Consumers First Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairwoman for her leadership because today's bill is about restoring effective law enforcement for consumers and protecting them from predatory Wall Street practices.

Republicans want to shield Wall Street, granting it free rein to plunder. Instead of draining the swamp, this lawless President has drained the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of its strength. Public enforcement actions are down 75 percent. That is how they feel about law enforcement.

The President is refusing to protect our active-duty military from predatory lending; halting payments to consumers who have been wronged; eliminating the office that is designed to prevent discrimination in credit against Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans; and eliminating the office dedicated to addressing student loan abuses.

Enough is enough. Instead of handcuffing those who do wrong, this administration is handcuffing the agency designed to ensure law enforcement.

And while this President profited himself from scams like Trump University, it is time to restore important consumer protections: law enforcement to protect students, active military, and the retirement savings of our seniors.

In just five years, $12 billion was returned to over 30 million American citizens. Wells Fargo would never have been penalized a penny for its multimillion-dollar fraud without a cop on the beat.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Mulvaney have been about pulling that cop back so that there is no protection for those this agency was designed to serve. Let's approve this bill to protect Americans from financial piranhas who would strip their savings to the bone.

Mr. Chair, I salute the leadership of the chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, for standing up for Americans who have been abandoned by this administration. It is essential we do our work in Congress to say it is consumers who come first, not those who would prefer to take advantage of them.

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Mr. DOGGETT. Madam Chair, I rise only to commend the gentleman from Texas for his important work on this arbitration issue.

There has been a very effective movement to quash the rights of consumers. In the financial services area, people are told to deal with it.

Our colleague Hank Johnson has the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act as it relates to nursing homes and employment. Our colleague Katherine Clark has a bill to repeal these arbitration restrictions with reference to discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual harassment in the workplace. Each of these is very important.

Arbitration is arbitrary. It does not fairly resolve disputes. It is biased toward the financial institution, and toward the employer and others in other cases. Arbitration is a model that does not work well to solve most disputes of this type.

It has even been suggested, amazingly enough, to bring arbitration into the drug price debate now. I don't believe arbitration is a way to solve these problems, and it is certainly not a way to get us lower drug prices

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