Christopher Dodd

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. I yield the floor.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the waiver provisions of applicable budget resolutions, I move to waive all applicable sections of that act and those budget resolutions for purposes of the pending conference report and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I see my colleague from Texas is seeking recognition. I wish to publicly thank her. She made a substantial contribution to this bill on several amendments that were adopted during debate on the floor. I thank her for them. They added to the value of the legislation. I am not sure what her comments will be right now, but I thank her for her contributions.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, my friend and colleague from Texas serves on the Banking Committee. I thank her and Senator Klobuchar. There was a series of amendments in which Senator Hutchison was involved. They added value to this bill, and I thank her for it. I mentioned yesterday, as a relatively junior member of the Banking Committee, there was no Member of this Chamber who added as much to the bill as the Senator from Virginia. There are not words nor time for me to adequately express my gratitude for his involvement. Literally almost on an hourly basis, he was involved, along with Senator Corker of Tennessee. They spent hours on their own talking with other people about how to fashion two of the most critical titles of this bill. Let me express my gratitude once again to Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and thank him immensely for his contribution. He did a great job.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I recognize my friend and colleague from Delaware.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Delaware. He highlighted the difficulty in passing legislation. There are those who think it goes too far and those who think it does not go far enough. We do not write a bill on our own. There are 100 of us in this Chamber and 435 in the other. There are stakeholders, the administration--all sorts of people we deal with on these matters. What we try to do is fashion the best proposal we can that moves us forward and addresses the underlying causes, as we tried to with this bill. I appreciate the Senator's points that were raised during the debate and discussion. We tried to accommodate them where we could in fashioning legislation. It is always a difficult process. You do not get to write your own bill. You can write your own bill and introduce it, but ultimately, for it to become law requires cooperation. We had that cooperation. I appreciate his involvement very much.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I see our colleague from New Hampshire is here. I will save this for a later debate, but I know there is talk about changing the rules of the Senate because of the frustration Senators feel. I will make, in my waning hours here, as strong a plea as I can to not succumb to the temptation to change the institution because of the current frustrations people feel. There is a reason this institution exists and has the rules it does. All of us one day are in the minority or majority. The fact that some may abuse the rules, as has happened here without any question, ought not to be a justification for fundamentally changing them. There are ways to deal with the problem without losing the essence of the Senate. He is no longer with us, but my seatmate, Robert C. Byrd, would speak for hours on end about the importance of not letting the vagaries of the moment dictate the long-term interests of the institution. I will leave that for another day, but I appreciate it. My colleague from New Hampshire is here.

Mr. DODD. I know Senator Conrad, chairman of the Budget Committee, has to be heard and it is critical to me he be heard on the budget point of order. Could you make it a little less than 20?

Mr. DODD. After 2 o'clock? Any point after----

Mr. DODD. Certainly I would have no objection to that whatsoever. Take some time at this juncture too, if you wish.

Mr. DODD. Again, let me reserve the right to object. I see the minority wants to check on such a request. I have no objection myself but obviously that is a matter--in fairness to the minority, we want to let them know of such a request. Here we are eating up time right now. I see my friend from North Dakota here as well. I am deeply grateful to the chairman of the Budget Committee. Go ahead with that request. I am told it is OK.

Mr. DODD. I thank my colleague from Pennsylvania and the unknown persons in the cloakroom. Let the record show they acknowledged the Senator's request.

Mr. DODD. The Senator is correct. That is why the conference report specifically cites the Barnett Bank of Marion County, N.A. v. Nelson, Florida Insurance Commissioner, 517 U.S. 25(1996) case. There should be no doubt that the legislation codifies the preemption standard stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in that case.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, before my colleague leaves the floor, let me thank him as well. Of course, hope always springs eternal. The vote hasn't occurred yet, so we never know. We might get his vote yet. I don't serve on the Agriculture Committee with him. Senator Chambliss was a very valued member of this conference. Obviously, a lot of work took place in the Agriculture Committee dealing with areas of the bill that he has spent several minutes talking about. He raises very good points. I would be the last person to suggest as a coauthor of the bill that we have crafted the perfect piece of legislation. As he points out, these are highly complicated areas. One of the reasons we tried not to write a series of regulations far beyond the competency of those of us in this Chamber is because it is complicated. Obviously, we have delegated the ultimate responsibility that we now have, which is to watch, the oversight, to the regulatory community, to make sure they do this right. I pointed out yesterday, and he has pointed out again today, when we get into a situation such as this crisis, certain words become pejorative, and ``derivatives'' unfortunately has become that, and it shouldn't. These are very critical components for capital formation, job growth, and wealth in our country. Hedging against risk is absolutely essential. So they are vitally important elements in our economy. I hope people, when they hear the word ``derivative'' being spoken won't assume this is somehow a bad idea. One almost gets the sense that people feel that way. I don't at all. I look forward in the coming weeks and months, as regulators begin to work with this bill if, in fact, it passes, that we will do that. A lot of the record has been established in this area, and through no small measure due to the Senator from Georgia, and I thank him for his work as well. Madam President, I yield the floor. Madam President, I note the absence of a quorum, and I ask that the time be equally divided on both sides.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Alabama. Once again--I say this with the respect--I feel as if I am listening to the first speech back in November when I offered the original proposal of this bill and wonder if we have been in the same Chamber and same city over the last several years. I am not going to use the time between now and 11 a.m. when we are going to vote on the cloture motion. I will not go through the long list, page after page of amendments that were adopted as part of this bill offered by my good friends on the minority side. We had 80 hearings held over 2 years, with countless efforts to reach out and bring in people. One can make a lot of accusations about the bill, but this was a very inclusive process. Half the amendments adopted on the floor in this Chamber during consideration of this legislation over 4 weeks were ones offered by the minority and were accepted and bipartisan amendments. There was never an alternative offered. There was never a substitute offered. It was a question of whether people wanted to amend this legislation. It is not a perfect bill, I will be the first to admit. We do not know ultimately how well the ideas we incorporated will achieve the results we all desire. It will take the next economic crisis--as certainly it will come--to determine whether the provisions of this bill will provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis when it happens. But we believe we have done the best we could under the circumstances to see to it we never have another bailout of another major financial institution at taxpayer expense. In fact, it was the Shelby-Dodd amendment adopted in this Chamber--it was the second amendment we considered--that actually completed the process of seeing to it there would be bankruptcy or resolution of financial institutions that got themselves into so much trouble that they put the entire system at risk. We set up an oversight council to make sure we could observe what was occurring not only here at home but around the globe--matters such as Greece or Spain that could put our economy at risk. So it isn't just one set of eyes but having those responsible for seeing to it that our economy remains safe and sound have the opportunity to provide the early warning that never occurred. We didn't need a Pecora Commission to find out what was going wrong. We had mortgages being sold in this country to people who couldn't afford them, marketing them in a way that guaranteed failure, securitizing them so they could be paid and then skipping town in a sense. I didn't need to have hours of hearings to find out what was the cause of it. The question was, How do we try to put a system in place to minimize the future kind of risks our Nation would face. It wasn't just to deal with those who created the problem but, rather, to look ahead--not in a punitive way--and to set up an architecture and structure to allow us to get to that point where we could be confident we were addressing these issues. Thirdly, of course, we tried to deal with exotic instruments that had caused so much of the difficulty. The derivatives market was a $90 billion market, and it mushroomed in less than a decade to $600 trillion, putting our Nation at risk because of a lack of transparency and accountability to determine what was occurring in those markets. To consider it a radical idea that we might want to have accountability and transparency I find remarkable considering what our country has been through. Also, we provided a consumer protection bureau. What a radical idea that is--the idea that people who buy mortgages or have a student loan, a credit card, a car loan, might have someplace in this city that watches out for them so their jobs, their homes, their retirement accounts are not lost. So while this bureau is in place in this bill, the idea was at least to see to it that people, when they have the problems they have been through or are going through, someone is watching out for them. We have a Consumer Product Safety Commission to address the purchase of a faulty product, but what happens when someone abuses or takes advantage, as happens in so many cases in financial areas? People should have a chance to have a redress of their grievance or to at least from the outset have an opportunity to address that before it becomes a broader problem. So, Madam President, again, we have debated this now for 2 years and countless opportunities. We spent 4 weeks on the floor of this Chamber, amendments were offered, and never once--I guess on one occasion we had a supermajority vote. There was only one tabling motion I know of. I did everything I could to make this as inclusive a process as possible. I understand some people don't like the bill. It saddens me, in a way, that it has once again become sort of a mindless partisan argument rather than talking about what we need to be doing. This is not the end of all of it, obviously. Oversight will be required, consultation in the coming weeks and months and years, to make this work well. But, Madam President, I can't imagine another process that has been as inclusive. My colleagues will recall that almost 10 months, going on almost a year ago, I invited both Democrats and Republicans on the Banking Committee to assume responsibility for major sections of this bill, which they did do, by the way, and made a significant contribution to the product. So while I respect those who want to vote against the bill, and that is their right to do so, find some arguments based on the merits rather than arguing about whether there was a process that was inclusive or that allowed people the opportunity to be heard. Again, we have the right to be heard, but we don't have the right necessarily to have our ideas become the law of the land. That is what a body like this is for. So this is a major undertaking, one that is historic in its proportions, and it is an attempt to set in place a structure that will allow us to minimize problems in the future. I can't legislate integrity. I can't legislate wisdom. I can't legislate passion or competency. What we can do is to create the tools and the architecture that allow good people to do a good job on behalf of the American public. That is what a bill like this is designed to do. I regret I can't give jobs back, restore foreclosed homes, or put retirement monies back into accounts. What I can do is to see to it that we never, ever again have to go through what this Nation has been through. That is what this effort has been about over the last several years, to try to create that structure, that architecture. It will be incumbent now on the present administration and those who follow to nominate good people to head up these operations, to attract good public servants who will fill the jobs of these various regulatory bodies to see to it that they do the work we all want them to do. Again, I can't legislate that. I can merely create the opportunity for that kind of protection to occur--to modernize a financial system, to lead the world, if we can, in harmonizing rules so we don't have the kind of sovereign shopping that was going on with regulatory bodies, where major financial institutions would shop around the world as to the nation of least resistance or the regulator of least resistance. We need to see to it that we have the unanimity or at least the harmonization of rules that will allow us to have a more orderly system in our globe because, as we have all painfully learned, matters that occur thousands of miles away can affect the economy in our own country. So for all those reasons, Madam President, I thank my colleagues for their efforts over the last 2 years. I thank the leadership for providing the opportunity and time for us to do this in this Chamber. I thank my colleague in the House, Barney Frank, and his colleagues for the work in which they engaged in order to produce a bill there. We spent 2 weeks, some 70 hours of debating the conference report, where more amendments were adopted--again, offered by my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats--to make this as good a bill as we could in all of this. So with that, Madam President, I will reserve some comments for later, but as we approach this vote in the next few minutes, I urge my colleagues to invoke cloture, to allow us to then have an up-or-down vote on this bill, and to do what we can to restore some trust and confidence and optimism for the American people. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in the lives of most Americans, this institution--the Senate--rose to the occasion and crafted a bill to address the financial service structure of our Nation to once again give us the hope that we can see wealth created, jobs produced, and an economy that will offer opportunities for the next generation of Americans. I urge my colleagues to support the cloture motion, and I urge them to support the bill when the vote occurs later today. I yield the floor.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum, and I ask unanimous consent the time during the quorum be equally charged to both sides.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, my colleague talked about 41. There are a number of Republicans who played a very critical and supportive role on this bill. I do not want the record to persist in suggesting that was not the case. Even people on the other side who ended up not voting for the bill--at least have not so far--added substantially to the value of this bill. In some cases, they might not want to acknowledge that, but they did. In the case of our two colleagues from Maine and our colleague from Massachusetts, they have taken an awful lot of abuse in the last number of weeks because they worked with us on the bill and made significant contributions. While they do not agree with every dotted ``i'' and crossed ``t,'' as I do not with this bill, they decided our country would be better off with the passage of this legislation than not. I do not want the record to be uncorrected when it comes to the number of people, including those three in particular, who will, I presume, continue to take some abuse from others because they did not toe the party line, nor have they on repeated occasions. They have acted as U.S. Senators, which is our first responsibility. I know what that feels like. I have been there on numerous occasions in my 30 years. Several times, I was the only Democrat to vote with Republicans on substantive matters. It is a lonely moment. I can tell my colleague what happens. It is painful, and you get those long looks from your colleagues. It is uncomfortable, to put it mildly. I will also tell my colleague that some of the proudest moments a colleague will have when they serve here is when they make those decisions and do so for the right reasons. While I am deeply grateful to my Democratic colleagues, many of whom had concerns about the bill, as my friend from Delaware did, and have been supportive all the way through, I guess there is a bit of the prodigal son--prodigal daughter in the case of our colleagues from Maine and prodigal son in the case of our colleague from Massachusetts--when they decided to stand up and help us get a bill done despite the criticism they have received. Everyone who has been supportive and helpful deserves credit, but I think those who were willing to take an awful lot of abuse in the process of doing so deserve commendation. I did not want to let that number stand--41--because it implies somehow there were people on the other side who were not helpful, and they were, including people who did not vote for the bill who were helpful as well.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, briefly, I thank my colleague from New Hampshire. I see my other colleague from New Hampshire as well. It is a New Hampshire moment. I thank Senator Shaheen and our colleague from Maine, Senator Snowe, for working as they did on the community bank issues. I was pleased, as I noted yesterday, that the Independent Community Bankers Association, while not endorsing the entire bill but specifically on their issues involving community banks expressed strong support for this bill and how much stronger these banks are today as a result of our efforts than would be the case if we were to defeat the legislation. Their ability to compete with these larger banks has been enhanced tremendously by what we have done in this bill. If these provisions were not adopted, they would be back in a situation where there would be significant disadvantages for them under the current law. I am very grateful to Senator Shaheen and Senator Snowe and others who supported their efforts to strengthen the role of our community banks that play such a critical role. As the Senator from New Hampshire pointed out, they were never a source of the problems in the residential mortgage market at all. That deserves to be repeated over and over. I thank the Senator for her comments.

Mr. DODD. I see my other colleagues here, including Senator Specter who wants to be heard, but I want to address my colleague from New Hampshire because we are both going to be walking out of this Chamber in about 5 months. I thank him for his work going back to 20-some-odd months ago when we were involved in the critical weeks and days in September and October. Judd Gregg was invaluable putting together a moment here while, not terribly popular, I think saved the economy and the country. I will not address all his concerns here. We have a different point of view on the issues he raised. They are not illegitimate issues. We think we addressed them properly. He has a different view, and I respect that. I appreciate his work and that of his staff on this bill. He made a significant contribution to this effort and I thank him for it. I see my colleague from Pennsylvania here and I yield the floor.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. I concur with Senator Collins and Senator Shaheen. Section 171 of this legislation came from an amendment that Senator Collins offered on the Senate floor, and I truly appreciate the constructive contribution she has made to this legislative process. My understanding also is that the capital requirements under paragraph 7 are intended to apply only to insured depository institutions, depository institution holding companies, and nonbank financial companies supervised by the Board of Governors. I thank my friends from Maine and New Hampshire for this clarification. Insurance Company Definition

Mr. DODD. Yes, that is correct. It is intended that a mutual insurance holding company organized and operating under State insurance laws should be considered an insurance company for the purpose of title II of this legislation. I thank the Senator from Nebraska for this clarification. Independent Representatives

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank my friend, the Senator from California, for her support and for all the work we have done together on this important issue. Her understanding is correct. The purpose of the Volcker rule is to eliminate excessive risk taking activities by banks and their affiliates while at the same time preserving safe, sound investment activities that serve the public interest. It prohibits proprietary trading and limits bank investment in hedge funds and private equity for that reason. But properly conducted venture capital investment will not cause the harms at which the Volcker rule is directed. In the event that properly conducted venture capital investment is excessively restricted by the provisions of section 619, I would expect the appropriate Federal regulators to exempt it using their authority under section 619(J). Captive Finance

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on the adoption of the conference report. The PRESIDING OFFICER? Is there a sufficient second? There is a sufficient second.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, in conclusion, I express my thanks to all. I want to thank the floor staff as well, both on the minority and majority side. We have spent a lot of time together over the last year, and I am deeply grateful to them for the orderly way in which they conduct their business and how fair and disciplined they are about making sure the floor of the Senate runs so well. So I thank them immensely for their work. I urge my colleagues to waive the point of order and to support this historic landmark piece of legislation that we hope will set our country on a course of financial stability and success in the generations to come. I yield the floor.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the conference report was agreed to and to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.