Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I wish to make an inquiry of the Chair as to the interpretation of the rule we passed, because it is my understanding that the rule doesn't require you to publish, but it does say the majority and minority leader are no longer obligated to honor your request for a hold if you have not. I ask for the Chair's opinion on that.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I think the motives ascribed by the Senator from New Mexico are improper. I do not think it is so people can't get into a job to cause President Obama problems. I reject that motive. With any administration, there is a very big difference of opinion. That is why we have elections. That is why things move like this in our country. It is about whether somebody objects to somebody's either philosophical bent or qualifications for a certain job. I make the point again that at the same time under a Republican Congress, President Bush had fewer numbers approved than President Obama does at this time. I hope we would not ascribe that motive. I want President Obama to have, in fact, the people he needs to have in place to effectively run our government. I will give the numbers again. To this date, President Obama has 596 of his nominees confirmed. At the same time, President Bush had 570. In the two previous administrations, President Bill Clinton had 740 and President George H.W. Bush had 700. I think what my colleagues are fighting for is fine. I agree with them. I am on the team as far as that is concerned. But I think we ought to be careful with the motives we ascribe. I really do not think it is to try to handcuff the administration. I think it is different. Of course, the sign that is being put up is about who is pending. I understand that. Let's be careful on the ascribing of motives. As I talk with my colleagues, I do not really find that motive. Even though they may not be out front with it as I have been, that does not mean they necessarily want the administration to not be effective.

Mr. COBURN. OK. I will take that reading of the law as an assumption that agrees with the position I put out there. I would say--if the Chair would give me some time in consideration of my reserving the right to object--I served in the majority for 2 years prior to the Senators who are here on the floor today, and I understand the frustration. I have been there. I was on the other side. It is difficult. In terms of numbers, we have more of President Obama's nominees cleared than President Bush's nominees at the same point in time. I wish to raise the question. I am going to comply. First, I don't have any problem explaining why I hold somebody. The BBG nominees: The BBG is in such a mess, I want to make sure I visit with every nominee before I give them a clearance to get on that board, because we are wasting three-quarters of a billion dollars there and not doing anything positive for our country as we spend that money. There are a lot of reasons why we hold people. One of the dangers of coming forward, from my experience as a Senator myself, of putting a hold on and then putting it out there, is this: If I want to do further work or study or have a question, the assumption with a hold is that you don't want them to move, and that may not be the case at all. The reason for a hold oftentimes is I want to look at the history, I want to look at the background, and I want to take the time to meet the individual myself. That fulfills the true obligation of advise and consent. I would also say we were frustrated when we were in the majority the same way, and we played the same kind of parlance, except with our own nominees. When somebody on our side had a hold, we didn't ever mention that. We didn't ever complain about that. We just complained when the other side did. So the perspective has to be--understanding the frustration; the President deserves advice and consent--but I also know there are 150 nominees right now sitting in committee who haven't been cleared in committee and we are a year and a half, a year and 4 months into this administration. It is not just that. I intend to object to every one of these, not because I personally have an objection, and I want my colleagues to know that, but one of the considerations of courtesy on the Senate floor is if somebody else does, you will honor that. The final point I will make is that the majority and minority leader usually work these things out. I think we passed 28 in the last few weeks, probably because of some of the good effort of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to apply the pressure and heat. But I plan to object to every one of these because there are those on our side who have a problem with the individual. But I don't disagree that you ought to have the courage to stand up and say who you are holding and why you are holding them. I don't disagree with that. But that isn't our case right now and that isn't the case of the law, as I understand it; it just removes the obligation. So on that basis I will object to this first package and plan on objecting to every other one in forbearance and as a courtesy to those on my side of the aisle who have a problem with these nominees.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN. I object.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of S. Enders Wimbush of Virginia, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Walter Isaacson, of Louisiana, to be Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the following reasons: I have had longstanding concerns regarding transparency and effectiveness of our taxpayer-funded international broadcasting agencies under the purview of the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In particular, I am troubled by the operations and management of Voice of America (VOA) given issues raised by the media, Inspector General, and former employees of VOA. Therefore, I have requested to meet with all the prospective nominees to discuss these issues. The Broadcasting Board of Governors performs a vital role regarding oversight and management of our international broadcasting. As the nation faces threats from the Middle East and in fact throughout the world, transparent and effective international broadcasting agencies are critical to ensuring our international broadcasts are in fact fulfilling America's interests in securing peace for ourselves and our allies.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Dennis Mulhaupt of California, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I intend to object to proceeding to the nomination of Victor Ashe of Tennessee, to be member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, pursuant to the provisions of section 512 of Public Law 110-81, I object to proceeding to the nomination of Susan McCue of Virginia, to be member of casting Board of Governors, dated May 5, 2010, for the reasons denoted above.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, as we have watched the debate the last 6 days on the financial regulation reform bill, I thought it would be interesting just to raise a few questions. The Congress--both the House and the Senate--created what was called the Financial Inquiry Commission. As a matter of fact, they had a meeting today. The purpose of that Commission--that will turn in their report in December of this year--was to take a thorough and complete look at what happened to us in 2008--the causes, the regulatory failures, the poor incentives--and then make recommendations to the Congress on what we should do. The question I have for my colleagues is, we have a bill on the floor that has given no credence to the Commission we created, and we are actually, according to the majority leader, going to finish this bill next week without the benefit of that Commission's inquiry. So a couple questions I would ask are, No. 1: Why? Why are we doing that? And, No. 2--by the way, the people on that Commission are learned people with great exposure and great experience in the areas of which we are discussing--Why are we allowing the Commission to continue spending money if we are not going to pay any attention to them? Why don't we just end the Commission, since we have obviously decided what they are going to have to give to us is not of value as we make the decision about what we need to change? I thought that is what we had the Commission for. So I find it peculiar that in our rush to blame somebody, our rush to take the focus off of where it belongs--by the way, that is right here in the U.S. Congress because 90 percent of what went wrong was our fault--our fault; that is where it lies--in our rush to shield and reflect that away from us, we are going to pass a bill with all sorts of unintended consequences of which we fully do not understand right now. It is a bill that is going to treat the symptoms, not the underlying disease of the financial problems we had. It rings well from a populist standpoint, but in the long run it does a disservice to our country. That does not mean this bill may not hit it 100 percent on what this Commission recommends, but we have no idea what they are going to recommend. So I think it is a great question for the public to be asking us: Why are we doing that? And why are we continuing a Commission that we obviously are not paying any attention to? One, it was created so we could offload the problem. That is why we created the Commission. We obviously did not care what they thought because we are not going to pay any attention to them. No. 2, we are going to continue to spend money on a Commission that we are not going to value. If we were going to value it, we would at least either give it a mandate to hurry up so we can make appropriate decisions and use their expertise or we would eliminate it. Now to the bill that is in front of us. What really happened to us. This is my opinion of what happened to us. The Congress created incentives to increase with ease the ability to own a home in this country. Then we created incentives through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to do that even greater. Then we created the ability to package and offload what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had taken and securitized it. We wonder why people would take advantage of that. There was not one oversight hearing on the Office of Thrift Supervision, which absolutely failed in terms of loan originators. There was one hearing in 4 years at the SEC that had nothing to do with their oversight of the packaging of these incentives before they became a problem. There was no oversight--significant oversight--on the explosive nature of derivatives trading in this country and around the world. We are so quick to point the finger at the people who took advantage of the incentives we set in motion. So now what do we have? We have $6 trillion or $8 trillion worth of exposure for the U.S. taxpayer in terms of guaranteed mortgages by the Federal Government through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and FHA, and we are hustling along so none of that ends up getting focused on us. We have a bill on the floor that does not address the core problem of what went wrong. Here is the core problem of what went wrong: There were no mortgage origination standards that were enforced by the Federal Government, as they took American taxpayers, to guarantee what was going to be an asset. What did we find at the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations? That in the last year before this, for one company alone that originated a vast majority of the loans in California--Long Beach Mortgage--90 percent of the mortgages were based on fraudulent data. OTS knew it and did not do anything about it. Why did they not do it? Because they got 16 percent of their revenue from Washington Mutual, who owned Long Beach Mortgage. So we set up all these systems, we incentivized this system, and now that it blew up in our faces--because we did not look at it, we did not oversight it, we did not do our fiduciary responsibility--we want to be quick and get rid of that blame from us by pointing the finger somewhere else. We have minimal leverage requirements in this bill. If we are going to create an incentive for people to act badly, at least we ought to put a block somewhere else that will limit the exposure of financial institutions based on capital ratios. We have not done that. We have not accomplished that in this bill. That is something that has to be there. We had companies leveraging to 40 and 50 times their net worth. Yet we are not addressing that issue to a significant extent. It is one small portion of the bill. Then we are going to take a consumer protection agency--which we created the problems for--and create a massive government bureaucracy that is going to filter all the way down to every small business in this country and isolate that power within one individual who is not accountable to the Congress and not accountable to the President, and we are going to say: You fix it. There will be an unlimited funding stream that is going to be totally out of control that is going to impede and impact the freedom of Americans' ability to make a living in the name of consumer protection. If you think I am giving a speech to protect the banks, you are wrong. I like them about as much as I like insurance companies. But we have to think about what we are doing, and we ought to be about fixing the real disease. That real disease is us--us not doing oversight, us not being responsible for the legislation we created, and setting up incentives, and then yawn as it goes awry and point our fingers somewhere else. There is no question we need to change the regulatory structure in this country. But there is something we need to change more than the regulatory structure; that is, the demand on the Congress to start doing its job in terms of oversight. We are quick to whip a bill out when it is politically expedient to do it and create a whipping boy, or several whipping boys, and say we are addressing things. But it is kind of like the pea under the three walnut shells. You never know where the pea is. The reason you never know is because there is not really even a pea there. There was when it started, but it went away. Then it gets put back. So we are playing the game. We are playing the American people that what we are doing is substantive, and that, in fact, it is going to enhance capital formation, when what we are doing is going to decrease capital formation. We have one section in this bill that says every small bank in Oklahoma--if they write a mortgage and sell it, forever they have to keep 5 percent of it. Well, if they are a small capitalized bank, guess what they are going to do. They are never going to create another mortgage in Oklahoma. So we are going to concentrate all the mortgages in the big banks in the country. That is why Goldman Sachs loves this bill. That is why Citibank loves the bill. We are not making the big banks smaller; we are making the big banks bigger. We are going to undercut the small and medium-sized banks in the country because we are going to put a 5- percent retention on every mortgage they write, when, in fact, all we would have to say is: If you write a mortgage and you package it and sell it, there is recourse back to you, the originator of the loan; that mortgage, when it becomes nonperforming, comes back to you. That is all we have to do. That does not tie up their capital. That does not limit their incentive to create housing in our own regional markets that is made available with capital in those regional markets. No, we are going to make the big boys bigger. All the regulation that is in this bill none of the big banks will ever have a problem with. They already have thousands and thousands of staff to handle government regulation. They will not add a person. But every small community bank in this country, every small financial institution in this country, is going to drown in the requirements of this bill. I know the chairman of the Banking Committee has worked hard to try to bring a forth bill. I know there have been great deliberations with many from our side of the aisle on the bill. But I think we have thrown common sense out the window. The motives are good. The goal--fix the problem--is good. But if we treat the symptoms of this and convince the American people we have fixed it when, in fact, we have not, when we have not eliminated too big to fail--because we are going to make the big banks bigger--what we are going to see is a further decline in confidence. In the name of fixing things, we are going to be taking massive amounts of freedom away from small businesses in this country. We are going to take discretion away from capital risk that has minimal risk to the country but has every bit of risk to the person lending the capital. We are even going to take away ``sugar daddy'' investors who are the only hope for some ideas--not venture capitalists. We are going to take away the ability for somebody to come in and say: I will invest in 40 percent of your business and give you the capital to try something. We have actually created requirements for that. As we look at what we are about to do, the American people ought to ask three questions, three very important questions: No. 1, does it fix the problem? No. 2, does it grow the government and require increased spending? And, No. 3, is there anything to make you think--since we were regulating all these industries already--the Congress might oversight the next set of regulations we put out there to fix this problem? I think the answer to that--all three of those questions--is no. I am in a minority, I understand that. I said previously, I think we ought to change the regulations in this country. I think we also ought to eliminate too big to fail by making those that are too big become so small they won't make a difference if they do fail. We ought to create the market circumstances that would force that to happen. But this bill doesn't do that. This bill won't do that. So as we go through this rather large bill, which I think has had three or four accepted amendments thus far and which is 1,409 pages long, one of the other questions we ought to be asking is how many Members have read the entire bill. How many Members understand what is in the bill? How many Members can have the capability to anticipate the unintended consequences of what is in the bill? I think we will find the answer to that is zero. Yet we are in a hurry to do this for a political reason. So I will go back to what I started on. We created the Financial Inquiry Commission. What are we going to do with it? What happens if they come out in December and say everything we did was wrong? Why did we create it? I would love to read back some of the speeches that were given on this floor about why we were creating it, because we had to know what went wrong. Now we have a commission that has been charged to tell us what went wrong, but we are going to ignore them. We are going to pass a bill before they have even completed their hearings. I think it is no wonder the country has a low level of confidence in our deliberations, because they don't make sense to the average American. They understand the political spin. They understand pinning the tail on the donkey. They understand placing blame so you can deflect it from yourself. They get all that. They see it and they see right through it. But we are creatures of habit. There are good things in this bill. Let me end on that. The elimination of the Office of Thrift Supervision had to happen. The reason they were ineffective is they got their money from the very people they were supervising and when their biggest customer is doing something wrong, rather than lose some of their revenue, they turn their eye the other way. Consequently, billions and billions and billions of dollars out of Washington Mutual became junk. Most of it was junk to begin with. It is the concept of greed. Other good things: Changing the rating agencies and what they are accountable for. This bill goes in a direction different than I would have gone, but the point is there needs to be a change. They need to not get paid by the very people who are asking them to rate something they are getting ready to sell, and they ought to be paid by the person who is getting ready to buy what they are getting ready to sell, so the accountability will be there. But we haven't done that. We recovered, and our recovery from this financial fiasco is because of the resilience of the American people. The price is enormous, with having 14 million people unemployed. That is a tremendous price to pay. The loss in terms of dignity, the loss in terms of the ability to provide for your family, the loss of losing the skill set you had and no longer can find a job to do it is a tremendous price that has been paid. But the American people are resilient. What they don't want to tolerate, however, is a Congress that fails to recognize and continues to repeat mistakes of the past. We can say, Well, we have been working on this for 6 months. We have. There have been negotiations going on for a long time. My question is, Do we have the answers? Do we know what the answers are? And if the answer to that question is yes, then let's disband the Financial Inquiry Commission right now. Let's not waste those folks' time. Let's not spend another penny of Federal taxpayers' money if we think we already have the answers. We are going to do just as we do on every other program: We are going to create another one and we are going to keep spending on the first one. Needless to say, I think this bill is fixable. I think we ought to address the real key issues: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Why are we not addressing them? Because we don't want to put out the bucks, the cost to do that. That is why. That is why we are not addressing it. We know the issues. We have taken an unlimited amount of our kids' money and put it in exposure and we have given an absolute implicit and implied guarantee to both of those organizations. The President in late December took office, and they are now buying back close to $400 billion worth of mortgages from the Treasury--nonperforming mortgages--and our kids are going to pay all that back. It will be 20 or 30 years before any of that property actually reaches the level at which it was sold. So what is coming next? What is coming next is we are going to mandate principal reduction on mortgages across this country. Who does that impact? What that says is that everybody who paid their mortgage on time and kept up with their payments by making tremendous sacrifices other places, guess what. You are going to get to pay for the mortgage of everybody who didn't through your taxes and through your kids' taxes. You acted responsibly, but what is coming down the pike is we are going to lift the load for those who didn't. You met your obligations. You signed the contract on the bottom line, and those who were less fortunate than you, you now are going to get to pay for them too. That is what is coming. Mark my words. You will hear it before November. That is what is coming through the HAMP, through the 40- percent reduction in the principal amount on many of these mortgages. So what is going on? We are rushing the financial reform bill that doesn't attack the three major underlying diseases of the financial system, and then right after we pass that, we are going to force principal reductions on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mortgages, on which you, the taxpayer, are going to pick up the bill. That is what is coming. We are going to hear that it is not. That is what is coming. Watch carefully what we do. Watch how we spin things. Watch how we create demons when, in fact, we are the source of the problem. Watch how we point our fingers at others whom we incentivized to take advantage of systems we created and say, Oh, no, we are not culpable at all. Oh, it wasn't us. We did all the oversight hearings. We changed it. When we saw the writing on the wall, we didn't do any of that. The Congress created this mess, and we are going to continue to act in the same way that is going to create more. Because we are going to create a whole new set of regulations and then we are not going to have the oversight hearings: Are you doing it? Where is the metrics? How do we measure whether you are doing it? Are you, Mr. Bureaucrat, doing what the Congress directed? As a matter of fact, we don't even put in the regulations. We let somebody else write the regulations. We are so knowledgeable that we are getting ready to fix this problem, and besides the fact the Financial Inquiry Commission hasn't said anything to us yet about what the causes are and the potential solutions, but we are not even going to write the regulations, just as we didn't in the health care bill. The Department of HHS is going to write 1,690 regulations on the health care industry in this country. The same thing is going to happen in this bill. As I say, I hope we can fix the bill because I think we need to make major changes. There are some good things in this bill. We are in danger of losing what confidence is left of the American people in our actions. We ought to be asking the right questions for the right reasons that shouldn't have anything to do with politics, shouldn't have anything to do with partisanship, and ought to have everything to do with what is the best, right solution for our country in the long run. Mr. President, I yield the floor.