Party Like It’s 2013
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee are having a campaign fund-raiser this week.
Starting on Wednesday, the committee’s majority is expected to pass bills to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the most important innovations in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.
The bureau has one purpose: to shield consumers from unfair, misleading and deceptive lending. The purpose of the Republican bills is twofold. One is to deprive the agency of the power to fulfill its mission. Another is to attract campaign money. As long as the Senate and White House are controlled by Democrats, the bills are unlikely to become law. But by advancing them in the House, Republicans can demonstrate how thoroughly they would dismantle reform if they controlled Washington and, in the process, rake in Wall Street donations.
What do the banks want in exchange? For starters, they want even stricter constraints on the agency than those that were written into the law last year — and that were expressly included to address banks’ objections to the agency.
Under the law, a two-thirds majority of a panel of other financial regulators can veto rules by the consumer bureau — a constraint faced by no other government agency. One of the Republican bills would allow a simple majority of other regulators to veto bureau rules.
Worse, the bill would lower the standard for exercising a veto. Under current law, a veto is allowed if other regulators deem consumer bureau rules a threat to systemwide stability — a high hurdle. Under the bill, a veto would require only that other regulators find the bureau rules “inconsistent” with safety and soundness. In other words, if a rule might cause banks to be less profitable, say, by curbing tricky and excessive fees, it could be vetoed by bank-friendly regulators.
Another of the Republican bills would rewrite the Dodd-Frank law so that the bureau would be managed by a five-member, bipartisan board, rather than one director — a recipe for delay and division. Yet another would block the agency from wielding its full powers until a director is confirmed by the Senate. That’s a way to hold up the agency indefinitely.
President Obama and other White House officials have been aloof in the face of Republican rhetoric and bills that call for the demise of the consumer agency. The strategy seems to be to downplay the effort by ignoring it. That doesn’t generally work.
In the battle to pass a budget earlier this year, the White House agreed to Republican demands for government and private-sector audits of the consumer bureau. It also agreed to a government study of financial regulation that is clearly intended to emphasize the cost — not the benefits — of regulation. Such audits and studies might seem to be mere annoyances, but as part of a larger effort to derail the consumer agency, they are dangerous steps.
Unless the administration offers a quick, full-throated defense, the agency may never fulfill its promise. And the process by which Congress is bought and sold — and consumers and taxpayers are hung out to dry — will be, once again, on full display.
The Myth of Mr. Obama’s Weakness
President Obama’s display of leadership in directing the killing of Osama bin Laden raises the prospect that American politics can move away from mindless debates over the president’s loyalties and fortitude. Perhaps the 2012 campaign might even shift to real issues, like the economy and the major parties’ competing visions of government’s role.
The baseless critique of Mr. Obama as a frightened lamb among the world’s wolves was started in the 2008 campaign when Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton derided his ability to manage world affairs. “It’s got to do with experience, knowledge and judgment,” Mr. McCain said, “none of which Senator Obama has.”
The myth that he was a naïve hand-wringer persisted, despite his decisions to reduce troops in Iraq, strengthen them in Afghanistan and join a coalition to halt the Qaddafi regime’s bloodshed in Libya. His administration took too long to find its footing on Egypt’s transition and in Libya, but it was not because, as the popular conservative blog RedState said, he is a “trainee president.”
The blog accused Mr. Obama of basing his foreign policy on an “effete, pampered background” and a delight in consensus, and Republican presidential candidates quickly got the idea. Tim Pawlenty said in March that Mr. Obama was more worried about his international popularity than keeping the nation secure. And just a few weeks ago, Mitt Romney accused him of being timid, tentative, and apologetic, all qualities stemming from “his fundamental disbelief in American exceptionalism.”
One of the subtexts to this argument is that Mr. Obama is not a true American, a thread soaked in the politics of fear and racial intolerance that runs through so much of the anti-Obama right. Donald Trump’s nativist claim that the president is not a citizen had its foreign-policy equivalent last year in Newt Gingrich’s repellent remark that Mr. Obama exhibits “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”
But just as releasing a birth certificate marginalized one falsehood, Mr. Obama’s risky and audacious decision to attack the Bin Laden compound in Pakistan has demolished the notion that he cannot make tough decisions or cares primarily about the nation’s image abroad.
One clear sign of Republican unease is that some, like Rick Santorum, are trying to claim that Bin Laden’s killing was an isolated event that proves nothing. That argument sounds hollow and desperate, and most Republicans are giving the president the credit he deserves.
There is still plenty of room for them to make politically coded attacks on Mr. Obama’s domestic policies that have nothing to do with real substance — saying he is a socialist who is trying to redistribute wealth, for example. But if — oh, if — they now make the 2012 race about issues that really matter, such as rebuilding the economy and the future of the government safety net, the nation will get the campaign it needs.
Fit to Rule on Same-Sex Marriage
Given ample chance during a 13-day trial to offer an argument apart from prejudice, proponents of Proposition 8, the prohibition against same-sex marriage in California, found no evidence. Now they are trying to disqualify Vaughn Walker, the now-retired Federal District Court judge who ruled that the measure was unconstitutional.
After the trial, Judge Walker said he is gay and involved in a long-term relationship. Last week, Proposition 8’s lawyers argued that the ruling should be tossed out because he had had a duty to recuse himself, or at least disclose the relationship at the start of the case.
The claim is bogus. It is well established that personal characteristics, like race, sex, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, do not by themselves invoke the rule that judges must step aside if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
Our justice system relies on trusting members of the nation’s diverse bench to put aside their personal characteristics and abide by their duty of even-handedness. Any other approach would invite foolish and unacceptable results — female judges being kept from hearing rape or sexual discrimination cases, or black judges from hearing cases involving racial bias or civil rights.
Indeed, following the open-ended logic of Proposition 8’s lawyers, it is hard to think who, if anyone, is qualified to rule on this case. Certainly not wedded heterosexual judges whose marriages stand to be somehow diminished, according to the antimarriage crowd, if Judge Walker’s ruling survives appeal in federal circuit court.
Some ethics experts say the ruling might have triggered credible conflict-of-interest concerns if Judge Walker were intending to marry in California. But that is misguided, too. There is no basis to think Judge Walker’s personal relationship played a role in his ruling on the evidence and on whether a constitutional reason exists to limit anyone’s freedom to marry.
The idea that a seasoned, Republican-appointed jurist was unfit to hear the case, and that his decision should be set aside on flimsy ethics grounds, is preposterous.
Past, Present, and the Quantity of the Year
How long is a year? Ask most people, and they’d say 365 days and not nearly long enough. The year, of course, is the time it takes the Earth to orbit around the Sun, a rate that is slowing fractionally each century. For many reasons, scientists need a more precise definition of the year than its length in days, yet the only unit of time defined in the International System of Units is the second, which is measured in oscillations of cesium atoms.
Recently, a task force of geologists and chemists proposed a new unit of measure called the annus — the Latin word for year — which would use the length of time between one equinox or solstice and the same equinox or solstice a year later. Because the Earth’s orbit varies in temporal length, the annus is keyed to the year 2000, which was 31,556,925.445 seconds long.
Astronomers prefer to use the Julian year — which is 31,557,600 seconds long — and they, like some scientific journals, are not likely to adopt the annus. Many working geologists are objecting to the proposed abbreviation for annus, which is “a.” To the task force, the symbol Ma means mega-annus, or million years. But to geologists, Ma means “million years ago,” and 90 Ma, for instance, means a specific point in the Cretaceous period.
However this is resolved, we are left meditating on a remark made by a pair of geologists who note that a geological date like 90 Ma, or 90 million years ago, implies “before present.” Unfortunately, these geologists write, the present “is not well defined.” We know the feeling. We also know that whatever you call it, the year gets shorter and shorter the older you get.
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