Q Well, I want to give you a chance to respond to what Speaker Pelosi is saying, because it really seems like the -- at least the sort of finger-pointing is ratcheting up, accusing Republicans, and it sounded like the White House, of mismanagement of financial-market regulation. It really seems as though there's a accusation that the White House is to blame in some way, or the Bush administration policy is to blame in some way. Your response?
MS. PERINO: Well, unfortunately -- unfortunately, I don't think that the reaction of finger-pointing from Democrats to the White House is anything new.
I would ask you to go back and look and ask Speaker Pelosi or any of the other Democrats who are pointing fingers, what specific regulation did they want that we blocked? What specific regulation did we eliminate? In fact, it was the White House that worked to try to get them to act on GSE reform as early as 2003. Unfortunately, they did not act on that until most recently when there was a crisis and we got the authorities that we needed in August of 2007. What we were looking for in that GSE reform was a strong regulator. That's what we wanted. It was more regulation, more transparency, and a stronger independent regulator who could actually look at the books of the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and tell us exactly what was going on. In addition to that, we wanted FHA modernization so that more low-income people could have their mortgages backed by the FHA. They didn't move on that until there was a crisis at hand. We wanted rules -- they're called RESPA rules, I can't remember what it stands for, it's Real Estate Settlement Act -- but it would help people understand what they're getting into when they have a loan. Unfortunately they didn't act on that. Hank Paulson's regulatory blueprint that he laid out early last spring fell on deaf ears to the Democratic members of Congress. So while we wish they'd have acted, that's behind us. There are times in our country when we can set politics aside and come together and work on a problem together in a bipartisan way. We would hope that that would happen. Unfortunately, this week Speaker Pelosi declined to come to a bipartisan meeting that Hank Paulson held up on Capitol Hill with several members of both the House and the Senate from both sides of the aisle, and she declined to show up.
seen at 09:00, 18 September
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