpayer bailouts. So without the rigorous annual stress test that we put in Dodd-Frank a decade ago and we are relaxing now, taxpayers could, once again, be on the hook if too-big-to-fail banks collapse, and we don't have the right tools in place to see it coming. This is maybe even more unbelievable than the fact that this body has fallen all over itself to help the biggest banks. This bill also weakens the oversight for foreign megabanks operating in the United States--the same banks that repeatedly violate U.S. laws. Let's run through the rap sheets of some of these banks. Deutsche Bank, a big German bank, manipulated the benchmark interest rates used to set mortgages. It is also known as the only large bank in the world that will finance the President's businesses. Santander, a Spanish bank, illegally repossessed cars from members of the military who were serving our country overseas. So we are going to give a break to a Spanish bank that repossessed the cars of men and women at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and others when they were serving overseas. Santander repossessed their cars, a Spanish bank, and we are going to deregulate and make them more profitable with less accountability. Barclays, a British bank, manipulated electric energy prices. If you live on the West Coast--I don't; my constituents weren't affected--but a whole lot of people were as they manipulated energy prices. Credit Suisse and UBS, two Switzerland banks--one of them illegally did business with Iran. We have tried to tighten the sanctions on Iran to get Iran to behave better so they don't continue to harass--or worse--Israel and all the threats they make. We are going to help a bank that did business with Iran, and UBS sold toxic mortgage-backed securities. It didn't have to be this way. I tried for months to work with the chairman of the committee--and I like Senator Crapo a lot. We work together well. I tried for months to work in a commonsense package of reforms aimed at lifting up community banks and credit unions. That is what we ought to do. That is what we could do. That is what we still could do. These are the local financial institutions that fuel home ownership and small businesses. I know a lot of them. They come to see me when they are in Washington. I see them in their communities. I see them in Sycamore, Columbus, and Mansfield, and all over the State. These are not the people who caused the meltdown 10 years ago. These are the ones who got dragged down when big banks crashed the economy. I support relief to those banks and regional banks that do things right and play by the rules. I want to do more to help average Americans who have to cope with unfair tricks and traps, but that is not what this bill does. That is how it started out. That is what Wall Street wants you to think; this is a bill for the community banks. Don't forget, they said that about the tax cut bill: It is a tax cut for the middle class. Well, 81 percent of the benefits of the tax cut go to the richest 1 percent. So don't always believe what they say when they talk about this. This was a false choice. Why should we have to roll back rules for the largest banks in Switzerland to help out community banks or credit unions in Ohio? Of course we shouldn't. It has been a false choice. We could pass a bill today that helps those local banks invest more in their communities while keeping in place strict rules for Wall Street megabanks, but Wall Street and Republicans don't want to do that. They want to use the little guys, the community banks we all want to help. They want to use the little guys to extract something for the big guys. It is the oldest trick in the book around here. We are going to cut taxes for the middle class. Well, really we are kind of hoping we can give big tax breaks to the richest 1 percent. We are going to help the community banks, but really we are hoping--we know we are going to help Wall Street. This city, Washington, this government, this Senate, this Senate Banking Committee are all suffering from collective amnesia. They just forgot what happened 10 years ago. Maybe it is convenient they don't want to remember what happened. Thankfully, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund--an agency of international financial experts--has done us a favor, to help jog memories. They have cataloged 300 years of history of bank deregulation efforts all across the globe. Do you know what they found? We deregulate, the economy explodes. We put in protections, the economy gets better. We deregulate again, the economy explodes. We put in protections, the economy gets better. We deregulate again--wash, rinse, repeat. We can do better. We owe it to the people we serve to do better. The Senate owes it to 176,000 kids in Ohio and other kids across the country whose lives and education were disrupted by the foreclosure crisis. Think how many children lived in homes when their parents were foreclosed on or their parents were evicted, and everything in their lives turned upside down. We don't care about them. We are going to forget about them, this collective amnesia. We are going to forget about them because we want to help the big banks get bigger and bigger and bigger. Is that what we are going to do? We owe it to the millions of people whose retirements were wiped out. Millions of Americans lost big chunks of their retirement, but we bailed out the big banks at the same time. We owe it to the students who graduated in the great recession and may have low earnings for the rest of their lives. The watchdogs who understand these markets are trying to warn us. Paul Volcker, former Chair of the Federal Reserve, has cautioned us about this bill. He was the Fed Chair for a Democrat and a Republican President. Sheila Bair, who helped us put protections in place after the crisis, is a Republican warning us about this bill. Tom Hoenig, the current Vice Chair at the FDIC, selected to that position by Republicans, has told us this bill is harmful. Barney Frank, as in Dodd-Frank, has said he would vote no if he were here. Former member of the Federal Reserve Dan Tarullo, who used to do the bank regulation with the Federal Reserve, has outlined a long series of concerns. Sarah Bloom Raskin, Antonio Weiss, Gary Gensler, law professors, fair housing advocates, big bank experts, people who provide legal services across this country who deal with foreclosures and civil rights groups are telling us we can't go down that path again. We know what happens next. It is hubris to think we can gut the rules on these banks again but avoid the next crisis. If you strip the rules away from the big banks and you turn your back as regulators on misfeasance and malfeasance, that collective amnesia--we are going to pay for it, and we know we are. There are so many important things we should be doing here instead. We should be addressing the fact--and the Presiding Officer and I have been working on this bill--that workers and retirees in Ohio and across the country might have their pensions they have spent a lifetime earning slashed in half if Congress doesn't act. We can be doing that. We could be addressing the fact that 400,000 Ohioans pay more than half their income each month on rent to keep a roof over their head. We could be creating jobs. We could be attacking the opioid epidemic. We could be fighting against high drug prices. We could be investing in our crumbling roads and bridges. Instead, guess what. We are here helping the big banks. Everybody is willing to work full time to help Wall Street. It is a question of whose side are we on? Are we on the side of megabank lobbyists or are we on the side of American taxpayers and homeowners and students and workers? I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Reilly Steel, a fellow with the Banking Committee, be granted floor privileges during the pendency of S. 2155.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 3 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, earlier today I talked to a server who worked in a restaurant in Northeast Ohio, in Trumbull County, north of Youngstown, and she is concerned, as I am, about a proposal from the U.S. Department of Labor that pretty much legalizes wage theft. We know, in this country right now, servers, or tipped workers, can be the person who pushes the wheelchair in the airport. I spoke to somebody the other day who drove one of those airport carts in the Cleveland airport. She makes $5 an hour because she is supposed to rely on tips to get up to the minimum wage, but she doesn't always get tips, or a server who works in a restaurant, in a diner in Garfield Heights or in Chillicothe, OH, and makes sometimes only $2.10 an hour and relies on tips. That is enough of a problem--that companies that employ tipped workers can pay such low wages--but that is compounded by this rule that comes out of the White House and the Department of Labor that really is tantamount to wage theft. The rule simply says the tips you put on the table at a Denny's or at a Bob Evans, the management--the employer--can take those tips and distribute them however he or she wants to other workers in the restaurant. Now, plenty of waitresses and plenty of waiters and servers give out some of their tips, distribute them to the bartender or others, and that is their choice, but for the employer to be able to take the tips from a worker, from a server, and decide whom to give it to in the back office or in the kitchen--someone they are not paying enough to anyway; to make up for that--or for the employer to just take the money and put it in their pockets, under this rule coming out of the Department of Labor--this is the Secretary of Labor and a government that is supposed to represent workers, supposed to advocate for labor. This administration has turned that upside down, where the Secretary of Labor is advocating for employers and basically legalizing wage theft-- taking that money from tipped workers who work so hard. We know how hard everybody at a diner works. They are not making a lot of money. They rely on those tips. We are going to say--the U.S. Government, the Department of Labor, the President of the United States--is going to say: Oh, it is all right to take some of these tip dollars and put them in my pocket as the employer. Give it to the workers in the kitchen whom the company underpays because they are going to supplement their underpaid wages with tips. It is mean- spirited, it is legitimatizing wage theft, and we have no business doing it. There are 24 of us who have sent a letter to Secretary of Labor Acosta condemning his decision. First of all, they did a study and found that this would take literally billions of dollars from the pockets of workers. They buried that study. We are saying, at least let that study out. Let people comment. Almost $6 billion in tips every single year will be lost because of this decision. It is a really bad idea. It is mean-spirited, and it frankly legalizes wage theft. It should be defeated. I yield the floor.

Mr. BROWN

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, this month, Ohio laid to rest two remarkable public servants, Westerville Police Officers Eric Joering and Anthony Morelli. Together, these men dedicated decades of their lives to the police force, giving the ultimate sacrifice to keep their fellow Ohioans safe. Officer Joering and Officer Morelli were doing their jobs, responding to a desperate 9-1-1 call when they were tragically shot and killed earlier this month. In the days since their passing, we have heard stories of their incredible service to their community, their fellow officers, and their families. Both men were married with children. Officer Joering was 39 and had three young daughters. His pastor, Reverend Hammond, spoke to the local news about Officer Joering's dedication to his family. He said that Officer Joering would do anything for his daughters. He let them style his hair. He let them paint his nails. Reverend Hammond quipped: ``I heard he drew the line at makeup.'' Officer Morelli was a 30-year veteran of the Westerville police force. Westerville is a Columbus suburb. He had two children. His daughter is getting married this summer. His colleagues remembered his infectious smile and his passion for life. Westerville Police Chaplain James Meacham said Officer Morelli ``went to heaven and partied.'' These two heroes were laid to rest 10 days ago with services at St. Paul Catholic Church in Westerville, drawing thousands of Ohioans and fellow officers to pay their respects. Thousands of people waited in line in the cold and rain to enter the church. Officers from around the country came to honor these men, as they so often do. The church parking lot filled with patrol cars from Illinois, Texas, West Virginia, Michigan, and so many other States. They had to use a TV at a gym next door as an overflow room to accommodate everyone. After the services, a long procession of police vehicles wound its way through Westerville. Ohioans lined the streets, waving American flags and wearing blue ribbons pinned to their raincoats. The tribute to these officers won't end with that memorial service. In times of tragedy, Ohioans always rise to the occasion. A donation page for the families set up by the local Fraternal Order of Police has raised more than half a million dollars. The city of Westerville will honor Officers Morelli and Joering with a permanent memorial in First Responders Park. The Westerville City Council voted unanimously to retire Officer Joering's K-9 partner, Officer Sam, and send him home with Officer Joering's family. They were there last week to take Sam home. One of Joering's daughters wore Sam's badge around her neck. Otterbein University, the local 4-year, private, distinguished university very nearby, will offer full-tuition scholarships to each of the three Joering girls. While none of these gestures can ever repay them or their loved ones for their service and sacrifice, today we honor these heroes' memories and lift up the entire Westerville community and all those who knew them. The best way for the public to honor these public servants is by supporting all Ohio officers and working to give law enforcement the resources they need to do their jobs. From the bipartisan legislation we passed last year to speed up claims processing for the families of fallen officers, to getting local police officers the resources they need to protect themselves as they fight the opioid epidemic, we must do all we can to support these women and men who sacrifice so much. Let's honor the memory of Officer Joering and Officer Morelli by recommitting ourselves to protecting and supporting their fellow officers and the families who sacrifice alongside them.