Safeguarding Consumer Financial Protection Reforms

WASHINGTON--Today, U.S. Representative Mike Quigley (IL-05) urged Congress to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the important financial reforms that will protect Americans from another financial crisis.

Below is a video and transcript of the speech. 

How quickly do some forget? When Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we did so on behalf of every constituent unfairly defrauded during the financial crisis.

As a Cook County Commissioner in 2007, I remember the financial crisis and the damage it did to Chicago’s communities. I remember when your credit card rate was about how well you could read fine print, not how regularly you paid your bill. I remember when auto financing could be based on a whim, not on your credit history. And when home buyers were pushed into loans no one could ever expect them to repay. I remember when it was open season on our veterans, when a whole industry was made out of defrauding our returning sons and daughters.

But I also remember how many of my colleagues characterized the creation of the CFPB, calling it a bureaucratic behemoth that would devastate credit markets and make lending impossible. Yet here we are today, with a growing economy and a vibrant credit market. Only now we do it with fair practices, protecting American consumers and treating them with dignity.

So I reject this attempt today to undermine the CFPB and the progress we’ve made. We simply can’t afford to return to the free-for-all that existed pre-crisis. H.R. 3193 is either a bad case of congressional amnesia or an attack on the most important financial reform of a generation. Either way, it is ill-sighted, and I urge my colleagues to defeat this effort.