“For at least the last three months, our country has been put through a financial wringer because, for at least the last three years, irresponsible people have been doing irresponsible things.

The fallout has Washington throwing around numbers like $700 billion.  Yet there is more than one financial crisis facing our country.  There are many more contributing factors to the state of our financial markets that $700 billion cannot solve.  This money won’t buy us transparency, it won’t buy accountability from people who made bad loans or sold bad securities, it won’t secure our country against foreign creditors who are buying even more American debt this week, and it won’t call irresponsible executives on the carpet for their misdeeds.  Neither will it solve the energy crisis – 500 billion American dollars shipped overseas to buy resources we should recover or replace at home.

Yet Speaker Nancy Pelosi is set to adjourn the Congress for the next five weeks – at least – until the election.

Like no other event since September 11, 2001, this is a time for public servants to stay at their posts, for Congress to stay in session, and for the American people to get some explanation about the enormous financial burden and tremendous risk we have been asked to shoulder.

This is a time for work.

The work product of this Congress is maddening and saddening.  In the past two weeks Speaker Pelosi’s Congress has produced a bad energy bill which, instead of allowing U.S. oil and natural gas to come to market from off-limits places like the Mountain West and the Outer Continental Shelf locks those resources away with more prohibitions and environmental hoops.  And it hasn’t called one shady Wall Street character to account for the mess in the markets.

 
In the rush to buy bad assets with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, the deliberations took place behind closed doors and a bill was produced in less than a week.  It is, in many respects, an unqualified bailout of irresponsible people who obscured reckless transactions – not with their own money – but with the investments of teachers with pensions, workers with 401Ks, and retirees with money market accounts.  No one who is to blame for this has said he or she is sorry.  None of them have been punished.  And most of them will draw one more big bonus check as they leave their jobs wreaking havoc on the American financial sector.

In the entire time I have served our district in the U.S. House of Representatives, we have never recessed the Congress so far in advance of a November election.  With so many loose ends, so much work undone, and so little justice dispensed, now is not the time to set a record.

This is hardly our money or our markets or our energy.  All of these matters will fall to the next generation and the one after that.  A few more days in session might not make a very big dent in the size of the debt we are passing down to them, but it sure would have a sizable impact on the quality of the financial and energy futures we are leaving for them. 

Taxpayers, present and future, deserve more than a rescue for the national financial system, they also deserve accountability and oversight tied to the huge amount of money in this bailout.  Congress has a real responsibility to do a complete job.  I’ve always believed in getting a bang for the buck – but for $700 billion, we aren’t getting a very big bang at all.”