Mr. REED. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his leadership on this issue, and I thank my colleagues who are going to join us later.

I am joining them in urging all of our colleagues in the Senate not to roll back the protections that are in place due to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

Let me remind everyone where we have come from. When we passed the Wall Street reform act, the Dodd-Frank act, we were in the most painful financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Dow Jones dropped from roughly 13,700 points in July of 2007 to 7,235 points by March of 2009, about a 47 percent drop in wealth as indicated by the stock market. It was a huge, huge hit. The line at that time was: What is happening to your 401(k) plan?

Well, we have come back, and one of the reasons we have come back is because Dodd-Frank has now provided safer rules of the road for financial institutions.

Back then and going forward, we lost 8.6 million jobs from January of 2008 until January of 2010. There were 8 million jobs lost primarily because Wall Street lost its way, frankly. The unemployment rate doubled from 5 percent in January of 2008 to 10 percent in October of 2009. In that period of time, roughly from July 2007 to November of 2014, nearly 7.5 million families lost their homes.

These are sobering numbers. Behind each of these numbers is an individual or family--our constituents, who suffered real and serious damages. Again, this was traceable almost directly back to excesses on Wall Street, which we consciously tried to correct in the Dodd-Frank act, and it has provided a solid foundation for economic recovery. Slow as it has been, we are coming back.

What happened was that these families lost their retirements--wiped out. It was not only the financial loss but the sheer psychological trauma of being either retired or on the edge of retirement and suddenly it was all gone. It has left a lasting impression.

People have lost jobs, as I have indicated. It was a huge loss of jobs. Some have never gotten back into the market or gotten a job at the level they had before.

Then, of course, there were the foreclosures, thousands and thousands of Americans losing their homes. Without their homes, some of our constituents lost their whole sense of belonging to the community and their ability to find a new job because they were just battling a day at a time for shelter and for subsistence. These were real issues, and we seem to have forgotten all of that. We seem to have forgotten that Wall Street--without sound regulations, strong regulation--will find its way off the path and into this type of difficulty.

We all know people who suffered these losses, and we all are committed that they won't suffer them again. But that commitment requires us to follow through on the Dodd-Frank act, the Wall Street reform act.

In that legislation, I worked very closely with Senator Warren to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It is just one of the examples of the efforts in that bill that actually protected our constituents, not theoretically but practically. They have been protected from tricky people who were giving them mortgages they couldn't afford, engaging in illegal servicing and foreclosure practices in the mortgage industry, steering consumers into excessive loans they couldn't afford--and the person doing the steering knew they couldn't afford them--but those tricky people took the money and literally ran, and we have tried to stop them.

Because of the efforts of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, $11.2 billion in relief has been given to families throughout this country; $11 billion has been given to individuals and families all across this country. This is an example not of theoretical legalistic procedures but of practical help for people. That is the direct result of Dodd-Frank, and some of the proposals that we are hearing about would undo that.

In the process of creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I am particularly proud of working with colleagues to create the Office of Servicemember Affairs within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to serve as a watchdog for our military personnel. Under the leadership of Holly Petraeus, it has done a remarkable job. More than $90 million has been returned to service members and their families from unscrupulous companies that preyed upon our military families deliberately--understanding the vulnerability of families that are in transit because of deployments and other things. Another example, the Military Lending Act, which has capped annual interest rates for military personnel, has been enforced through the efforts of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This has not only helped these families, but it has helped this Nation. It has helped our military readiness. I can tell you that basically a long time ago, I had the privilege of commanding soldiers, paratroopers in the 82nd, and it is hard to be a good soldier when you worry about whether your family is going to be able to make it through the week or the month to get your next paycheck. This is real help, and it is the result of Dodd-Frank. No, many things are the result of Dodd-Frank.

So why do we want to roll back these reforms? You ask people, and they will say: Well, it is burdensome, and they are hurting these financial institutions; you know, it is just so hard to operate a financial institution today.

Then you take a look at the stock performance of these institutions, the American global systemically important banks and even our regional banks. These institutions have seen their stock prices increase from July 2010 at least by 31 percent and in some cases as high as 114 percent. That is the market saying to these institutions and to all of us that they are in good shape. They are in great shape. They are not being burdened by financial regulations. They are not being overwhelmed. They are profit centers. They are doing great. Name other companies that have increased their value so much. One reason is because everyone is confident there is a stable, sound, rigorous regulatory structure that is ensuring that banks will not go off the cliff as they did in 2007 and 2008 when their stock prices collapsed.

So if you look at that, if you look at the markets, they are not complaining about Dodd-Frank. The markets are looking to say: That is where the money should go. That is what you should invest in.

So if you look at that growth and then draw a contrast between what has happened to average American families--they haven't seen that kind of wage growth. I don't know many working families who have seen a 31 percent increase in their income or a 114 percent increase in their income, but we have to do better with respect to our working families.

One thing we have to do is make sure that we keep in place protections that were built into the Dodd-Frank act.

There are always ways you can improve legislation, and there are a myriad of technical corrections that could be done, but to disguise some of these proposals as technical corrections is not appropriate.

I think also, frankly, if we are going to be sensible, sound, and thoughtful about technical corrections, let's go ahead and do it the way it should be done, the way Dodd-Frank was done. I was on the banking committee. We had hearings. We had a markup. We had, in fact, several markups until we got it right. Then we brought it to the floor, we had a vigorous debate, and we amended the bill. Then we took that bill to conference, then we had it changed in conference, and then we sent it to the President for his signature.

So if we are going to do corrections to improve the Dodd-Frank bill, let's do it the way we did it originally, not finding a convenient vehicle--a highway bill, an appropriations bill, any other bill--and sticking them in as sort of ``take it or leave it''--you have to do this or you lose highway funding or you lose funding for our schools, for education, for national defense.

I would hope that we can move forward in regular order and make corrections where necessary, but certainly let's not use these waning days of this session to undermine the Dodd-Frank Act with some of the proposals I have heard.