Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 5084

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, the purpose of the Securities and Exchange Commission is to protect investors and to maintain orderly and efficient markets. This bill would change that deal. It would change the entire premise of the SEC. It would use the SEC to pressure people to disclose personal information that has no connection to the financial health of the company, information that many people understandably, justifiably, and with really good reason prefer to keep private. Why? Because it is not the public's business; it is theirs.

The bill requires businesses to probe the race, gender, ethnicity, and veteran status of not only those already on the senior payroll of their companies but also anyone who is even considered for those positions.

Secondly, the free market already provides a way to achieve these goals. If investors prefer to invest in companies that have certain kinds of people on their boards and certain kinds of people in executive positions, then companies have a financial incentive to disclose that information. No one is stopping them from doing that. Many companies do, in fact, disclose that information. Many companies are already providing this information because their customers and their investors are demanding it.

Government is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It is not a deity. It is just force. It is just organized, collective official force. That is all it is. We should not use the heavy hand of government for things that the American people already have the opportunity to do on their own and in many, if not most, cases already are doing on their own.

Finally, the bill co-ops Federal employees at the SEC to create a diversity advisory group of government bureaucrats and academics who would advise Congress on policies to increase ethnic and gender diversity on corporate boards.

We already have a diversity advisory group. We already have it. It is the millions of Americans whom we represent. To think that bureaucrats at the SEC could inform Congress of the importance of inclusion and diversity better than the American people is wasteful, and to think that it is appropriate to vest in the SEC an entity designed to protect investors from fraudulent activities of those running these enterprises is just the wrong conception, not only of the SEC but of government in general.

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I have deep affection and adoration for my friend and colleague, the Senator from New Jersey. I do respectfully but strongly disagree with his position on this.

He made the point several times that if he were acting as an investor, he would very much like to know the composition of a corporate board or an executive team within a corporation, which is great. A lot of people feel the same way. That isn't the question. No one is stopping a corporation from disclosing that information. In fact, a whole lot of corporations do.

Some may not want to do that. Some might want to disclose some of this information but not all of it. Some might not want to be in a position of asking probing questions regarding the gender and ethnicity and race of their employees, understanding that it will then be disclosed to the public under the crushing force of Federal law.

There are legitimate reasons why a company might not want to do that, some of which have to do with that company's own ability to treat its employees and its board members and its executive team with dignity and respect. In some circumstances, not everything is the government's business.

Transparency, yes. It is absolutely something that I believe in. Transparency usually refers to what we need when it comes to government action. Transparency is what we demand when we require open public hearings when government does business. Transparency is what we require when we allow government documents to be made public and allow the public to see what the regulatory process is doing.

Transparency doesn't mean that everything that everyone does in America that has a tie to economic activity is the public's business. The fact that it is publicly traded doesn't mean it is owned by the government.

So the statement made by my colleague to the effect that when information is hidden from you, then the free market doesn't work very well--I don't understand what that means. If what he is suggesting is that it is hidden in violation of law, that is not the case. If what he is suggesting is that the free market can't punish those who refuse to disclose information about the boards and reward those who do, that is exactly what the free market does. The free market has every opportunity to work here. It is not as though nobody is providing this information, but it is not their business.

As to the suggestion that because the Chamber of Commerce supports this, therefore it is pro-business, and because it is pro-business, we should all support it, I respectfully but strongly disagree. I know that as a Republican, I am supposed to automatically agree with what the Chamber of Commerce says. Sometimes I do, but, you know, a whole lot of the time, I don't.

This goes back a long time. It goes back to the time when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed a massive tax reform bill that was proposed by President Calvin Coolidge. I found some relief in the fantastic, eponymous book ``Coolidge'' about President Coolidge and his proposal of that reform-- a reform that, by the way, helped build America's middle class and resulted in explosive economic growth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposed that reform.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce gets a lot of things wrong, and it is wrong here. This isn't the government's business. These businesses are not government. They can do what they want, and it is not our place to say otherwise

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, as my distinguished friend and colleague from New Jersey says, the fact that they make all types of demands on publicly traded companies is not a substitute for an actual logical or legal argument as to why they are entitled to information that is not theirs--information these companies may or may not choose to collect because that is their business. It is not the government's business, and it sure as heck isn't the government.

So the fact that they make all types of demands on publicly traded companies doesn't prove the point here. We have to remember something, and, yes, we have to remember it right now in this moment--not in spite of this moment but because of it. Government is for. We have seen the catastrophic consequences of people who lose sight of what government is for and what its limitations are.

The fact is that we don't have access to angels, as James Madison described it in Federalist 51. If men were angels, we wouldn't have a need for government. If we had access to angels to run our government, we wouldn't need all these rules. But because we are not angels, we don't have access to them to run our government. We have to have rules, and there have to be limitations on what is and isn't the role of government.

Now, look, there are all kinds of businesses that keep track of this information on the corporate board members and those considered for those positions and their executives and those considered for those positions. It is not our role to tell them the information they have to extract from each and every person they interview for those positions and demand that it be publicly disclosed. Why? Well, because, among other things, it is none of their darn business, and in many cases, it is none of ours. That is the business of the individual.

We shouldn't be punishing companies, businesses, and hard-working Americans. Yes, some of them are rich, and a whole lot of them are not rich. We shouldn't be punishing them just because they don't happen to share our view of how they ought to be operating.

I find it curious that he says over and over again that this is how they will be more successful and this is how they will make more money. It is not our place to decide. They are free to operate their business in a foolish way and in a way that might cost them money. It doesn't make it our place to decide this

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