Pelosi Statement on Passage of Bipartisan Economic Rescue Legislation

Contact:Brendan Daly/Nadeam Elshami, 202-226-7616

Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic leaders, and Chairman Barney Frank of the House Financial Services Committee held a news conference this afternoon following the passage of the bipartisan Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which passed by a vote of 263 to 171.

During the course of the news conference, Speaker Pelosi signed the legislation, which was then sent to the White House and signed into law by President Bush. Below are the Speaker’s opening remarks:

"Good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. As we observe the passage of the very serious piece of legislation, we must do so with an eye to the future. We were faced with a situation that had terrible ramifications for everyone on Main Street, but all the attention was on Wall Street. We wanted to turn that attention and that was our intention in the legislation.

"Under the leadership of our chairman, Barney Frank, as I called him on the floor, a maestro, we were able to make improvements, working in a bipartisan way, making improvements in the legislation, and then make more improvements in the legislation before it came back to the floor today.

"The eye now is to the future. To shine the bright light of accountability on what is happening in our financial markets so that it doesn’t happen again. That accountability will tell us how we got to this place and ferret out the abuses. That accountability will honor our trust to the American people.

"Mr. Frank will be holding hearings on where we go from here, because we are about the future. Mr. Waxman’s hearings will be instructed as to how we got here – that we know how to avoid this in the future. It will be about accountability, it will be about regulation, regulatory reform, which is essential. It will be about building an economy with a focus on the middle class, where many more Americans will participate in the economic security of our country.

"And the high flyers on Wall Street will no longer be able to jeopardize that personal economic security of Americans, again, because of the bright light of scrutiny and accountability and the attention given under regulatory reform.

"We are all believers in the free market – it’s part of our democracy. We know that the free markets create jobs, create capital, and create wealth – that’s very important. But recently, left unregulated and undisciplined and unsupervised, they create chaos. That was then; this is now. We’re about the future, and that is the direction we want to take our policy. We want to take our economy in a New Direction for the middle class.

"So many of our leadership was part of this legislation today. I don’t say that we celebrated, because I don’t think that. Frankly, we could have had a much better bill under different circumstances, but these are not the circumstances we were under.

"We were dealt a bad hand; we made the most of it. I think the American people will benefit from it. We decided, in the course of this week, that we needed to bring the bill up, that it was urgent that it pass and we had to depend on ourselves to get it passed.

"Fortunately, we had a strong bipartisan vote, but we knew we would be strong enough to pass the bill today, because of the work of Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn and Rahm Emanuel and our other members of the leadership. And now I am pleased to yield to the person who worked very hard on this with great leadership, Steny Hoyer."