Consumers First Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARCIA of Illinois. Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of the Consumers First Act and thank Chairwoman Waters and Speaker Pelosi for their leadership.

I remember the housing market collapse in 2009 very clearly. I remember the foreclosure signs going up all over Chicago and in my own neighborhood of Little Village, a working-class community. Families lost homes. They skipped meals. They took second and third jobs just to scrape by. Too many families never recovered.

President Obama and the Democratic majority swore to never allow a Great Recession to happen again. Never again would we allow Wall Street to go unchecked and allow consumers to be ripped off wholesale by the big banks.

We passed sweeping legislation, Dodd-Frank, and we created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB. In short, CFPB was going to be the consumer watchdog for everyday hardworking Americans.

Since Trump's election, every day has been an assault against these protections: payday lending protections, reversed; student loan protections, reversed; predatory auto and home loan protections, reversed. Instead of protecting consumers, Trump and Mick Mulvaney have made their priorities clear: banks over people, business over the consumer.

Systematically, Mulvaney and Trump have been busy dismantling the CFPB, the same agency that recently helped a man in New York who had lost $1,200 wrongly taken from his account. He was able to recover it thanks to the CFPB. That man is one of thousands that have been helped by the agency. That is the power of government when it is empowered to fight for every American.

Meanwhile, Mulvaney has called the CFPB's public complaint database nothing but a ``yelp for financial services.''

At a time when this administration is working at the behest of Wall Street, the 1 percent, and the big banks, this Democratic majority is moving forward to protect consumers.

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