House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) held a sit down with reporters today, touching on three major issues involving the $700 billion bailout plan. Hoyer said that no one believes this plan is perfect, but that something needs to be done now. “Members are not comfortable with the request. The crisis is real, the risk is great, and the need for a substantial and rapid movement is clear,” he said.

Hoyer said that it’s the administrations policy that has gotten the economy into this mess. He says that President Bush has an obligation to address the American people about what has happened in Wall Street and what is going to be done about it and he called for Bush to appear in prime time. He stressed that it was not congressional that policy failed.

Hoyer said that the bill for the bailout should go through either Thursday or Friday of this week. Hoyer wanted to point out that “no one should believe that we are going to hand over a blank check. The theory is not to save Wall Street but to stabilize the economy so the working class people don’t get squashed by the economic chaos. All of this should be done Thursday or Friday.”

In the bill, Hoyer and the House Democrats, would like to see two major things be done. The first is capping executive salaries. “Taxpayers should not be losing a substantial amount while executives are making a profit,” said Hoyer during the briefing. Democrats also would like to see some sort of aid for those that are getting foreclosure on houses. Hoyer said that they would like to negotiate in ways that would allow the middle class to stretch out their payments over time to limit the amount of foreclosures that are happening.

Campaign advisers said that Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is in consultation with senate colleagues and the ongoing developments on Capitol Hill as the Congress negotiates with the administration on Wall Street bailout legislation. Campaign manager Rick Davis said that McCain is going to participate in this legislation and plans to vote on it, if and when it reaches the floor.

McCain has express some concerns with a plan that would allow the U.S. Treasury to purchase illiquid assets from major financial companies in order to inject liquidity into the financial system. The campaign said that McCain has called for “unprecedented transparency” for unprecedented power and also feels that there is potential for too much power to be concentrated on a single authority. McCain has called for sufficient oversight to accompany the legislation. “Simply trust me is not good enough,” said Davis.

With 43 days to go until Election Day, McCain senior advisor, Steve Schmidt made his feelings about the media clear in a call…with the media. In the call, intended to roll out a new campaign commercial highlighting some of Barack Obama’s associations in Chicago politics, Schmidt said that the ad was necessary because the media is under reporting some of Obama’s controversial friendships. He zeroed his scope on the New York Times.

“Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard, a journalistic organization It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Senator McCain, attacks Gov. Pain and excuses Senator Obama…Everything that is read in the New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated from that perspective,” he said.

Pentagon correspondent Dawn Casey will be covering a briefing live from Iraq with Multinational Corps Commander Gen. Lloyd Austin at the Department of Defense. Legal Affairs correspondent Jay Tamboli will be covering the Georgetown University Law Center’s briefing on “Anticipating the Supreme Court’s October Term 2008: What to Expect.” United Nations correspondent Dan Patterson will be covering visits to the UN by President Bush, Republican Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Washington Bureau will also be covering a meeting of the House Republican Policy on “Policy Prescriptions on the Future of Energy,” as well as a meeting of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee The Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing on “Corruption and Contracting waste, Fraud and Abuse in Iraq: focusing on “high level, insider accounts of Iraq corruption and its effect on the U.S. mission,” and a conference call with the McCain-Palin campaign.

Following the president’s statement in the Rose Garden, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino and Director of the National Economic Council briefed the press on the government’s increasing role in attempting to restore investor confidence to the struggling financial markets.

Hennessey outlined the steps that have been taken and those that the government would like to happen, “So we’ve got the conservatorship for Fannie and Freddie. Treasury and Fed worked over the last weekend, they were up in New York working with firms in the industry,” he said. “We had the Fed taking steps just a couple days ago to prevent what they would call the disorderly liquidation of AIG, the insurance company. And then the Fed has been increasing significant amounts of liquidity into the financial system to keep things moving.”

Hennessey reiterated statements made by President Bush about urging the Congress to pass legislation that would allow the federal government to buy illiquid assets from struggling financial institutions to further increase liquidity.

“The most obvious example of an illiquid asset is a mortgage asset, a mortgage-backed security that’s probably lost value as the values of the homes that are underlying those mortgages have declined,” he said. “And what’s happening is, as those assets have lost value, people don’t want to buy them, they become illiquid, it’s hard for people to buy and sell them, and so they’re stuck on the balance sheets of financial institutions.”

Hennessey said that the White House would be in negotiation with congressional leaders over the weekend. Congress and the administration will need to hammer out the details of this authorizing legislation. Hennessey said that they would have to make “significant, substantive progress on the details” over the weekend.

“This is a very bold set of actions, we are calling on Congress to do something that is very big and that we believe needs to be done quickly,” he said.

Speaking to reporters in the Rose Garden President George W. Bush, joined by the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission Ben Bernanke and Chris Cox and the Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, speaks about government action in financial markets. Bush explains the current economic crisis and steps that the U.S. government is taking or plans to take to restore balance, liquidity, and investor confidence to the market. (9:04)

 

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Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) makes a reference to Vice President Dick Cheney’s statement “that deficits don’t matter.” He says that Wall Street must have taken that to heart. (0:41)

 

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Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) explains about upcoming congressional hearings into the recent government bailouts of large financial companies. (0:39)

 

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Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) says that government bailouts to financial companies were rationalized as those companies being “too big to fail.” (0:42)

 

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Rep. Tom Fenney (R-Fl.) says that recent government bailouts in the financial sector are socializing market risk while profits stay on Wall Street. (0:30)

 

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The Hill is still reeling from Department of Treasury and Federal Reserve market interventions in the hard hit financial section.

“Enough is enough…We’ve got to bailout the taxpayer from bailout mania,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas). Hensarling and other House Republicans spoke out against government intervention in the market, including the recent government assistance of Bear Sterns, AIG and the takeover of government sponsored enterprises Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Hensarling, along with Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Michelle Bachman (R-Minn.), Tom Price (R-Ga.), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), and Tom Feeney (R-Fl.)

“The government is the lender of last resort,” said Price. He said that risk is an inherent part of the free market system. Price and Feeney emphasized their view that the government is socializing risk as profits are kept private. The recent moves to facilitate sales and give loans to struggling financial giants by the Treasury Department are expected to add to the long term debt to be absorbed by the tax payer. “Again we believe that any short term gain by bailing out one another financial institution is not worth the long term pain of the moral hazard of taking us…to a lost decade of economic growth,” said Hensarling.

Following a press conference to highlight recipients of certain government assistance programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D- Md.) addressed the bailout of American International Group.

Reid, the Senate majority leader, decried “secret meetings” between Congress and the administration to lay out government assistance measures. “I think it’s time that there’s more than one branch of government. The American people deserve some transparency.” Reid said that he believed that the Senate could do something to stabilize the economy by passing a bill to fund infrastructure before the current session comes to an end.

Hoyer said that there would be hearings in both the Financial Services and Oversight committees. He said that Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) would look into the future of regulations and that Oversight Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) would investigate what happened to lead up to these government bailouts. Hoyer said that committee would answer the questions “What went wrong? Why did we not regulate? Why did we not have the referee on the field?”