Mick Mulvaney

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. I have heard three arguments, Mr. Chairman, that somehow this is a convoluted linkage. No, it is not. It is pretty straightforward. The Bank shall not guarantee or extend credit in connection with a transaction with a foreign company or joint venture, including a foreign company, that benefits from support from a foreign government if the foreign government has a sovereign wealth fund with an aggregate value of at least $100 billion. I have no idea how that is convoluted, Mr. Chairman. That is about as straightforward as you get. If you are involved in a sovereign wealth fund, you don't get taxpayer money. The other thing I heard is that this is to protect one customer, one client. That is absurd. This is designed to protect 150 million American taxpayers. The last thing I heard was this is not serious. Yes, it is. Anytime we have the opportunity to put American taxpayers in front of foreign taxpayers, I think that would be very serious. I would encourage the support of this amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Duffy).

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, how much time is remaining on my side?

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time to close.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, a couple different things. I am a little surprised, Mr. Chairman, to hear some of the advocates here today because some of them, including the most recent speaker, were actually against the Bank when there was a different party in charge of the White House. I hear today that this is supposedly about jobs, jobs being created. By the way, that is a claim that not even the Export-Import Bank makes on its own. It has never come into our committee and said, ``We create jobs.'' It comes into our committee and says, ``We support jobs.'' We are not really sure what that means. We have asked them. They are not really sure how to count it. In fact, there is really good evidence that they are counting it wrong. Let's say for the sake of argument, Mr. Chairman, that they do create jobs. They also destroy jobs. Every time the government gets involved in the market and creates jobs someplace, they destroy it someplace else. It is just much harder to see. So it is very difficult for us to say: Look, this job was destroyed by the Export-Import Bank. But I will tell you this, my local banks in rural South Carolina can't go to the Treasury and borrow money for free every time they want to. If they could, they might be able to create some more jobs as well. We have a distortion to the market, Mr. Chairman, plain and simple. That is all this is. Are there going to be winners? Absolutely. There is a lot of them, as a matter of fact. In fact, you can go buy stock in some of them if you want to. Are there losers? Absolutely. You will never see them. You will never see them. They are in Union County, South Carolina, maybe. I don't know because we will never see the jobs that are not created because of the distortion created by the Bank. We have a tremendous opportunity not to kill the Bank. If the Bank really is as profitable as you say it is, this should be fine. By the way, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Kinzinger) has left and said that no one is getting up to say the Bank doesn't make money. Here I am. The Bank doesn't make money. First of all, if you made it count right, it wouldn't make any money. But, in my lifetime, we have had to bail this institution out to the tune of billions of dollars. How soon we forget those types of things, Mr. Chairman. We are going to pass this amendment. It is not designed to kill the Bank. It is designed to get the taxpayers off the hook in case the Bank makes the same mistakes today that it has made in the past. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I was on a working group last year under the auspices of the chairman of the Committee on Financial Services with, amongst other people, the good gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Fincher), who has now left us for dinner. No, there he is. One of the things that the opponents and proponents of the Bank could all agree on was the fact that the Bank was poorly run when it came to managing its risk. Specifically, it has what bankers call market concentration. It puts too many of its eggs in one basket. In fact, one particular industry, aircraft and avionics, takes up almost 30 percent of the Bank's portfolio. We had a banker on that committee who worked with us. He said no self-respecting private sector bank would ever allow that to happen. That is simply bad management. It is not credible management. It is not responsible management to the shareholders. The bad news here, of course, Mr. Chairman, is the shareholders are the people who pay us. What does this amendment do? It tries to bring some of the private sector sanity into the Export-Import Bank and say: Look, you are going to have to abide by rules that ensure diversification of risk, both within industries and across companies. If this were really a bank and not just a political extension of the current administration, they would probably be doing this. If the Bank was run by a banker and not a political bundler, the Bank would probably already be doing this. But since it is a political extension of this administration, since it is run by a political bundler and not a banker, it falls to us to make sure that the Bank follows some commonsense rules about to whom it lends and how much it lends to them. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, how much time is remaining?

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Arbitrary limits, I had to laugh about that one, Mr. Chairman, when I was making my notes, because I was in a committee meeting today with the same folks making the argument now, saying that Congress does that all the time. In fact, I think the person who made that argument is sitting across the aisle from me today. I am just glad that folks making the argument now in opposition to this amendment aren't in charge of private banks. In fact, if they were, they would probably be in jail, because a lot of the same restrictions on lending that are contained in Dodd-Frank are exactly the rules that the Export-Import Bank is breaking right now. We would never tolerate a private institution that allows the type of concentration, both marketwise and geographically, that the Export- Import Bank has. Dodd-Frank would never permit it. Apparently, now it is okay, because we don't have private shareholders on the hook. We have taxpayers on the hook. So, if things go bad, it is really not that big a deal. I will remind everyone here, Mr. Chairman, that the inspector general's report has suggested exactly the type of reforms that are contained in this amendment. Anyone with any banking experience or even people from Tennessee with just a little common sense might be able to look at the balance sheet of this Bank and say: ``Wait a second. There is too much concentration of various industries. There is too much concentration of various geographic areas. This is a really, really bad way to run a bank.'' And it would be, of course, if this is a bank. But it is not a bank. It is a government program. It should be run like a bank, however. And that is what this amendment gives us the opportunity to do. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, in closing on all of these amendments, I want to touch on something we haven't had a chance to talk about here today. There are a lot of people in here who are apparently very proud of the Bank. They are happy with the way the Bank is run. They don't think that, but for some token reforms and changes, the Bank needs to change very much at all. The last 6 years have been 75 years of combined prison time because of wrongdoing at the Bank. There were 90 criminal indictments and complaints, 49 criminal judgments, and more than $223 million--a quarter of a billion dollars--in court-ordered fines and restitution because of wrongdoing at the Bank. We are proud of that? That is something that doesn't need serious overhaul? That is something we can just tweak around the edges because we have done it for so long? Maybe that is part of the problem. Maybe it has been a really, really long time since we have looked at this Bank under the microscope like we should. Maybe we should not have rubberstamped it for the past 16 administrations. Maybe the Bank should have followed the law that we passed in 2012 to reform itself. What does it say about an institution, Mr. Chairman, that ignores the law that this Chamber passes, the Senate passes, and the President signs? You combine that which can only be described as bureaucratic arrogance with this--prison time, criminal indictments, judgments, fines and restitutions--and you have an institution that is in sad need of reform, Mr. Chairman, and this is it. The amendments that you will see tonight are your only opportunity to do that. We could have done it the other day on the motion to discharge, but it was finely tuned so that that could not happen. This is it. We should pass not only this amendment, Mr. Chairman, but all of the amendments. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. MULVANEY

Mr. MULVANEY. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. MULVANEY. If this is not dilatory, what is the effect of passing this motion to recommit? I so often hear the preface, ``This doesn't send it back to committee; it doesn't kill the bill.''

Mr. MULVANEY. So passing this motion to recommit would send this bill back to committee?

Mr. MULVANEY. For how long?

Mr. MULVANEY. Fair enough. Further parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. MULVANEY. Does the person offering this motion represent to this body that they are in favor of this motion in order to qualify?

Mr. MULVANEY. Fair enough. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot of talk so far today about the Bank, about what the Bank does. We have heard a lot of talk about small business, a lot of talk about the Bank leveling the playing field, a lot of talk about the Bank being that lender of last resort when no one else will step into the breach to help American businesses. Supposedly, that is what this is all about. That is not what this is about. We had a discussion in the committee earlier this year where I actually suggested amendments that would focus the Export-Import Bank on small business, that would allow the Export-Import Bank to expand its use as a lender of last resort, but that would limit the Bank to true uses to level the playing field, when we really were competing with export credit facilities overseas. A representative of the United States Chamber of Commerce sat in our committee and said he would oppose every single one of those amendments. Small business is not what this is about. Leveling the playing field is not what this is about. Being a lender of last resort is not what this is about. This is about doing the bidding of the very, very large corporations that have a very, very large lobbying presence in Washington, D.C. That is what this is about. I am just surprised to see who is for it. We had a chance to actually fix the Bank. No amendments were allowed today. We had a chance to actually focus on small business, a chance to focus on the Bank's role as a lender of last resort, a focus on what the Bank should be doing. But we will miss that, Mr. Speaker, because we are doing the bidding of other folks. Vote as you will, but let's be honest about what this is and what this is not.

Mr. MULVANEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise for the purpose of making another parliamentary inquiry.