Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 3714 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and that any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Just by a process of elimination, unless one of the two absent Senators was the one who had the hold, whoever was holding Judge Chin actually ended up voting for him after months and months of having delayed the nomination.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. That is the right of the Senator to do, so long as they do it publicly.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. First of all, I thank the Senator for her continuing efforts on this point. I had the privilege of joining her on the first day in moving some of these unanimous consents. She brought up 73, I think, in 1 day, to tee up all these names under the Senate rules that require that once a unanimous consent has been proposed, the identity of the Senator with the hold has to be divulged in 6 legislative days. As I understand it, the 6 legislative days run today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H. Con. Res. 264, just received from the House and now at the desk.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Con. Res. 62, submitted earlier today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 507, submitted earlier today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burris.) Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Let me thank Senator Sanders, who is a passionate and articulate consumer advocate, and Senator Merkley of Oregon, who has come to the Senate in the interests of his native Oregonians, trying to make sure they are well served. He has been remarkable at that. I apologize to Senator Durbin. I know he wanted to come and join us as well, but the timing changed and he was unable to attend. I thank him for his cosponsorship of this amendment. I also thank distinguished chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Chairman Levin, for cosponsoring it. I am truly honored by their support. The distinguished Senator from Illinois, Senator Burris, tells me he wishes to cosponsor as well. So I am grateful to him and I thank him. He is a former banker so he understands these issues very well, and he understands the effect of backing in the local community. I am very gratified by his support. The last thing I want to say before I close on this subject is that the system by which credit card companies get consumers into these high-interest rate predicaments is no accident. It is a system and it has been carefully designed by the credit card companies, beginning with the way they write the agreement. When credit cards began, the credit card agreement was two or three pages long. I am looking at an array of young pages here in front of me. They are pretty soon going to be getting credit cards of their own. They won't know what it was like when I got my first credit card. They are going to get a first credit card contract that has 20 pages of fine print. And hidden in the fine print have been amazing tricks and traps. One of my personal favorites, which we thankfully ended under the leadership of Chairman Dodd earlier, was that the credit card companies would declare the day was over at 10 in the morning and then they would open the mail at 11. So if you got your payment in on the day it was due, they didn't open the mail until they declared the day was over. The day wasn't over. The Sun was still up, morning was not even over, but they had declared in the fine print of the contract that they could end the payment day at 10 in the morning and then open the mail later that day so your check was, guess what, late, and that put you into a late payment category so they could jack your interest rate. As Senator Sanders' constituent and so many folks in Rhode Island have experienced, 1 day you are at 12.9 percent and the next day you are at 30 percent and you don't know what hit you. And once they have you there, it is very hard to unwind. It is very hard to pay it off and get out. Many consumers cannot pay off their credit card all at once so now they are trapped, and they are trapped in what Prof. Ronald Mann of Columbia University has called ``the sweat box.'' He has looked at how the credit card companies manipulate their consumers, and what they do is they set up all these tricks and traps and suddenly you build up a nice balance and it is at a reasonable interest rate but you fall into one of the traps. They catch you with one of the tricks. And bang, they have you. You are now at a 30-percent interest rate, you don't have the resources to pay it off all at once, and the charges begin to pile up--the fees, the exorbitant interest-- and pretty soon they have got you completely over a barrel. It is systematized. It is done to extract the maximum amount of money and profit from consumers who are not aware of how sophisticated the machinery is that is out there trying to gouge them. This is not just a question of exorbitant interest rates; it is also a question of pushing back against credit card companies that have developed a system, the sweat box system, that needs to be put to an end. And State regulation can help do it. Because if the State is not being paid off with tax revenues to look away from what the bank is doing, and if most of the damage is not being done in other States whose complaints are not as relevant in the home State, in the domicile State, then they get away with it. They will not get away with it once federalism, States rights, and the American tradition of State protection of its citizens are restored and this inadvertent loophole is closed. My amendment would do that. I hope colleagues who are listening to this will think about supporting the amendment. As I said, I think it ought to have bipartisan appeal and will certainly be good for people in our country who are at the business end of the credit card industry's machine. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I thank Senator Sanders and both my colleagues very much for their cosponsorship of this amendment and their advocacy of it. I would hope we could find support for this from the other side of the aisle. I do not see this as an exclusively Democratic issue. If you look at the arguments that have been made by all of us on the floor just now for it--Senator Sanders spoke eloquently about the Judeo-Christian tradition that informs so much of our civilization and its horror of exaggerated exorbitant interest rates--for those of our colleagues who are attuned to those traditions, who take their religious principles seriously, they only have to harken back to sources of our Judeo- Christian tradition to find these kinds of limits are good and historic. For those of us who are constitutional scholars and historians and are familiar with the doctrine of federalism and the role of the States in protecting their local citizens, the notion of States rights is one that has frankly been championed by colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Here is an opportunity to express their fealty to that doctrine and to that principle of States rights. To those who think that 202 years of successful tradition of local regulation of interest rates has value, we can document that this is a recent anomaly. This is a peculiarity we are correcting. The great sweep of American history, over more than two centuries, is that the States protected their citizens properly and well. Anyone who cares for consumers in their States, local consumers up against huge credit card companies that keep you waiting on the phone for hours when you have to try to file a complaint, whose offices are in another State or in another country, sticking up for your local citizens is something I think we should all be prepared to agree to. And finally, for those of us who have local banks, community banks, Main Street banks that are domiciled in our home States, why should they suffer the disadvantage of having to compete against these huge rapacious credit card companies and Wall Street banks and be subject to their State's law but have this loophole allow the monster banks, the gigantic banks to take advantage of consumers in this way? I think you can look at this amendment from a whole variety of perspectives and the principles that it stands on are ones that many of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have supported and championed over the years.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements relating to the measure be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. Con. Res. 61 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand adjourned under the previous order.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m., on Friday, April 30; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate resume consideration of S. 3217, the Wall Street reform legislation.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, today I wish to honor a Rhode Islander who has devoted his life to improving the lot of others. For decades now, the name Henry Shelton has rung out as a clarion for social justice and equality in our Ocean State. He is and has always been a voice for the little guy--the homeless veteran, the hungry child, or the underpaid laborer. Most folks in Rhode Island know Henry as the founder and coordinator of the George Wiley Center, a nonprofit antipoverty organization based in Pawtucket. But before that, Henry was a Catholic priest for 16 years, during which he began organizing needy Rhode Islanders in Providence to elect leaders responsive to their needs. In 1973 he left the church to marry his beloved Carol, a former nun who shared his passion for advocacy. Ever since then, Henry has been ``raising hell,'' as he might say, and fighting for Rhode Island's overlooked and underpaid. In 1974 he started the Coalition for Consumer Justice and in 1981 founded the George Wiley Center. Over the years Henry has organized sit-ins, battled budget cuts, fasted to get clothes for children on welfare, advocated to keep electricity rates down for low income residents, and even been arrested for disorderly conduct--a fact which may amuse those who know Henry as a peaceful and gentle man. And last year, Henry fought through his toughest battle yet. Just before the New Year, Henry suffered a serious stroke which landed him in the hospital. Anyone with a friend or family member who has experienced a stroke knows that the recovery is often a slow and painful process, but none of this stopped Henry. In fact, the headline in the Providence Journal following his hospitalization read: ``Advocate for the poor, Henry Shelton, suffers stroke--but continue work from hospital.'' The paper went on to report that Henry organized a State house rally from his hospital bed. This is the Henry I know, and who we in Rhode Island have known and loved for many years. This Monday in Rhode Island, the Fund for Community Progress will present Henry with its Profile in Courage Award, which the organization describes as a ``distinctive honor for those who have dedicated their lives to creating positive change in the community.'' Henry Shelton has generated enough positive change in his life to satisfy that requirement many times over. And so today, Mr. President, I would like to thank Henry Shelton for a lifetime of selflessness and courage, and for always being a voice for those who needed one most.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, April 28; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and there be a period of morning business for 90 minutes, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each, with the time controlled between the two leaders or their designees, with the Republicans controlling the first 30 minutes and the majority controlling the next 30 minutes; that following morning business, the Senate resume consideration of the motion to proceed to S. 3217, the Wall Street reform legislation, as provided for under the previous order.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 501, submitted earlier today.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here because for the second day in a row the Republican minority has once again sided with the Wall Street bankers and taken their side in the battle the American people want us to have to clean up Wall Street and see to it that the kind of economic damage that reckless gambling by Wall Street created across our whole economy never happens again. We want to bring sensible, firm oversight to these Wall Street banks, and we want to create an independent consumer financial protection agency so that there is an institution out there that is looking out for the little guy, the person who can't hire a lobbyist or a lawyer and who has to take it or leave it when the bank comes calling. The history of what brought us here is instructive. It says a lot about the motivation of what is going on on the Republican side. We began with the most colossal bank failure and economic meltdown since the Great Depression. This body had to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up the financial sector and save it from complete and utter collapse from a global financial meltdown. That is how dangerous the way Wall Street was playing was. It took us right to the brink of global financial meltdown and required unprecedented--and unpopular--actions by Congress to keep that from happening. You would think the lesson everybody would take from that experience is that Wall Street needs to change, that there needs to be regulatory reform. This cannot be allowed to happen to American families again because wild speculators on Wall Street are playing unregulated games with other people's money. But from then until now, we have seen no Republican bill. Chairman Dodd laid down his first bill on November 19, 2009, and the Republicans didn't answer with an alternative of their own. There was no basis from which to negotiate back and forth. They just criticized his bill, and that was that. Negotiations continued--persistent negotiations--to try to get some Republicans to support Wall Street regulatory reform, and they led nowhere. Were Senators negotiating in good faith but being reeled in at the end by the leadership? Was it just a way to waste time with false negotiations to keep us from getting to this business? I don't know; I am not a mind reader. But what I do know is that there was no Republican alternative. Eventually, Chairman Dodd said: OK, we are going to hearing. We have our bill. Bring your amendments. Let's have a public debate in the Banking Committee about how we regulate Wall Street. On March 23, Chairman Dodd convened that markup. I know our committee members came expecting a long haul. They were expecting late nights and many days. They were expecting the kind of effort we saw when we did the health care reform bill, and I had the pleasure to serve on the HELP Committee with Chairman Dodd. Day after day, week after week, hundreds of hours of hearings we went through amendment after amendment after amendment. We accepted 160, I think, Republican amendments in that process. We still didn't get their support, but at least there was a public discussion. But when the Banking Committee took up this bill, with that same expectation that there would be long, arduous hours of hearings, argument, public debate, and amendment, what did they get? The ranking member said: We have no amendments. We don't care to discuss this. Call up the vote on the bill. We don't want to do anything in the public light of day. Vote the bill out. So the chairman had no choice but to do that. He had no choice but to vote the bill out with no amendments. So here we are. We have gone from the worst financial disaster the country has seen since the Great Depression until this point, and the Republicans have no bill, no reform to offer. When it comes to their first opportunity, when their hand is forced in the committee to bring in amendments, they have no amendments, nothing to say. Now we try to move to the bill, and here we are--stuck. We are not here voting on the bill, we are here trying to get their clearance to bring up this bill to discuss it and go through the Senate process of debate and amendment and they are objecting to that. So what is the common theme of a party that has no bill, that offers no amendments, and that wants no floor debate? The common theme of those things is wanting to cut deals in the dark, wanting to have their deals not see the light of day until they are already buried in a bill. Some of them would probably even turn around and object to some of the things they argued to get in. We should be prepared to do the public's business in the light of day. In fact, after the most public process we have ever seen on health care, we took criticism from the other side for a couple occasional moments when people got together and cut a deal. But those were the exceptions in a hugely public process, ranging across several committees that took weeks and months, in which everybody knew where we were going, what we were doing, and what our priorities were to help the American people. This is the exact opposite. They do not want to do anything in the light of day. They do not have a bill where they are prepared to show the American people what their ideas are. When you say to them: OK. Our idea is, how would you change those, they have nothing to say. They do not want to debate, discuss or amend. When we call them to the floor to say: OK. Here we go, let's have this discussion for the American people, they say: Nope, we don't want to have a discussion, not until we have cut our deals, not until we have gone into backrooms and cut our deals, not until we have delivered for Wall Street in backroom deals we wouldn't bring to this floor because we know what they would look like in the bright light of day. That is where we are. Frankly, it is unfortunate and it is a shame for the American people because every day we continue with this is another victory for the Wall Street mischief. Every day we are delayed is another day that the champagne corks are flying out the window of the investment banks on Wall Street as they celebrate the fact that more highly leveraged gambles can go through because we haven't regulated them, more mortgage brokers can go out and sell junk mortgages to folks and take advantage of them with conditions that are buried deep in the fine print that they do not see. More people can get stuck in credit card tricks and traps that are unregulated by an independent consumer financial protection agency to stand up for them. Of course, the CEOs continue to get huge bonuses without the kind of governance this bill would put over executive compensation. Why do they do it? Well, the relationship between the other party and Wall Street is pretty well known. It has been publicly reported that leaders of the other party went running up to Wall Street not too long ago to have their favorite closed-door, private meetings in the shadows, no publicity, no press. They would not discuss what took place in those meetings, but you know they went up there to offer their services to Wall Street to help defeat this legislation. They just don't want to talk about it. So that has been pretty well established, and it runs afoul of the desires of the American people. Two-thirds of Americans want us to take action. As those of us who have spent time in public life know, usually people care about issues that relate to them very immediately. They care about pocketbook issues. They care about their family, the roof over their head, their paycheck. For a lot of folks in America, Wall Street is a long way off, and it is almost a kind of hypothetical concern for a lot of Americans. But they have it, just as strongly as they care about the economy right now. Because they know Wall Street has been taking advantage of America for too long; that the risks of it for ordinary families, when it gets out of control, are too great; and that Wall Street needs to be reined in. They know that, and that is why they want us to act. That is why it is a shame that the minority party is refusing to allow us to even go to the bill and have a public debate in the light of this Chamber, in the light of day, about our ideas. We have told the American people what our ideas are. They are in the bill. Here are our ideas: Our ideas are a strong Consumer Financial Products Safety Commission--an independent consumer financial products protection agency to look out after the little guy. How often have you looked at a credit card application and seen how many pages of small print are in it? Look at a mortgage. Look at any kind of commercial credit. In all that small print, the lawyers and the lobbyists have done their work. Too often, it is the person who signs on the bottom line who ends up discovering they signed up for a raw deal. Nobody is looking out for them. Nobody is putting at the top of the contract: Green light. This is fair. We have taken a look at it. Safe, good to go, Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval--or yellow light: Careful. You might want to truly know what you are doing before you sign up for this--or red light: Bad deal. Dangerous for consumers. Look out. Simple, helpful information for American consumers to get, an independent commission to help advise consumers in those ways and have some regulatory authority over the people who put those products together, that is what we want in this bill. It is not fancy. It is not tricky. It is just a way to unwind the ``gotcha'' contracts that too many Americans have had to put up with for too long because Wall Street and the bankers have been writing those contracts and there hasn't been discipline over them. So that is one of the ideas we are out there with. If they have a better idea, where is it? I don't want to deal that away in the dark. Come to the floor and tell us in the bright light of day what better idea you have than a consumer financial protection agency that is independent and out there to help the ordinary folks. We would also consolidate bank regulators so that a big Wall Street bank can't shop around and decide which regulator it wants to have regulated. You don't get to choose your ref when you go to play a game, and you shouldn't get to choose your regulator when you go out into the field of commerce. It allows game playing and it is not right. We should strengthen regulation over all financial firms and no more allowing them to change their charter to avoid rules they do not like. That is not complicated. That is simple. It is clear. It is our position in the bright light of day. If they have a better one, where is it? I am not going to deal that one away in the dark. It wouldn't be right. There are provisions that would crack down on CEO compensation, to make sure shareholders have a real say in executive pay and to make sure, in particular, that the compensation committees of the board that sets executive pay aren't just the pals and the golfing buddies of the people whose multimillion-dollar pay and bonuses they are approving; to make sure it is independent directors who are on the compensation committee and making those decisions. That is our position. It is clear. It is out there in the bright light of day. It makes sense. If they have a better idea, bring it. We are happy to listen to it. But this room is empty of Republicans right now. There are no ideas, there are no alternatives. All they want to do is deal this stuff away in the dark and it is wrong. They will, however, attack it. They will say that a provision in this bill that provides for the banking industry to fund an orderly failure and wipeout of an existing bank so the government doesn't have to come in and bail it out, because there is no provision for an orderly failure, is actually taxpayer-funded bailout legislation. I mean, they couldn't be more wrong. The argument doesn't even make sense. For starters, there is no bailout. The bank isn't bailed out. It is put out of its misery, but it is put out of its misery and sold off in an organized way. So as far as a taxpayer-funded bailout, there is no bailout. As far as it being taxpayer funded, it is industry funded. There is no taxpayer money in the deal at all. We make the industry pay to basically have a funeral plan for their colleague banks that fail so the taxpayer doesn't have to be there. They turn that completely inside out, and they do so why? Not because it is true--we know that--but because they have a pollster who has taken a poll and who has discovered that, guess what, the American public doesn't like bailouts and doesn't like bailout bills. So, aha, the geniuses discover they are going to call this a bailout bill because that makes it seem unpopular. It doesn't matter that it is not true. A little confusion never hurts when you don't have a position of your own that you are willing to bring out in the light of day. But that is what they have to say about that provision. That is actually a provision that I think makes a lot of sense. There has to be a way to have an orderly failure of a bank that goes insolvent so the taxpayer doesn't have to come in and prop it up because people worry, if one goes, is there a run on the bank? What does this mean for the global banking system? You have to have a way for banks to fail, for managers to be fired, for shareholders to lose their money, for all the consequences for failure in a real market system to happen but in an orderly way. That is what the bill does. So you can go through this bill idea by idea, and I am willing to stand by the Democratic ideas. I actually have some amendments, if we could get to this bill, that I would like to see called up because I think we could improve it. I would love to see us reverse a decision called the Marquette decision--a decision by the Supreme Court that said the rules for a bank are determined by the State where the bank has its headquarters--where it is domiciled, and if there is a conflict between a State law that protects the consumer and the State law for where the bank is, it is the home of the bank that wins. Well, now, how did that all work out? What happened is the banks figured out the States that have the worst consumer protection laws in the country and they moved there. Not for nothing does your credit card usually come from one of just two or three States. The result of that is that the power of the States of the United States of America, the sovereign power of the States of the United States of America they have had since before the Revolution to protect consumers from exorbitant interest rates, from rates that were called usury because they were too high, illegally high, was taken away from them. Nobody in Congress made that decision. It slipped through in the back of the Supreme Court decision all those years ago and the industry saw their opportunity and they adapted. If you want to know why you are paying a 30-percent interest rate on your credit card when your home State has an interest rate cap of 18 percent, it is because of that decision. I am for putting that choice back in the hands of the States to protect their own consumers from these global, international, multinational banks. Global, international, multinational banks, huge Wall Street banks could not give a hoot about Rhode Island. But if they have to obey Rhode Island law, that is another question--Rhode Island law or Colorado law or California law or Vermont law; you name it. The States should be able to protect their consumers the way they always had until this decision--it is part of American history--from exorbitant and cruel interest rates. So I would like to see that amendment. But the bill as it is, is something we can be proud of. It is a shame that here we are with two votes now back to back, with the Republicans refusing to allow us to even enter that debate. I have wracked my brain to try to think of a way to explain why they are doing this. There are not any good reasons. One is to prevent progress on anything, anything and everything--the politics of obstruction. If it has President Obama's name on it, if it would reflect well on him no matter how important it is to the American people, forget it. Job No. 1 is to deny any victories, any support to Obama irrespective of the merits. We have seen plenty of evidence of that and maybe that is the reason. Reason No. 2, they have interests, special interests they want to protect--Wall Street interests, banking interests, people who do not want to see an independent consumer financial protection agency looking over consumer contracts and sticking up for the little guy. That could be another reason. That would explain why they do not want to put their positions on the record anywhere. That is why they will not write a reform bill. That is why they will not put forward a reform amendment in the committee. That is why they will not come to the floor and allow us to debate this bill. They know their arguments are running against the public interest, the concerns of the American people and the needs of our country, and are just to protect Wall Street. They don't want that in public so they are willing to have this fight. They are willing to blockade even going to this bill, just for the purpose of protecting the darkness in which they want to cut deals to protect Wall Street and the special interests behind them. That has to stop. Like many of my colleagues I am prepared to stay here, to keep banging away at this, to come and vote over and over again, to spend days and nights on this issue until we get the job done. I take some comfort from some of the stories of history, one of which is the Biblical story of Jericho. When Joshua and the Israelites surrounded Jericho, they didn't go and negotiate and ask them would you please open the door, we will give you what you want. No, they went around the city, time after time--seven times they went around the city of Jericho, blowing their horns, blowing the ram's horn. On the seventh day, on the seventh tour around Jericho, when they blew their horns, Joshua said to the Israelites: Let out a great shout. And they let out their great shout and the ram's horns blared and the walls fell flat. Maybe it will take seven times around this bill before the walls of obstruction the Republicans have put up to protect the dark deals they want to do for their special interests fall. Maybe it will take seven times. Maybe it will take 17 times. Maybe it will take 27 times. But when you look at the damage that Wall Street caused to this country with its speculative, dangerous practices, with its unregulated, uninhibited excesses, this is important. This is one we need to win for the American people. This is one we need to win for the safety of our economy going forward. This is one we need for every family that lost their job because the financial catastrophe washed through the business they worked for. They have never been to Wall Street, they have no interest in the financial industry, but they are as out of work as anybody else because of what splashed and sloshed across this country from what happened on Wall Street. Those are people we cannot forget. Those are people we cannot let down. Rhode Island still has the third highest unemployment in the country. We are in our 27th month of severe recession. It has been compounded by historic flooding that has 2,000 Rhode Islanders still out of their homes. The flooding sure isn't Wall Street's fault but it compounds the harm that Wall Street inflicted on the entire economy, and it focused so intensely in my home State of Rhode Island. As far as I am concerned, we are here, we are here to stay, we are going to get this done, and we cannot be discouraged by the Republican obstruction. I see the majority leader on the floor. Would it be convenient to yield to him?

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