Yesterday, the US Senate voted on the new plan to bail out the financial system. I have grave concerns about this bailout at the expense of Texas families.

While we urgently need a rescue bill, and I believe that Congress should work quickly to pass legislation to aid our ailing economy, this is a leadership challenge for reform. This bailout should not just be a rescue; it should also be a reform of the system. This attempt still places too much emphasis on rescue, and not enough on reform.

It’s hard not to think that this bailout is an undeserved reward to the people who got us into this economic crisis. Taxpayers are being asked to clean up the Administration and Wall Street’s mess, and both have asked the taxpayers for a blank check. I do not believe we should give them one.

Now is the time to address how we have gone off the rails–time to insist on changes to the lack of oversight that led to this crisis. My fear is that this bailout doesn’t do that. The lack of prudence and unfettered wheeling and dealing that allowed abusive and reckless loans, shoddy investments, poorly understood financial instruments, and market excess would still be in place after this bill passed. It’s like spending $700 billion to clean up a flood in your house without fixing the leak in the roof.

For a bailout of this magnitude to be successful, it needs real accountability. There are virtually no limits on what the Treasury can do with this money and there are insufficient checks on the Secretary of the Treasury. At this point, I am not confident that the Bush administration can manage anything competently, much less a $700 billion blank check.

Several days ago, I outlined what I would support in a potential bailout:

  • Real assistance for homeowners
  • Real regulation
  • Limits on out of control executive pay
  • Accountability

This bailout does not contain enough help for ordinary Americans, and this bill is supposed to be about economic rescue, not corporate welfare. Even worse, foreign companies would also be beneficiaries of taxpayer largesse. As such, I can not support it.

The Senate has amended previous versions of the bailout to include a variety of tax breaks that I can support. Instead of fixing the bailout so that it is truly responsive to our economic needs, it has been littered with extras to buy votes.

Texans should not support a bailout that has insufficient protections for the taxpayers, doesn’t go far enough in reining in out of control executive salaries, has little relief for people in real distress, and doesn’t heal the systemic rot that led to this crisis in the first place.