Pat Toomey

Mr. TOOMEY

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the nomination of Reta Jo Lewis to serve as the President and Chair of the Ex-Im Bank of the United States. It is my understanding that we are likely to have a vote later today on her confirmation, and I want to address this. And let me start by underscoring why, frankly, I don't think we should have an Ex-Im Bank, and let me explain why. First of all, let's start with the Ex-Im's claim about how it does business. The Ex-Im Bank maintains that, when it provides financing for these transactions that it engages in, it only takes risks that private lenders are either unable or unwilling to take. Now, we ought to stop ourselves right there and say: Well, wait a minute. If the private sector is not willing to take these risks, why should we force taxpayers to take these risks--because the Ex-Im Bank is, of course, backed by American taxpayers. So that is question No. 1. But it actually gets worse than that. The Ex-Im Bank also insists that it only makes safe bets; it only engages in very low-risk, safe transactions. But, of course, it is impossible to do both, right? Ex-Im can't only take transactions so risky that no one else will do them but at the same time only do safe transactions. That is an obvious contradiction, and that is a contradiction that is at the heart of Ex- Im's business model. So how do they do business? The reason they do business is they systematically underprice the risk. That is why Ex-Im gets the transaction instead of the private sector. That is why borrowers go to Ex-Im instead of any number of private financial institutions that are happy to offer the deal but only under terms that generate an adequate return on the risk. This is why, for instance, the largest, most successful, most profitable banks in America go to Ex-Im for loan guarantees--because Ex-Im's terms are too good to be true, at least too good to be true in the private sector. Let me just give a very recent example of just how egregious this is. In 2021, the Ex-Im Bank financed a deal in which they guaranteed an $82 million loan made by JPMorgan, the bank, to Qantas, the Australian airline, for the purpose of buying jet engines from General Electric. Now, let's think about this. We have JPMorgan, the largest bank in America--extremely profitable, enormously successful, all the capital in the world. We have Qantas, which is one of the most successful and profitable airlines in the world. They are the largest airline in Australia. And, of course, General Electric is one of the largest industrial companies in the world. Can anybody actually, with a straight face, suggest that any of these companies can't borrow money privately? Seriously? All three of them access the capital markets every day. They have access to all the financing in the world. Yet taxpayers guaranteed this transaction because it was available. They don't need any subsidy from American taxpayers, none whatsoever. Yet this is what Ex-Im does. Now, one of the claims that we hear from Ex-Im and from some supporters of Ex-Im is that Ex-Im plays an essential role; without them, we just wouldn't have the exports that we have; we depend on Ex- Im to export products. Well, the problem with that argument is the vast, overwhelming majority of American exports are done without Ex-Im. Now, we went back and looked at the annual export data from 2007 through 2020. In that period of time, the highest percentage of U.S. exports that were financed with Ex-Im financing happened to be in 2012. Do you know what that percentage was? It was 2.3 percent. That is the value of the exports that were financed by Ex-Im Bank. And that was, by the way, when Ex-Im had everything going for it. It was fully operational. It had a quorum on the Board. It had not reached its lending limit. So it was doing business without constraints. Yet it does this little, tiny sliver of American exports. The fact is, we are the second biggest exporting economy in the world behind China. The United States is No. 2 in total exports of goods. We are No. 1 in the world in terms of value added, and we do it almost entirely without Ex-Im financing--at least 97.7 percent in Ex-Im's best year. So the argument that somehow American exporters need Ex-Im to survive is patently false. It gets worse, though. Now Ex-Im wants to expand into domestic financing. Ex-Im has been tasked by the Biden administration with developing a new domestic financing program to expand the reach of the Bank. The proposed domestic financing program would support creating or expanding domestic manufacturing businesses and infrastructure projects as long as there is the expectation that some arbitrary portion of the goods will ultimately be exported. Can you imagine? So now the Ex-Im Bank is going to provide domestic financing. Gee, if only we had banks in America. If only we had capital markets in America so that we could provide financing for these transactions. No, we need the Ex-Im Bank to do it. We need taxpayers to go into the domestic banking business, on top of everything else. It is unbelievable. This isn't just mission creep. This is like mission sprint. Of course, it completely subverts the congressional intent. The intent was to match financing that is provided for exports around the world. This has nothing to do with that. There is no reason in the world that Ex-Im should be providing domestic financing--none. We live in the most developed capital markets of the world. We have a huge, enormously successful banking system. There is absolutely no need for this. And the only way they will get business is to, once again, underprice the risk so that taxpayers do not get properly compensated for the risks that they take. Now, let me get to the specifics of our nominee. I am concerned that Ms. Lewis is not going to protect the U.S. taxpayers from this inherently risky construct. For one example, the Biden administration has suggested doubling Ex-Im's statutory default cap from 2 percent to 4 percent. So what does this mean? So under current statute, Ex-Im has got a limit of how much of its balance sheet can be in default. It is 2 percent. Well, lately, the default rate has been creeping up. In fact, it has tripled, and it is very close to 2 percent. So the obvious solution is to do something about the credit quality of the balance sheet, but that is not the Biden administration's solution. They just want to double the permissible amount of losses. Well, I have no reason to believe that Ms. Lewis would object to that at all. In fact, I suspect she would embrace that. I am also concerned about the background she brings to this job. Ms. Lewis does have some experience in international policy, but she does not have the financial background that should be a prerequisite for serving as the President of a big bank. And without such a background, she is going to inevitably rely heavily on Ex-Im's staff. As I said, I am very concerned that she is going to support this domestic financing program of the administration. So for these reasons and others, I am urging my colleagues to vote against the confirmation of Ms. Lewis as President of the Ex-Im Bank. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President.

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would just like to bring to my colleagues' attention to the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the lead story, the headline above the fold today, ``Annual Drug Overdose Deaths Top 100,000, Setting Record.'' For the 12 months ending in April, alltime record number of fatalities--a big majority of them opioids, mostly synthetic opioids, driven primarily by fentanyl. Unbelievable. Think of 100,000 new families in the last 12 months that will have an empty seat at the Thanksgiving Day dinner next Thursday. Pennsylvania has been hit as hard as any State, but every one of our States has been hit hard by this. So why am I objecting to this? Because I have an amendment that at least on the margins would help. It is simple, and it is common sense. It adds fentanyl to the majors list. The majors list is the list that includes the countries that the President has to identify as the largest producers of illicit fentanyl. That is China. Let's be clear. But once these countries--any country-- is identified as a big producer of fentanyl, my bill would require those countries to prosecute drug traffickers and schedule fentanyl as a class, and if they do not, then they are not doing all they could and should be doing to keep fentanyl off our streets; in which case, under my amendment, the President would be authorized to withhold certain categories of foreign aid. This bill is so noncontroversial and common sense, it has actually already passed this body just last year. It is bipartisan. Senator Maggie Hassan from New Hampshire, a Democrat, is my partner on the underlying bill. And I would point out to my colleagues, I don't have any objection to anyone getting an amendment vote. I am not holding up anybody's votes, as long as we get this chance to reduce the flow of fentanyl coming into America. So I ask to modify the request to include my amendment No. 3925.

Mr. TOOMEY. I object.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, on Tuesday, the President of the United States officially nominated Cornell Law Professor Saule Omarova to be America's top banking regulator. She would be the Comptroller of the Currency. The Comptroller of the Currency is the lead regulator of all of our national banks. Now, twice before today, I addressed her nomination on the Senate floor--her then-prospective nomination. Now she has been nominated. And I noted that Professor Omarova describes her own views as radical. For example, Professor Omarova has written that she wants to ``radically redefine the role of a central bank.'' She has also stated that her proposals represent a ``radical departure from what we've been conditioned to view as the `normal' state of play.'' Madam President, probably the only thing I can think of in all of her writing that I agree with is her characterization of her views as radical. Specifically, let me be clear about what is radical about her whole approach. It is radical because she has a clear and obvious aversion to democratic capitalism itself, in other words, the central organizing principle of American society that we would be a free society and that that would include economic freedom and economic decisions can be made by free men and women pursuing their own understanding of their self-interest. Instead of that, she has a clear preference for an administrative approach where decisions are not made by free men and women engaging voluntarily in exchanges but, rather, by technocrats who are deemed to know what is better for us than we could possibly know for ourselves. The fact is, in my 11 years in Congress, I don't think I have seen a more radical nominee for any regulatory spot in our entire Federal Government. And I know that is a bold statement, but I stand by that. Now, last month, I spoke about Professor Omarova's radical plan to have the Federal Government set prices throughout our economy. She wants the government to decide what people should pay for food and gas and wages and home prices and many other things. That is pretty radical. Today, I want to focus on her radical proposal to nationalize the U.S. banking system. So let me first start by observing that Professor Omarova's plan to nationalize our financial system wasn't something that she wrote decades ago or even years ago. In fact, I believe she wrote it last year, and it was published in the Vanderbilt Law Review just last month. Professor Omarova's radical plan to nationalize financial services was published just last month, and the paper was titled ``The People's Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.'' ``The People's Ledger.'' Not the people's Republic, mind you, but ``The People's Ledger.'' That is her title for the paper. In the paper, Professor Omarova outlined her plan to ``effectively end banking as we know it.'' Now, that is a very strong statement. So what exactly does she mean by this? Well, she lays this out for us. In her proposal, the Federal Government would become the retail bank for every American. That is right. It has essentially two features. She would have the creation of retail deposit accounts at the Fed for every American citizen and the issuance of a central bank digital currency to manage this in various ways. The objective of this plan--these are her words--the objective is to ``reimagine the role of a central bank as the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.'' Think about that. We want the central government to be allocating financial resources in a modern economy. Those are not my words; those are her words. In its role as the ``ultimate public platform,'' according to Professor Omarova, ``central bank accounts [would] fully replace-- rather than uneasily co-exist with--private bank deposits.'' These are her words. She wants to fully replace all of the private accounts that we have. So, in other words, if you have a bank account with a local community bank, no more; couldn't have that uneasily--what is her word?--uneasily coexisting. That would be replaced. Your money would be with the Federal Reserve instead. So Professor Omarova's view is to put the Fed in charge of handling all of our bank deposits, all of our bank accounts. So when a hard- working American receives their paycheck every week, it doesn't go in direct deposit to the community bank with which you are accustomed to doing business; it would go to a government-controlled bank account with the Fed. Professor Omarova's proposal would ``envision the complete migration of demand deposit accounts to the Fed's balance sheet.'' So lest anyone suggest I am exaggerating about her plan to replace all banking, these are her words: ``the complete migration of demand deposit accounts to the Fed's balance sheet.'' Now, why does Professor Omarova propose that we destroy banking in America and shift all deposit accounts from the innumerable private institutions that we all use and do it all through the Fed? Well, one reason she cites is to empower the Fed to directly distribute fiscal stimulus and aid to worthy beneficiaries. I kind of wonder who the radical left would consider to be sufficiently worthy to be a beneficiary, but that is another whole topic. Another justification that she offers for the Fed to control all retail banking--really, for Fed to be America's sole retail bank--is so that the Fed can more easily control the money supply. This is very interesting. She provides a little insight into how she envisions this because she says this would include ``implementing a contractionary monetary policy by debiting'' consumers' accounts. Now, she allows that this could ``be perceived as the government `taking away' people's money.'' Why would people perceive it as the government taking away people's money? Because that is exactly what she is saying should be an option available to the Fed. So specifically what she is saying is that all Americans' deposits must be at the Fed. There can be no private banks. That would be an uneasy coexistence we shouldn't tolerate. And then, if the Fed causes inflation, which is the usual source of inflation, no problem--the Fed can solve the problem by confiscating a little bit of the money from everybody's accounts. Imagine this. That is exactly what she is advocating. The Fed can create inflation, but that is all right--we will give it a new tool to solve the inflation problem: just confiscate the money from the American citizens who are forced to put their money with the Fed. You can't make this stuff up. This is what she is advocating. That is not the only reason she wants the Fed to be everyone's bank. She says it is to ``maximize [the Fed's] capacity to channel credit to productive uses in the nation's economy.'' This is the definition of ``socialist hubris.'' This is the definition of ``socialism''--the idea that we have the government allocate the resources. Let the government decide what is the productive way to use the resources of our society rather than individual men and women by virtue of the exchanges they voluntarily choose to engage in. She wants to substitute a centrally managed, planned socialist economy for the free society that we have today. There is no other way to characterize it. Where has this ever worked? This is unbelievable. If it were possible, which it is not, how would the Fed decide which are the productive and the nonproductive uses? What about loans to energy companies? Gee, I don't know. Is that productive or is that not productive? Let's leave to it the Fed to decide. What could possibly go wrong? Here is another reason why it is very bad to force all Americans to do their retail banking with a central government. It is the end to privacy for Americans' financial transactions. That is over. We remember just weeks ago the tremendous backlash against the idea that banks would be required to report aggregate transaction information to the IRS. I know I got buried with phone calls and letters. I think we had 16,000 Pennsylvanians who reached out to my office alone, urging Congress to reject that proposal. Can you imagine what people will think of Professor Omarova's plan to force you to have your whole bank account with the Fed? Americans don't want the Federal Government monitoring their bank accounts. I should think that would be obvious. They certainly don't want the Federal Government having control over this. Let me conclude with this: It is perfectly OK for academic institutions and think tanks to have people espousing these socialist ideas and spinning all different variations on these collectivists and centrally planned and socialist themes. It is perfectly fine. That should be debated. I am not in the camp that thinks you cancel someone who has a different point of view from being able to articulate what they believe in. But the idea that we would take someone who holds these socialist views, who is so strongly anti-capitalism, and put that person as the chief regulator of America's banks--that makes no sense at all. I urge my colleagues to oppose this nominee. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I rise today to discuss President Biden's nominee to serve as one of our Nation's chief banking regulators. About a month ago, President Biden announced his intention to nominate Cornell University Law Professor Saule Omarova to serve as Comptroller of the Currency. I was on the floor recently, and I spoke about her nomination. And I noted at the time that she has been celebrated on the far left for promoting ideas that she herself has described as ``radical.'' It is one of the few things on which I agree with her. These are radical ideas. In fact, they are very radical ideas. And most disturbing about this is they demonstrate--these ideas of hers--a very clear aversion to America's free enterprise system at a very fundamental level, despite the fact that our free enterprise system has produced an incredible level of prosperity and standard of living. I have to say, I don't think I have ever seen a more radical choice for any regulatory spot in our Federal Government that I can think of than Professor Omarova. And let me be clear. That assessment is based on the things that Professor Omarova has written and said in her own words, often quite recently. So today I want to focus on just one of the radical ideas that she presented in great detail in a paper that she wrote in 2016--not exactly ancient history. This is her plan to have the Federal Government set wages and prices for large sectors of the U.S. economy; in fact, the most important goods and services in our economy. Under her plan, the Federal Government would designate--and these are her words--``systemically important prices and indexes'' or ``SIPIs.'' She creates an acronym for these things; she calls them SIPIs--for the Federal Reserve to regulate. So she details five different approaches, different ways, that the government could regulate and take control over these prices of these systemically important goods. And they are all--it is all a terrible idea based on the completely erroneous premise that somehow the government knows what the price of these things should be. But among all of them, one that is maybe the most troubling is one that she describes here. And this is what Professor Omarova argued. She says: ``The . . . final regulatory option we think worth considering is . . . price maintenance--typically within some band--through OMOs.'' Now, OMO stands for open market operations, and that is an operation that the Federal Reserve engages in. But the Fed uses open market operations--or OMOs, in Professor Omarova's lexicon--to just buy and sell securities for one purpose, and that is to manage the amount of money in the supply--in the economy, to manage monetary policy, to do it by managing the supply of money. That is it. What Professor Omarova is advocating for is a radical departure from this very, very narrow and limited activity. What her plan would do is to empower the Fed--and these are her words--``to buy and sell in markets . . . with a view to keeping particular [systemically important prices] within particular bands thought necessary for the purposes of maintaining systemic stability.'' Wow. Now, what kind of prices does Professor Omarova have in mind for the Fed to control by buying and selling these commodities? Well, she tells us. She says: Various candidate SIPIs here come to mind. . . . Certain sensitive commodity prices--those for widely used fuels, foodstuffs, and some other raw materials, for example-- constitute another class of candidates. Finally, wage or salary indices constitute yet another class of candidates. Now, here are some of the other candidates for price controls that she has in mind: ``home prices,'' ``productive inputs'' such as ``energy,'' ``certain . . . metals, and other natural resources.'' In other words, like all the most important commodities in America, under Professor Omarova's radical plan, it would be the government that would set these prices rather than a free market determining how these prices should be set. The government would control everything from the size of your paycheck to the amount you pay at the grocery store for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gasoline. There is no more allocation of scarce goods based on who values them the most--the brilliance of the way that a spontaneous market allocates resources automatically to their best and highest use and enables us to have the lowest possible cost for the most possible goods. None of that. No more. We will have a committee--it is called the Fed Open Market Committee--and they will dictate the prices that we will pay and how the resources of America will be allocated. Now, if her radical idea sounds familiar, that is because it is familiar. It has been tried--been tried several times--repeatedly, and every single time it has failed spectacularly, time and again, in all the centrally planned economies in the world, especially the Soviet Union. In fact, Soviet efforts to control prices in their economy were so abysmal, they failed so badly that they spawned countless jokes within the Soviet Union that illustrate the folly of central planning, the inherent impossibility of central planning. One of my favorites is about a guy who walks into a store. He walks up to the shopkeeper and says: You don't have any meat, do you? And the shopkeeper replies: No, we don't have any fish. It is the store next door that doesn't have any meat. So we can laugh about these things that people living under the misery of the Soviet Union, they had a sort of gallows humor about the misery of their circumstances. But the fact is, it was this notion that a really smart committee at the center of the government could dictate the prices and the allocation of all resources; that idea is what caused the misery-- ultimately, of course, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is what happens anywhere where governments try to control what should be left to the free men and women in terms of allocating resources. Government-run economies, like the very one that Professor Omarova is proposing--they don't work. And let me stress a point that I have made before about Professor Omarova. The fact that she was born and raised in the Soviet Union has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the Senate should confirm her to run a major financial agency. There are some unbelievably wonderful, successful, patriotic, terrific American citizens who had the misfortune of growing up behind the Iron Curtain. That has nothing to do with whether or not she is qualified for this job. It is her advocacy for the policies that, in disturbing ways, resemble those of the Soviet Union--that is what should inform our judgment about whether this person should be the chief regulator of the Nation's federally chartered banks. Now, Professor Omarova would likely argue that her centrally planned economy would be different. That is always the case. This time we will get socialism right. As her paper notes, the Fed does already use open market operations to implement monetary policy. That is true. So why not let the Fed use a similar mechanism to set and maintain stable prices for all kinds of important assets? Well, the answer is simple: Making decisions about what individual-- maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of individual assets across something as complex as our entire economy, what they should cost, how they should be allocated, that is an impossibly complex endeavor. There is no technocrat, no bureau, no committee, no agency--there is no entity that can figure that out. It is the organic decisions, individual decisions, of millions of free people that spontaneously create the allocation that maximizes the well-being of the people of a free society. By the way, there is a pretty strong case to be made that the government doesn't do such a great job on monetary policy either. People that we have serious doubts about how well they set the price of a single thing--namely, the U.S. dollar--do we want them directly controlling the prices of everything or at least everything that is important? I think not. So the more I read the radical ideas that Professor Omarova has advocated for and the more I think about the damage this would do to our economy and our society, the more troubled I am by her nomination. So I strongly urge President Biden to reconsider his nomination, his decision to nominate her.

Mr. TOOMEY

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

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise to address the recent announcement from President Biden that he intends to nominate Saule Omarova to be Comptroller of the Currency. Now, Ms. Omarova, if she were, in fact, confirmed to be Comptroller of the Currency, she would head up the Agency that is responsible for chartering and regulating national financial institutions. So that is to say she would be the head of, the primary regulator for, America's national banks, of which there are very many. I just want to provide this morning a brief introduction, a glimpse, into the mindset of this nominee. I will take more time on future occasions to delve more deeply into some of the things that she has advocated for and written about and that I find extraordinarily disturbing. I think many of my colleagues will as well. But let me start with just a few observations. First, there is little doubt Ms. Omarova has been celebrated on the far left for promoting ideas that she herself has described as ``radical.'' That is a point we can agree on. These are very, very radical ideas. In fact, I don't think I have ever seen a more radical choice for any regulatory spot in our Federal Government. I know that is a very sweeping statement to make. I think I can stand by it. There is a lot that is extraordinary and radical here, but maybe the heart of it is Ms. Omarova doesn't just want to tighten regulation of banks. That is not what she is advocating for. What she wants to do-- these are her words--``effectively `end banking' as we know it.'' Those are words she wrote just last year. This is not ancient history. These are the views she has articulated in writing within a year. She clearly has an aversion to anything like free market capitalism, and that is in her writing. In an October 2020 paper called ``The People's Ledger,'' she outlined a plan for ``radically reshaping the basic architecture and dynamics of modern finance.'' And what this was all about, what she was arguing for in this paper from just last year, was really promoting the nationalization of an entire industry--retail banking; basically bringing to an end the ability of banks to compete for customers' services and instead nationalize that; a clear socialist idea that we shouldn't have a free enterprise system competing for people's business but rather have the government own it and provide that. Specifically, she wants the Federal Reserve to allocate credit and capital. And as part of this regime, she advocates that the government, acting through the Fed, would actually cut off credit to those deemed ``socially sub-optimal.'' Can you imagine? Is there something more chilling than the idea that we would abolish retail banking, make it the responsibility of the Fed, and then actively require that the Fed decides who is socially optimal and who is not, and then allocate credit accordingly? This is unbelievable. In a 2012 paper, she suggested a mandate that financial products could only be sold if they are approved in advance by the Federal Government. There is no freedom to innovate there. There is no responding to customers' wants and needs. There is no competition for providing--none of that. The government will decide what can and cannot be offered. Even she admitted that this is ``paternalistic and has command-and- control elements.'' At least she acknowledges that is what this is. But it doesn't end there. Ms. Omarova doesn't just want to nationalize banking. She wants to do that, but that is not all. She also wants the banking regulators to run the whole economy. Under her plan, which she, again, laid this out in writing in--this is in a 2016 paper, the Federal Reserve would set prices in large sectors of the U.S. economy, those that she deems to be ``systemically important prices,'' that would include--she helpfully tells us what would be considered systemically important prices--`` . . . widely used fuels, foodstuffs, and some other raw materials'' and ``wages or salary indices,'' among others. So she is openly advocating that the Federal Government sets wages and prices throughout the economy. Does this sound anything like a free enterprise economy? It is unbelievable. In addition to that, citing a desire to ``sidestep debilitating political battles over the Federal budget''--now, just think about that term. Let's unpack that just a bit. ``Debilitating political battles over the Federal budget.'' That sounds to me like Congress arguing over spending--arguably, the most fundamental responsibility of Congress. But in order to sidestep that--that fundamentally democratic process that follows our Constitution--in a 2020 white paper, Omarova proposed creating a National Investment Authority to channel both public and private capital to further policies that would be set by an unelected, unaccountable board. So the American people don't get to decide how their tax dollars get allocated by holding Members of Congress accountable through elections. Instead, there would be some board that would make all these decisions for us. And that is not the only unaccountable body she has proposed to exert control over the private sector. In a 2012 paper, Ms. Omarova also proposed creating a Public Interest Council--a Public Interest Council. And their purpose would be to use pressure and propaganda tactics to manipulate public opinion against banks and regulators, and to ``generate mass political support for the actions it considers necessary,'' and ``build its independent power base.'' I am almost speechless. It is absolutely--so you could ask yourself: Where would a person even come up with these ideas? How does it even happen that it occurs to someone to think up these things? Well, maybe a contributing factor could be if a person grew up in the former Soviet Union and went to Moscow State University and attended there on a Vladimir Lenin Academic Scholarship. Now, let me by very, very clear about something. There are lots of wonderful American citizens who were born and raised behind the Iron Curtain--I totally get that--including in the former Soviet Union, who have come to this country, and they love America as much as anyone I have ever met. I know some of them personally. So I am not suggesting in any way that growing up behind the Iron Curtain and attending university in Moscow is in any way disqualifying. But the attitude a person has about the Soviet regime, now, that is another matter. So in the case of Ms. Omarova, in 2019, she tweeted: ``Say what you will about the old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn't always `know best.' '' Say what you will about the old USSR. Really? There is a lot to say. I will have a lot to say on another occasion about the old USSR. She followed up with a tweet. She decided to clarify that, and here is the tweet she issued afterward. She said: ``I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life. But people's salaries were set (by the state) in a gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!'' Can you imagine? Ms. Omarova clearly knows her views are far outside of the mainstream. How do we know? Well, why else would her most recent resume have been scrubbed of one particular item that was on her resume as recently as 2017? And that item is the thesis that she wrote when she was a student in Moscow on her Vladimir Lenin personal academic scholarship. The title we know. The title of the thesis was ``Karl Marx's Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.'' Unfortunately, that is all I know about this thesis. Now, this morning, I released a letter that I sent to Ms. Omarova requesting that she provide a copy of this paper in the original Russian to the committee in time for us to translate it so that we can fully consider her nomination. Like most committees, the Banking Committee requires nominees provide copies of any articles or papers they have written, and that is a very important tool that we use to evaluate a person's thoughts and fitness and temperament, and judge and where they are coming from. I am looking forward to receiving that paper from her. I will conclude with this: You know, in a country as big as ours, where we have 330-some million people, I have no doubt that there are some individuals that we can find here and there who would think of the Soviet Union--that brutal, oppressive, totalitarian, freedom- suppressing, soul-sucking, murderous regime that was the Soviet Union-- there must be some people somewhere in America who somehow would compare it favorably to the United States, as shocking as that is. What has never occurred to me is that a person who thinks that way could possibly be considered to an important, powerful, and prominent position in the Federal Government. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Alexander LePore, an FDIC detailee with my staff, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of this Congress.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I rise to oppose the nomination of FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra to be the CFPB Director. In the Banking Committee, every Republican voted against him, and on the Senate floor, Republicans have uniformly voted against discharging his nomination from the committee. There is a reason for that. I think my colleagues have the same grave concern that I have that Commissioner Chopra would return the CFPB to the lawless, overreaching, highly politicized Agency that it was during the Obama administration when he was there. CFPB, as you will recall, was created by our Democratic colleagues through the Dodd-Frank Act, and it was arguably the most unaccountable Agency in the history of the U.S. Federal Government. Think about it. It is an Agency with a single Director who, until recently, even the President of the United States was unconstitutionally forbidden from firing. This Agency is not accountable to Congress through the appropriations process the way most Agencies are. Most rely on appropriations from Congress for their funding. That is part of our power of the purse strings. Not with the CFPB. It simply draws virtually unlimited funding at its discretion from the Federal Reserve, whether Congress likes it or not. Now, during the Obama administration, the CFPB systematically pursued an activist, anti-business agenda. It limited consumer choice, it drove up the cost of credit for consumers, and it certainly unfairly burdened employers with overregulation. CFPB repeatedly engaged in overreach and abuse of its authority. Just one example: Instead of clearly laying out the rules of the road through a transparent regulatory process, it would invent rules on its own by springing lawsuits on the financial institutions that had no way of knowing that they were engaged in anything that the CFPB objected to because there was no rule. It was just rulemaking by enforcement. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals, quite rightly, held that this approach violates the fundamental bedrock principle of due process. But that is not all. Commissioner Chopra helped set up the CFPB, and then he served as a very high-ranking official there during the Obama administration. In that role, it has been widely acknowledged that he had a hostile relationship with lenders. He used ``name and shame'' tactics to pressure them. In one case, he took the ``shoot first; aim second'' approach to the facts by posting online inaccurate allegations about credit unions, which the CFPB then later had to retract. At the FTC, Commissioner Chopra has continued his aggressive anti- business stances, and he has continued to take a ``shoot first; aim later'' approach to the facts in order to advance his agenda. In one recent case, three of his fellow Commissioners publicly rebuked Commissioner Chopra for ``his disregard of the facts and the law, for making misleading claims, and for relying on false assertions.'' During this whole nomination process, while Commissioner Chopra is under consideration to lead the CFPB, he has done very little to alleviate these concerns. I asked him a request for the record. Given its history, given the actions that have been overturned by courts, was there a single CFPB enforcement action that Mr. Chopra believed was too burdensome or was too punitive? He couldn't identify a single one. In addition, Commissioner Chopra favors unaccountable regulators with vast powers. He actually in writing proposed this superagency that would regulate politicians and think tanks and nonprofits. At his nomination hearing, Commissioner Chopra once again defended the CFPB's completely unaccountable structure. All this raises concerns about how he would wield power at the CFPB. Remember, at the CFPB, he would not be accountable to Congress in any meaningful way, certainly not through the appropriations process, and since the CFPB is a single Director Agency, there would be no other Commissioners to restrain him. Commissioner Chopra has also shown a complete disregard already for congressional oversight. According to multiple press reports, the Biden administration's political leadership at the CFPB has been taking unusual and possibly unlawful actions to push out top-level career, nonpolitical civil servants at the CFPB in order to fill those civil service positions with handpicked activists who will support the Biden agenda. Now, the implication has been that this was done in preparation for Commissioner Chopra taking over as the Director. These were just allegations, but there were several of them. There was some credibility to them. So I sent Commissioner Chopra a letter simply asking in a straightforward way whether he was aware of or whether he had been involved in any efforts to dismiss these career civil servants at the CFPB. It has been over 100 days since I asked him these simple, straightforward questions, and he has refused to provide any response to me. His refusal to respond to my oversight requests--I am the ranking member of the committee that has jurisdiction over the organization he is meant to lead. This refusal to respond to a simple oversight request is completely unacceptable from a nominee, and it leaves very little doubt how he will treat congressional oversight if he is confirmed. As all of the Republicans on the Banking Committee have stated, ``In our view, this should disqualify [him] from consideration as CFPB Director.'' It is clear to me that Commissioner Chopra would very likely return the CFPB to the rogue, unaccountable, anti-business Agency it was during the Obama administration. We have every reason to believe he would continue to disregard legitimate congressional oversight requests. I urge my colleagues to join me in voting against his confirmation. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following notice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention related to an eviction moratorium be printed in the Record.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, we had a big controversy in the infrastructure bill over how to go about imposing transaction reporting requirements on crypto exchange programs. I am very pleased to be able to report that a group of us reached a bipartisan agreement: Democrats and Republicans, the Biden Treasury, and the administration is on board. I want to thank the cosponsors of the amendment that brought everybody together on this: Senator Warner, Senator Lummis, Senator Portman, and Senator Sinema are all in agreement on this. I should point out I appreciate Senator Ron Wyden's work throughout this entire process. Let me just give a little bit of context here, and then I am going to yield to some colleagues and then ask unanimous consent that we adopt this commonsense change. To start off, we have very broad agreement, probably unanimous agreement, that centralized digital asset exchanges, when they behave as brokers, should be required to report transactions of their customers just like ordinary brokers do: stockbrokers, bond brokers. The problem is that the underlying text of this bipartisan infrastructure bill, while it attempts to do this, I think it is very significantly flawed with how it goes about it. The unintended consequence of the current text is it will ensnare people and companies and impose this transaction reporting requirement on those to whom it shouldn't apply and, in some cases, people who couldn't even possibly comply. For example, the underlying text of this bill would impose this kind of transaction reporting requirement on crypto transaction validators. These are the people who are building out the block chain by validating a transaction. They would be obligated to report things like a name and a tax ID number associated with the dollar amount. They don't have that information. For them, the transaction is just an anonymized number. It doesn't make any sense at all. Also, people who write software code and then have no further involvement in any transactions, I think they would be captured by this language in the underlying bill. Certainly, that doesn't make any sense. It would apply to anybody who is providing a service that effectuates these transactions. Think about the parallel in the ordinary securities brokerage business. Think about Merrill Lynch. We require Merrill Lynch to report the information about me if I give them my money to buy stock. That makes sense. But we don't require the electric company that provides electrical service to Merrill Lynch to make any such reporting because that would not make sense. What happened was a group of us came together to clarify the rules of who are the actual brokers of cryptocurrency who should be responsible for the transaction reporting requirement We are not proposing anything that is the least bit sweeping or radical. Our solution just makes clear that a broker means only those persons who conduct transactions on exchanges where customers are buying and selling and trading digital assets. We make sure that the bill does not sweep in software developers. It does not sweep in crypto transaction validators, regardless of which of the various methods they use for the validation. It doesn't sweep in node operators or any other nonbrokers. But anyone who owes any tax from a cryptocurrency transaction should pay their tax obligation. So if you are actually a crypto broker, you would be required to turn over that information under our approach. Our amendment would do that. But it is important that the reporting requirement only applies to those kinds of intermediaries. I don't think any one of our cosponsors thinks our solution is absolutely perfect, but it is a big improvement over the underlying text. I would also point out that this space is changing. It is changing fast. A year from now, people will have come up with innovations and applications that we can't even imagine that probably nobody has even thought of yet. What I don't want to do is impose a burden that is going to stifle that kind of innovation. What we shouldn't do is have an overly broad mandate or reporting requirement on people who can't even comply. We shouldn't favor or punish any particular methodology or platform design or validation mechanism. And we shouldn't--we shouldn't--stifle innovation. There is time to do this. There is an agreement. It is bipartisan. The White House is on board. We can get this done. We can do it right now. I am going to yield to my colleague from Wyoming before making a unanimous consent request.

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Wyoming for her very constructive leadership in this area, and I yield at this time to the Senator from Ohio.

Mr. TOOMEY. I thank the Senator from Ohio for his very constructive cooperation on this, and let me yield to our colleague from Texas

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding adoption of substitute amendment No. 2137, the Toomey- Warner-Lummis-Sinema-Portman amendment No. 2656 be agreed to.

Mr. TOOMEY. I do.

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President.

Mr. TOOMEY. So for people who have been watching this and aren't familiar with the bizarre practices in this body, I want to just explain briefly what just happened here. Because there is a difference of opinion on whether or not the Senator from Alabama should get a vote on his amendment--because that is not agreed to--the body is refusing to take up an amendment that has broad bipartisan support that we all know fixes something that badly needs to be fixed. This isn't like a whim of the Senator from Pennsylvania. There is, like, nobody who disputes that there is a problem here. You want to know the specifics of the problem? According to the underlying bill, this is what is going to pass. This is what is going to get sent ultimately to the President's desk. It is a transaction reporting requirement, including name, taxpayer ID number, dollar amount, date. It is imposed on any person who, for consideration, is responsible for regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets on behalf of another person. Well, look, I am not even a lawyer, but I can read. It sounds to me like any service effectuating transfers--that would include validators. I don't know how that doesn't include miners, stakers. It probably includes hardware and software wallets, software developers all across any kind of platform. We are going to ask these people to provide information that they don't have and they can't get. In what universe does that make any sense at all? All I want to do is have a vote on an amendment that fixes this in a way that has bipartisan agreement, in a way that constrains this to apply narrowly to the people who actually are the intermediaries running a centralized exchange, who have this information. But apparently we are not going to be able to do that. So we will be back on this because we are going to do a lot of damage. Who knows how much innovation we are going to stifle. Who knows exactly what kind of new apps will never emerge. It is hard to predict what kind of completely impossible mandate results in, but it is not good, and it is going to bring us back here having to try to clean up a mess which we could have prevented. I yield the floor.

Mr. TOOMEY

Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I want to address an opportunity that we have in this body to fix a flaw in a provision in this infrastructure bill. I want to thank my colleague from Oregon and our colleague from Wyoming. The three of us have been working on this, and I really hope we get this done. I am going to insist on having a vote on this. Let me just give a little context here. So we are all aware of this new category of assets some describe as currencies, which are also called cryptocurrencies. And this is a fascinating development. Actually, some have been around for some time now, but they have come into the public eye in a much, much bigger way in recent years--very recent years. And while sometimes we think of this as some kind of unit of value that is traded and has some pretty spectacular volatility sometimes, for me, while that is very interesting, what is much more interesting is the underlying technology and what that might make possible. I am still trying to understand. I am still on a steep learning curve about all the possibilities of the distributed ledger technology, the methodology by which cryptocurrencies can be exchanged without an intermediary. There is no bank that the money has to go through. It is an amazing and fascinating technology where individuals scattered around the globe actually validate the legitimacy of a transaction and it becomes immutable. And there is a permanent record in some cases. There are other models where it is different. But this is an amazing technology. It has tremendous potential. We had a hearing in the Banking Committee just last week, at my request--the chairman agreed to a hearing--where we talked about some of the use cases for this underlying technology, and we heard some amazing things. So the most common activity now is trading in these digital currencies, whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum or others. There are many, many of them. And that is the biggest single activity, but there are very, very important and interesting additional use cases that are occurring. One of the things that I am fascinated by is the potential to have this dispersed mechanism for validating ownership. Think of all the amount of time and money and effort we spend on all kinds of transactions where, ultimately, we are trying to validate someone's ownership: the title to their house, the title to their car, your ownership of the stocks that you bought from your broker. We have developed very expensive, actually, and sometimes time- consuming processes by which we do this. This can all be done on a blockchain. This can all be done almost instantly, at almost no cost, and I think that this is the direction that we are going to be heading in. That is just one example. There is another whole category that is fascinating to me, which is what people refer to as programmable money. Think about it, programmable money; what is that? Well, here is a great example that we heard at our hearing from a witness who works for a company that actually provides these kinds of services. But here is an example. You know, one of the things that has always been a challenge is, how do you ensure that, say, a person who has a copyright is properly compensated when that copyright is used in one form or another? I used to have a restaurant. And when we played music in the background to create a certain ambiance in our restaurant, how do you make sure that the people who have the copyright on those songs gets paid properly for that? I will tell you, it is a terrible system. It is completely arbitrary, and there is no precision to it. There is no way to monitor it. Well, how about an idea where you have a programmable capability where, if I listen to a music app on my iPhone, for every second of a particular artist's music I listen to, it automatically sends a corresponding tiny fraction of some currency to the person who owns that copyright? That is completely doable in the context of this kind of technology. I just mention these two things just to provide a little, tiny glimpse and illustration of the kinds of amazing things that I think this underlying technology is capable of, and it is likely going to change the way we do an awful lot of things in the coming years. I say that as background because in this legislation, there is a very reasonable intent, but I think the drafting doesn't get it quite right. The intent is to say: for those exchanges, for those places where people go to buy and sell cryptocurrencies--and there are centralized exchanges where that happens every day in huge, huge volumes--we want to require these exchanges to have the same kind of reporting requirements that a conventional broker would have when a security is bought. So, in other words, we want the folks who run the exchange to report the name, some identifying number--maybe it is a Social Security number--the dollar amount. And all of this is because people buying and selling these cryptocurrencies are generating capital gains and losses. It is an asset. If you sell it later after a gain, you should have to pay a capital gains tax on that asset, depending on how long you have held it. If you have lost money on it, then you ought to be able to take that loss against gains that you may have elsewhere. It is completely reasonable to have a provision that requires the reporting of the transaction. That, I think, is the intent of this legislation. But, unfortunately, the way it got drafted, to my reading, and to--I am certainly not alone; I think this is almost universally acknowledged--the language would impose this reporting requirement on people involved in the cryptocurrency world who don't even have the information about the person making the purchase or the sale. So, for instance, it might very well be interpreted to impose this reporting requirement on the miners, the people who are involved in the arithmetic process by which you validate transactions. They don't even know the names. They have a numerical representation of the transaction. They don't know who is buying it. They have no idea. They have no way of knowing. So it is not a reasonable--not an even slightly reasonable burden to impose on them. That is one little example of how badly flawed this language is. It wasn't intended that way. The good news is, it can be fixed. And Senator Wyden and Senator Lummis and I have come up with language that fixes this problem. It would make sure that the reporting requirement on a centralized exchange, the folks running that who have this information, would, in fact, have to report it. They don't right now. There is no statute. There is no regulation that requires that. This would require the reporting. And the industry is fine with that. They recognize that they should have to report this. But they also recognize that it should only be imposed on people for whom it makes sense, right? The people who actually have that information. So our amendment addresses this. It fixes this. It solves this problem. I think it achieves the intent. And we are having a little trouble getting the ability to offer this as an amendment here on the Senate floor on this bill. I am not here to ask that we simply adopt it by acclamation. I welcome debate and welcome a vote, but we ought to be able to have a vote. We absolutely should have this debate and have a vote before we go ahead and impose this requirement. And if we were not to adopt this amendment, then we could be doing a lot of damage. We could have a very chilling effect on the development of this technology, and that is what I am most concerned about. That is what I want to avoid. This technology is very, very exciting. It has tremendous potential. And the last thing we should do is allow a flawed drafting exercise to have this chilling effect on the further development of this technology. I see the Senator from Oregon is here on the floor, and I want to thank him for his leadership on this effort, for his work. He and I, I think, have a very similar way of viewing this. And if he would like to make some comments, I will yield some time to him

Mr. TOOMEY. Reclaiming my time. I want to thank my colleague from Oregon for his thoughtful leadership on this. I thank the Senator from Wyoming. Senator Lummis, is on her way down. She is going to join us, as she has been an integral part of this effort to just correct this. This is a big deal in a number of respects. I would point out--I want to stress, right now there is no statutory reporting requirement in this whole space. There is no regulatory requirement. I don't think you could have a regulatory requirement without a statute authorizing it. So this is a big deal. It would require the companies operating these exchanges to report this financial information so that it dramatically enhances the likelihood that capital gains taxes would be collected. This provision scores as a source of revenue because it increases the likelihood of compliance. I don't know why anyone would object. I am not aware of any objection of the substance of this on my side of the aisle. I know Senator Wyden has like-minded folks on his side of the aisle. It is really important that we not overreach, that we not do this wrong. We have not gone through the ordinary process for developing tax legislation. Tax legislation is notoriously complicated and difficult to get exactly right and prone to unintended consequences. Normally, we have hearings in the Finance Committee. We get input from all kinds of experts. We make drafts. We circuit the drafts. It is a long process to make sure you get it right. This has gone through none of that, zero. What we are trying to do is say let's restrict this to where it belongs, let's clean this up the best we can. You know what? This space is changing. A year from now, there will be new innovations we haven't thought of, that probably nobody has thought of, and we will probably have to go back and revisit this. What we wouldn't want to do--shouldn't want to do--is have an overly broad mandate, a reporting requirement on people who can't possibly comply with it because they don't have the information. We wouldn't want to impose that and have a stifling impact on the development of a really, really exciting and potentially powerful new technology. That is what this is about. As I said earlier, I am going to insist on having a vote on this. I don't know why we wouldn't win by a big margin since, after all, we are just ensuring that we get the intent of this legislation rather than a miscarriage of it. As the Senator from Oregon pointed out, Senator Portman from Ohio, who has worked so long and so hard on this infrastructure bill, supports us getting a vote on this. He supports the amendment that we have drafted. I am hopeful that this is going to pass. I will be insistent that we get our vote. That is something we ought to do. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. TOOMEY

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

Mr. TOOMEY. Madam President, I rise in opposition to the Duckworth amendment, 2140, and I want to talk about that briefly. First of all, I think there is probably very broad support in this Chamber, and I certainly support the idea that local transit agencies meet ADA standards wherever it is possible to do so. Of course, transit agencies got a truly massive, staggering amount of money over about a 12-month period ending in March--so much so that, cumulatively, they are sitting on something very close to $40 billion that they just weren't even able to spend. But despite all that, we dramatically increased the annual run rate of the Federal Government's contribution to transit agencies; and then on top of that, the bipartisan negotiators agreed to a big, one-time plus-up above and beyond all the money that was sent to these transit agencies over the last year. In the course of these discussions, included for transit agencies was a nearly $2 billion funding request to the Senator from Illinois--the junior Senator from Illinois--specifically for ADA upgrades at big city transit systems. To my knowledge, it is the first time that the Federal Government has ever specifically appropriated substantial sums of money--nearly $2 billion this time--for the purpose of improving, upgrading big city transit systems, in part, perhaps, because, of course, transit systems have their own sources of money, their own States that can provide them. But, anyway, that was--this agreement was struck. Now, in the course of working out the terms and the details and negotiating over the language which would accompany this unprecedented funding for ADA upgrades, you know, there were negotiations. That is the nature of this process. So we asked for certain changes in the language that was initially proposed. Some of those requests were rejected, some were adopted, and that is how we got to a deal. And one of the changes that was adopted was an agreement that this amendment--this planning mandate requirement that is contemplated in the amendment from the Senator from Illinois, that plan would be dropped. If we were to go ahead and now adopt this amendment, it would completely violate the deal that was struck. Now, let me just briefly explain why we requested that that language be dropped. The amendment stipulates, among other things, that as a condition of receiving this nearly $2 billion that this agreement offers to transit agencies for this specific purpose--as a condition, it said a transit agency must commit to a new Federal race, age, and income equity mandate. This is a quote: . . . equity of service to all riders . . . taking into account historical and current service gaps . . . This is politically correct virtue signaling. This is people claiming that transit agencies are somehow racist, and that we have got to--I don't know--we have got to make sure that escalators are not racist. It doesn't take a very fertile imagination to think about how this language could be used to impose a host of new requirements on agencies. You could have bureaucracies here micromanaging who knows what--route planning, fair pricing, frequency of service--out of some presumed systemic racism in transit agencies. If we adopted this, then decisions by transit agencies that should be guided by cost and ridership issues would end up being influenced by wokeism. Now, I think the people who run transit agencies are good and decent people who care about their communities. They are trying to do the best they can. They have now got staggering amounts of money with which to do it, but they don't need to be second-guessed by social engineers who are insisting that their agency is rife with racism. So I urge a ``no'' vote, and I want to stress that the ``no'' vote on this amendment doesn't reduce spending for ADA compliance by a dime. That is not what this is about. This is about avoiding a ``woke'' planning mandate.

Mr. TOOMEY. May I be recognized for 2 minutes in opposition?

Mr. TOOMEY. One minute. Well, listen, I just want to stress to my colleagues here that defeating this amendment does not prevent one dime from going to transit agencies for the purpose of upgrading their stations to comply with the ADA. All it does is prevent a mandate for a ``woke'' planning provision that was dropped in the negotiations on this bill, so I urge a ``no'' vote.