mr. chairman , i thank chairman baker for yielding me this time ; and to call me a co-contributor , when one considers all the effort he has put into this , is a vast overstatement .  i have never seen , during the time i have been here , which is a number of years now , a legislator work so hard on a particular issue ; and i congratulate chairman baker for getting it this far .  and i would like to thank the ranking member .  the gentleman from massachusetts ( mr. frank )  has been extremely helpful .  i do not know where this is going to come out in the end because of the discussion and dispute over the affordable housing fund .  but , basically , i think the underlying bill is a heck of a sound bill .  i would like to credit both sides .  we do not have a lot of legislation on this floor which is really done with the best interests of america at heart without any consideration for politics , republican or democrat ; and i think this is one piece of legislation that does this .  i doubt there are those , other than the gentleman from massachusetts ( mr. frank )  and the gentleman from louisiana ( mr. baker )  , and maybe three or four other people in congress , a few on the outside , who can really describe all that this means in terms of the gses .  when you are dealing with fannie mae and freddie mac and the home loan banks , virtually any mortgage out there is in some way touching on them .  they have vast investments .  they have vast sums of dollars that they are handling on a regular basis .  if there are any organizations that need close scrutiny and regulation in this country , to me it is these gses .  that is what this bill does .  i am not critical of those who have been doing the regulation before , but the bottom line is there were some problems .  we do need the most sophisticated kind of regulation that we can have , because they are participating in some of the most sophisticated kinds of investments that one can make .  we are dealing with a housing market ; and while i hope there will not be a bubble or anything of that nature , there are problems potentially in that area that we will have to deal with , and we want to make sure that they are closely monitored so they will not contribute to that particular problem .  i appreciate the affordable housing fund .  i am sorry there is a dispute over it .  i think the concept of the affordable housing fund makes a heck of a lot of sense as well .  i would strongly recommend this legislation .  i hope it will pass in the house and we can achieve this as final legislation that the president can sign and all of us can take a great deal of pride in doing something that is constructive for america .  