Today we begin in earnest to examine the potential shenanigans in the 112th Congress. At the risk of appearing partisan, we’ll start with a few of the incoming chairmen in the House. As you know, the House is a stickler for the rights conferred by seniority. The tradition can be defeated after great pains and is usually granted to a less senior member because the ranking member passes or is egregiously and publically incompetent.
Mr. Spencer Bachus, a 62-year-old lawyer and Republican Representative from Alabama’s sixth Congressional District has toiled without complaint for 18 years to rise to the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee. Take note here of the Alabama connection. The great State of Alabama has a lock on financial services legislation and oversight of financial services regulation. Richard Shelby Senior Senator from Alabama is ranking member of the Committee for Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Alabama has a financial services sector that would fit into the odd file drawer on Broad Street. Both Houses have these committees tasked:
"[To oversee] all components of the nation's housing and financial services sectors including banking, insurance, real estate, public and assisted housing, and securities."Mr. Bachus makes no bones about the silliness of that task:
“In Washington, the view is that banks ought to be regulated, but my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”We ought to offer the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is a principled position on the issue. Maybe we should also ignore that Mr. Bachus (like no other Representative) relies heavily on financial services campaign contributions. And, maybe we should ignore that Mr. Bachus runs mostly unopposed making it possible for him to use those millions he gets from Wall Street every year to subsidize his poor relations in the House. This has the effect of buying him influence greater than his grasp of the job and, frankly, his reputation as an intellectual lightweight. He just beat back a chairmanship challenge from Mr. Ed Royce of California on just that basis.
It isn’t those things at all. He is one who has toyed with the idea of shutting down the government this spring or summer. Never mind that a resolution to freeze the debt ceiling or failure to pass a budget has little chance of passage. Never mind that just the prospect of that sort of vandalism is enough to roil markets for months. Never mind that the American people deserve better. The suggestion is, at once, hair brained and deeply condescending.
Legislators should legislate, not be an instrument of policy. The same people (Mr. Bachus among them) who rail against activist judges are guilty of chipping away at the power of the Executive, not through law or threat of law but through harassment and disapprobation. The challenge has been laid down several times: If you haven’t got a workable solution to the debt crisis, sit back quietly until one comes along. We ought to have had enough by now of the cant and rant which offers fixes that can’t be done, won’t be done or assigns blame by the ton.
The only answer is for the adults in the Congress to put their heads together with the adults in the Administration and hammer out a program that we can follow together. The time is now.
I’m Just Sayin’,
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