Bill Foster Vows To ‘Fix’ Things If Dems Gain Back The House Majority: We Each ‘Have A List’

yesterday

During a town hall event on Tuesday, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) spoke about the future of the House of Representatives.

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Transcript

00:00I'm a constituent, a supporter from Lamont. I'm employed by the CFPB.

00:04The court has stopped us from being eliminated, but that is clearly what the administration wants to do.

00:10Can't Congress do something to stop them from destroying government, including the CFPB?

00:15All this money, all this weaponry, to Israel, to indiscriminately bomb my people.

00:21I've failed them. They slept with them.

00:24They slept with them.

00:27To go to other countries, they've become refugees.

00:32The CFPB, I actually, probably for the audience here, can explain what the CFPB stands for.

00:39It stands for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

00:43It's one of my proudest votes in Congress for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

00:52And the consumer protection part of that was, in large part, to form the CFPB.

00:58And what this is, you're all familiar with the FDA.

01:02So when you eat food, there is an agency that makes sure that this food is safe and that there are no poisons in it.

01:08And there had not been any agency who was responsible for making sure that we don't have toxic financial products

01:16that were so much at the heart of the financial collapse 15 years ago now,

01:21that people were given mortgages which everyone knew they could never repay them.

01:25And this sort of thing should not ever be allowed to happen again.

01:28And that's what the CFPB was put in place to prevent.

01:33They were given credit cards which just unbelievably rip off terms of the credit cards.

01:38And that was at least partly fixed by the CFPB.

01:42And the enforcement power, when bad actors appear, was put in the hands of the CFPB.

01:47And so then the question, I think, was how are you going to prevent Trump from destroying that?

01:54And so the issue on that is that, again, we made a mistake in assuming that there would be people of good faith

02:01running the operation from here on forward.

02:04And so when we said the CFPB director could specify the budget that they needed,

02:09the funds are drawn from the Federal Reserve Bank in the amount determined by the CFPB director.

02:15And so when Trump appoints a CFPB director that says, okay, fine, zero dollars,

02:20we didn't protect ourselves against that.

02:23And so there are so many places where we have just made an assumption of good faith that is not being followed through.

02:31Well, there is a long list of things that we have to repair when we get the majority back.

02:39That's right.

02:40Well, the acting in good faith, you know, I go through a long list.

02:45Another example.

02:48It's not the only one in here.

02:54So there are many examples of acting in bad faith and ways that we can fix it.

03:01You know, one simple example.

03:03Everyone is familiar with that ever since Richard Nixon,

03:06every presidential candidate had published 10 years of tax returns, just as one of the things he did.

03:11Again, we said, do we need a law?

03:13No, no one will ever run for president without publishing their tax returns.

03:16Okay?

03:17So now we need a law that says the moment you declare for presidency,

03:20the IRS publishes 10 years of your returns.

03:24And that's it.

03:25And that law will probably prevent Trump from doing that.

03:32Every member of Congress has a list of things that we have to fix when we get back the majority.

03:37All right.

03:38And that's, it's on our list.

Bill Foster Vows To ‘Fix’ Things If Dems Gain Back The House Majority: We Each ‘Have A List’

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