Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I would have thought my Republican colleagues would have waited a little bit more than 28 hours to so thoroughly repudiate George Bush. What this motion says is that George Bush used the authority to deploy $350 billion ``so badly''--direct quotes--``so hastily, so haphazardly, so without a plan, that nothing will fix it.'' Basically, we are told that President Bush drove the car so recklessly that we have to junk it. That because President Bush so misused these tools, we have to deny them to a new President. Let's be very clear. The TARP has taken on in the minds of some of my colleagues on the other side an odd shape. It has become alive. It's sort of a horror movie in their minds. The TARP is this thing that has its own will. No, the TARP is not something with its own will. It's a set of policies. George Bush's administration used them badly. Not, I think, as badly as my Republican colleagues say. That is why I think I am defending them. He didn't permanently destroy this. There are a number of things that the past President did that I don't like. I was not a great fan of the Bush foreign policy. But I don't think we should repeal the State Department. I think Obama should have a chance to have a good foreign policy. So that is the first part of this. The criticisms made of the Bush administration, wholly irrelevant to what the Obama administration will do. As to the timing, the Bush administration acceded to the wish of the Obama administration to release the funds. Apparently, the Bush administration agreed with the Obama administration that delay would be a serious problem. Had the Bush administration not waited, we might have had more time. The President, to his credit, President Bush, accommodated President Obama, unlike my colleagues who now want to cut him off at the knees early on. I have another problem, Mr. Chairman. This motion today is a motion to end the program. Guess what we will vote on tomorrow? A motion to end the program. Having wasted the House's time with a blatantly nongermane rule, recommittal, they now come up with a blatantly unnecessary one because the exact vote we are having today, we will have tomorrow. And so why do they do this? Why would they ask for the same vote? They have a dilemma. Let's be very clear. Responsibility, which comes with it sometimes making decisions that can be in the short term difficult, in the minds of some--responsibility sits uneasily on the shoulders of many of my Republican colleagues, particularly the most conservative. When they had a President they were supposed to support, they had to do things that made them uncomfortable. Not all of them, but their leadership and many of them voted for the TARP. They couldn't wait for George Bush to leave town so they can throw off the shackles of responsible public policy. Now they can simply revel in their negativism. They can vote to kill the program today and tomorrow to show George Bush how much they don't like him. And what particularly is their problem? Well, one of the things many of us on this side think was the greatest single problem of the Bush administration was not doing foreclosure mitigation. The Obama administration has committed that if they get this second $350 billion, which the Senate vote means they will get, they will do foreclosure mitigation. But here is the problem of this conservative dominated Republican Party: The most recent paper from the Heritage Foundation says, don't do foreclosure mitigation; it is a waste of time and money. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, another source of great guidance for my colleagues over there, says, don't do foreclosure mitigation. They are torn. They have to put in the recommit that they can find some reason to vote for because they don't want to have to choose between the demand of a large number of Americans for foreclosure mitigation and the arguments of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal that they shouldn't do this. So what do they do? They advance the disapproval vote from tomorrow to today because they don't want to do this. By the way, the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation also are critical of other things. The Wall Street Journal says, how dare we try to give money to community banks; how dare we talk about auto industry help or auto dealers, or loans to others in America. The Bush administration--and I give the gentleman from South Carolina, it was better that we passed it than that we didn't. But the Bush administration made several errors: They didn't put any real controls on how the money that they infused was spent; they did too little on compensation; they didn't do anything about foreclosure. President Bush agreed with President Obama that there was still a need for the money. We here want to pass a bill that instructs them to use it better. I do not think that your desire to dissociate from George Bush should lead you to cripple the Obama administration.