crapo. senator crapo: -- [laughter] the clerk: mr. crapo. mr. graham. senator graham: no. the clerk: mr. toomey. senator toomey: no. the clerk: mr. johnson. senator johnson: no. the clerk: mr. corker. senator corker: no. the clerk: mr. perdue. senator perdue: no. the clerk: mr. gardner. senator gardner: no. the clerk: mr. kennedy. senator kennedy: no. the clerk: mr. boozman. senator boozman: no. the clerk: mr. strange. senator strange: no. mr. sanders. senator sanders: yes. the clerk: ms. murray. senator murry: aye. senator wyden: aye. senator stabenow: aye. the clerk: mr. whitehouse. senator whitehouse: aye. the clerk: mr. warner. senator warner: aye. the clerk: mr. merkley. senator merkley: aye. the clerk: mr. kaine. senator kaine: aye. senator king: aye. the clerk: mr. van hollen. senator van hollen: aye. the clerk: ms. harris. mr. chairman. senator enzi: no. the clerk: mr. chairman there are 12 nays and 11 yeas. senator enzi: the amendment is not agreed to. ext one is merkley number 2. for reasons i stated earlier i oppose the amendment. does anyone seek recognition in

what is needed with senator -- what is needed, what senator crapo and i have been supporting, with a great many of our colleagues in both parties and now 205 groups, timber companies, scientists, environmentalists, academics, people from all across the political spectrum, 205 of them joining senator crapo and i in saying what is needed is a clean fix for the wildfire budgeting system and a complete end to fire borrowing. now, we have been working on this, as i say, for years and years, and we know that some of our colleagues want to see a variety of other policies attached, particularly policies dealing with forest management. one of the reasons i wanted to come to the floor tonight, mr. president, is to say i take a back seat to no one when it comes to fighting -- or to finding the right approach to forest management, and i have written bipartisan forest management laws. but let's make sure that as we go forward on this issue, that we understand we cannot let other matters get in the way of stopping the cycle of fire borrowing once and for all. and what senator crapo and i have prop

senator crapo knows that i think that this is a real factor. steve mnuchin said we would have -- have $2 trillion worth of growth on this and you stay we and yesterday -- we had economists at the senate finance committee saying -- these are republican economists -- the growth doesn't pay for itself and that is why we are concerned. we have seen this movie before, colleagues. in 2001 and 2003, the bush tax cuts were the same thing. there is growth and what we have is take deficits. we had to haul ourselves out of this. i can go through this and there is a pass-through provision that opens up a loophole to the mega-wealthy that is the size of the grand canyon. everyone of us wants to deal -- wants to be for small businesses. this is the high fliers can figure out a way to take ordinary income and converted -- and convert it into a low rate business income. by the way, they will be causing problems for social security and medicare. they are not paying payroll tax. that is a valid point that senator sanders pointed out. and the estate tax abolition

roten brg. >> chairman crapo, ranking member brown, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. i'm mark rote ebberg, i'm president of the electronic privacy information center. we are an independent, nonprofit research organization founded in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging privacy issues. i would like to begin by saying that the equifax data breach is one of the most serious in our nation's history. on par with a 2015 data breach at the office of personnel management that impacted more than 22.5 million federal employees, their families, and friends. the equifax breach poses aenormous challenges to the security of american families and even to our nation's security. there is no simple solution, but in my testimony today i will outline the steps i believe that congress can take to mitigate the risks that follow from the breach and reduce the danger and likelihood of future data breaches. i should also say that the equifax breach is remarkable because of its scope, the sensitivity of the data, and the delay to fix a well-documented security flaw. more than four month

crapo: yes. mr. merkley: the thing that confused me about your commentary is that you referred to people being forced with this through court, they would have a chance for arbitration as opposed to being locked into arbitration. under this rule, people would have the option of arbitration? mr. crapo: yes. that's why those who criticized our effort to reject this rule said that we are trying to stop forced arbitration, the rule itself would allow arbitration agreements. it stops the company from allowing the company to reach an agreement with the consumer to avoid class action litigation. mr. merkley: my understanding is when you have an arbitration clause you have one option, to go into arbitration. under the rule, you have two options, you have the ability to go to court or the ability to go to arbitration. mr. crapo: let me reclaim my time and you can respond on my time. let me clarify, as i indicated, even the cfpb in its own study said that most of the contract -- not all companies use the sa

>> chairman crapo, we're doing that in a few ways. first and foremost we went to the credit bureaus and provided the names of our customers whose account could've been inappropriately opened. unfortunately, because of regulation that credit bureaus couldn't provide us with the details of those customers back to us. what we saw when we look at that is about 40% of those customers had no use of the trade lines within a year. so that credit was not impacted. of that remaining 60%, about 25% had no impact on their credit scores. we found that the median impact, excuse me, i mean impact was about four points. but numbers are just numbers because certainly more customers were impacted and some could've been impacted, credit scores, by more than four points. what we did was we reached out to 43.5 million small business and consumers and said, if you have an issue, come into wells fargo and see us and we will make it right. approximately 41,000 customers have come in. based upon that, , about half bd credit related issues and we have made it

senator crapo is a good friend of mine. he's doing his duty and defending his position well, but no other republican senator, no supporter of this resolution. nobody wants to come down here and speak. why? because they don't want to be seen at home as defenders of wall street and they don't want to be defenders of the most powerful people in this country. so they stay in their offices quietly, come meekly on the floor, then they'll vote yes and go home and hope nobody really knows about it. they're not willing to give. senator crapo, whom i admire and respect greatly, he knows that. he means it. he's doing his duty as chairman of the banking committee. none of the rest of them want to join him. i think that tells you a whole lot. i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from minnesota. mr. franken: thank you, mr. president. i rise today to discuss the consumer financial protection bureau's recently finalized rule to limit the use of predispute forced arbitration clauses in contracts fo

backup for those worst-ever fire seasons, and that's what my colleagues, senator wyden and senator crapo, bipartisan teamwork have been -- have been putting forth, and it's called the wildfire disaster funding act of 2017, and it says when we reach a certain level of funding for fighting fires, the rest, the balance will go to a fema-style fund. that's exactly the way it should be done. it's been estimated in the past that if just the top 1% or 2% of the worst fires were funded in a fema-style fund, we have never had fire borrowing in the past, but the most relevant kind of crisp and clean way to do that would be to adopt this bill that senator wyden and senator crapo have put so much work into and that i'm certainly pleased to sponsor. so that would be very useful, and we should do that now. we should respond while the memory is fresh and actually while fires are still burning in state after state, certainly burning in my home state of oregon. but then we should recognize, too, that this terrible fire year has done so much damage to so many communities. they have communities where the r

senator crapo: senator donnelly? mr. smith,nelly: this is to all of you, the veterans affairs allowed that's to receive medical care in non- v.a. facilities. the implementation of the program led to billing problems which resulted in some vets receiving adverse actions on their credit reports from debt collection efforts. adverse actions make it more expensive for them to get a mortgage, and it is troubling our veterans have had their credit harmed through no fault of their own. we have introduced a credit act -- to make it easier for this debt to be removed. mr. smith, medical debt can get expensive. what damage can it do to the credit when this is reported as unpaid? mr. smith: we agree with you that veterans are not have their records tarnished by backlog and , and weencies we understand that is what is happening here, and we are committed to working with you to solve that issue to the national system. institutionally we believe the folks who are best able to solve and theue are the v.a. private medical service provid

. >> thank you, chairman crapo. under current law, whether we like it or not, companies like equifax can collect vast trophies of personal information. that includes personal information plucked from our work histories, our social media profiles from reward cards that track our purchases at the grocery store, even information from our smartphones tracking our daily commutes. generally these companies are free to sell that information to all sorts of financial institutions and other data mining firms who use it to make decisions about us, like what kind of car or job that we might get. corporations like equifax rarely have to tell us exactly why or how these decisions are made. they get to hide behind proprietary models and trade secrets. it seems our laws protect big corporations' use of people's data a lot better than they actually protect people. as a recent breach demonstrates, enhanced cyber security measures at companies like he cequifax m work perfectly yet still do little to protect consumers' data. 145 milli

>> thank you, chairman crapo. i think china is sending very deliberate messages to its banks and to other companies in china. there was an announcement today, in fact, that the chinese commerce department sent an announcement that all north korean firms and joint ventures with china had to be shut down. we are working very closely with the chinese. we think that they are taking this seriously but we're going to continue to monitor it. we continue to share information with them on actions that we think they need to take. this is obviously a very serious problem. and the urgency within which china takes it is going to be key to any successful economic pressure campaign. >> thank you. senator brown. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i thank you both for testifying and for your service to our country. i want to dig down deeper on this on the sanctions issues. start with you, miss thornton. you've testified that terms you used maximum pressure, peaceful pressure, strategic accountability describe our policy towards pyongyang

. >> thank you, chairman crapo. the story of this data breach is a familiar one. a big financial institution screwed up. executives walk away with millions of dollars. tens of millions of americans end up holding the bag. unfortunately, americans have come to expect that the equifax scandal will play out the same way as the wells fargo scandal. a couple executives retire, some of them lose some of their bonuses. a couple fines are issued, and only later do we find out the problems go much, much deeper. most americans never chose to have their data scooped up by equifax. you have said that since 2005, equifax has been rapidly transforming itself into, your words, a global analytics company, by collecting huge troves of information on people that you can sell to marketers and employers. but you almost never ask people if they want to be tracked. most of the 145 million people, that number seems to climb every week or so, over half of all adults in the united states, most of 145 million people whose data you allowed to be stolen probably only had a vague idea of what

and i think senator crapo was there for this yesterday. is i think when you look at some of the math behind what has been advanced, at least to date, from republicans, there's some kind of magical growth fairy that's being applied. now, senator carapo knows, i happen though behavior is important. i think it's a real factor. but steve mnuchin said we were going to have, like, $2 trillion worth of growth on this. and yesterday we had economists at the senate finance committee saying, no, these are republican economists, by the way, saying no, growth doesn't pay for itself. and that's why we're all so concerned, because we have seen this movie before, colleagues. in 2001 and 2003, bush tax cut, same thing. promised us all this progress and growth and the like. what we got were big, big deficits. and we had to haul ourselves out of it. and i could go kind of section by section through this. there is a pass-through provision, which i think opens up a loophole for the mega wealthy that is the size of the grand canyon. every one of us wants to be

borrowing has to end and that's why we absolutely need to support the bill that senator wyden and senator crapo and others have been working on to say, let's create a fema-like structure for these forest firings so we end this -- for these forest fires, so we need this. that needs to happen. rye now there are three funding issues that we need to address. first we need to help out the communities that have been impacts economically by these devastating fires. some have been scorched directly. others have been profoundly affected by the smoke in the community. others have been affected by highways be shut down. others have been impacted by tourism dropping dramatically. so it's very important that we send a message to the department of agriculture and the small business administration, the housing and urban development department to say, use your emergency programs to assist these communities. and we really should make sure that they're at the front of the line along with those who have suffered the disasters in texas and florida and puerto rico for emergency loans and assistance from the small b

i'm hopeful that senator crapo and i, the chairman of the committee, and others on the committee, were pretty unhappy, not to speak for others certainly, but were pretty unhappy with equifax's performance and yesterday didn't get a number of answers to our questions. when you think about what we do with medical language, with our personal medical information, we have laws to say our personal medical information belongs to us. we, of course, can share it with a hospital or a doctor, with whomever we want. but our doctor can't share it with our doctors without our permission. a hospital can't share it with other hospitals without our permission. but our personal financial data doesn't fall under those categories. we know how this happens. equifax, a company that many have rarely thought about and a lot of people -- most have never to the much -- never thought much about it. and many have never really explored who they are president equifax is a company in atlanta. there are three sort of data collection agencies like this that your -- they get your data without your permission. they get

bipartisan victory in the next two months using these bills as the basis and combining with senator crapo's work. if we can put forward a package to solve the wildfire funding crisis finally, adopt landscape scale approaches on the nature conservancy doing good work on this, reduce some of these redundant environmental reviews .hat sustains efficiency there's nothing more frustrating for folks than to participate in and then for years expanding and improving these good stewardship provisions and address a major problem on the landscape in a way -- a big way. thank you for working on this issue. this is one of those opportunities that could be governed at its best. we could put our heads together and have something done. >> thank you very much for your testimony. we will proceed to some questioning at this time. ms. crowder, according to the ,ederal and management agencies humans are either intentionally or unintentionally of -- an intensely responsible. the cost of fighting the most expensive fire in the united states history was in california and it exceeded $200 million. it was caused by

with my colleagues from both washington, senator murray, my colleagues from idaho, senator risch and crapo, our colleagues from oregon, senator merkley and wyden, introduced a bill to help reduce our risk when it comes to the fire seasons and what we can do to better protect our communities. that is the kind of planning and adaptation that we think we need to address. today's report cannot be ignored. it cannot be ignored that the federal government is going to have to spend this much money on dealing with the impacts of climate. that's what the government accountability office is saying. it says we need a better plan. we need to reduce costs. we need to look at these impacts and make sure that we as a nation are putting every resource into this or otherwise we really will be spending trillions of dollars. that trajectory is real. that's what the g.a.o. report says. hundreds of billions of dollars now, trillions in the future. but if we would simply recognize these impacts and start addressing them by having agencies recognize this and plan for it both in the adaptation and mitigation, i g

crapo: mr. president, i ask unanimous consent the committee on the judiciary be discharged from further consideration of s. res. 147 and the senate proceed to its immediate consideration. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: senate resolution commemorating the anniversary of the 1992 los angeles civil unrest. the presiding officer: is there objection to proceeding? without objection, the committee is discharged. mr. crapo: i ask that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and thes to -- motions to consider be considered made and laid on the table with no intervening action or debate. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. crapo: i ask unanimous consent that the senate proceed to the consideration of s. res. 283 submitted earlier today. the presiding officer: the clerk will report. the clerk: senate resolution 283 designating the week beginning october 15, 2017, as national character counts week. the presiding officer: is there objection to proceeding?

crapo: mr. chairman. the presiding officer: the senator from idaho. mr. crapo: mr. president, i rise to speak in support of the nomination of the honorable randal quarles to be a member of the government of the federal reserve system. mr. quarles has extensive government and private sector experience dealing with both domestic and international financial markets. he is no stranger to public service having previously served in multiple top posts at the treasury department. mr. quarles has also been nominated to serve as the vice chairman for supervision, a role that has never been officially filled. instead former federal governor dan turillo acted as the vice chairman for supervision in various ways including by chairing the federal reserve board on regulation, overseeing the coordination committee and representing the fed at the financial stability board and in basul among other functions. in february chairman yellen committed in a hearing that she expected president trump's nominee for vice ch

chairman crapo, ranking member brown and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you. my name is andrew smith and i'm a partner in the law firm of covington and berling. i'm appearing today on behalf of the consumer data industry association which say trade association of companies that provide businesses with the information and analytical tools necessary to manage risk and to protect consumers. cdia's members include the three national credit bureaus. equifax, experian and transunion. you've asked us to discuss how credit burrows protect consumer data, but first i wanted to mention the important role played by the national reporting system and our economy. more than two thifrds our gdp comes from consumer spending fueled by consumer credit. it's the national credit reporting system that allows consumers to quickly and effortlessly open a bank account or purchase a cell phone. more than 40% of consumers move every year. and the national credit reporting system facilitates this nobmoekt. in addition to providing fast, fair, impartial access to well priced c