A few days ago, I thought it would be valuable to name the 17 Democratic senators who voted with the Republicans to gut Dodd-Frank. No Democrat surprised me less than corporate wrote Mark Warner of Virginia. A record of consistent votes like this is what has earned him his place as one of the 5 worst Democrats in the Senate, as well as his overall “F” score.
The second wealthiest member of the Senate (net worth $215 million)— after Medicare scam artist Rick Scott (R-FL)— Warner is incapable of differentiating between his personal financial interests and the interests of his constituents. Yesterday a Virginia NPR affiliate VPM reported that “Warner, a member of the Senate’s banking committee, was part of the bipartisan effort in 2018 to loosen oversight of banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets in a partial repeal of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.”
Two days after 3 banks collapsed because of Warner’s vote, he defended himself on This Week by claiming that the level of regulation that he voted for was “appropriate” and that the banks collapsed because of mismanagement. He neglected to mention that one of those mismanagers, Greg Becker, the president of SVB, threw a fundraiser for him before he voted in line with their lobbyists asking that regulations be loosened. “Warner,” reported VPM, was a top recipient of contributions from Silicon Valley Bank and its employees in recent election cycles, according to federal election filings. Records obtained by OpenSecrets and the Sunlight Foundation show that CEO Greg Becker hosted a 2016 fundraiser for Warner at his California home.
Burgess Everett and Eleanor Mueller reported that the Senate Democratic caucus is in turmoil because the crooked operators like Warner (as well as Coons, Sinema, Carper, Shaheen, Hasan) have decided to stick to their guns in face of efforts being made to undo their regulatory banking fail. Biden tried pinning the blame on Trump and Republicans in Congress, conveniently leaving out the fact that it was his own closest allies in the Senate and House who collaborated with the Republicans in rolling back Dodd-Frank.
“I wish I’d been wrong. But I knew I wasn’t,” Warren said in an interview this week about her opposition to the 2018 law. She’s now calling for repealing it: “Both parties participated in rolling back the rules. Now both parties need to participate in strengthening the rules.”
The current Senate Democratic discord is especially acute because the caucus had the numbers to block the 2018 effort — but under heavy pressure to cut a deal to help community banks in an election year, 17 of them supported it. The collapse of two banks with roughly $300 billion in total assets over the past week has animated those internal divisions among Democratic senators, who usually pride themselves on policy unity. And it starkly contrasts with Senate Republicans, who uniformly supported the last big banking bill.
Asked whether he regretted his vote, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) told reporters: “No. I voted for a bill that was a bipartisan compromise.”
…Republicans instantly ruled out passing new bank regulations on Tuesday, arguing federal regulators are already empowered to increase scrutiny of those banks. So Democrats will have to decide whether it’s worth taking their internal fight to the Senate floor again.
Several Democrats said they want to see either repeal of the 2018 legislation or other tougher laws. But at the moment there is no apparent solution that would get 51 Democratic votes, much less the 60 senators needed to vault a filibuster.
“We’re going to try,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told reporters. But he added that “I don’t know how we do a legislative fix.”
…[T]he issue is already becoming a cudgel in Senate races. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who is running for the Arizona Senate seat, went after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) for her vote in support of the 2018 law, calling the votes the “most salient example of how we’re different.” Of the most vulnerable Democratic senators up for reelection next fall, Brown, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania opposed the 2018 law, while Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Tester and Sinema supported it.
…Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, both of which qualified for the 2018 exemption, had lobbied hard for the measure by assuring lawmakers they were not big enough to pose systemic risk. Yet federal authorities cited that exact problem on Sunday when they announced they would backstop all of Silicon Valley Bank’s deposits after it collapsed thanks to a large-scale run.
…Even with their entrenched positions, Democratic senators are trying to avoid a replay of the backbiting five years ago when Warren called out her colleagues that supported deregulation in a fundraising email. That move prompted a contentious meeting among Democratic chiefs of staff in which Dan Geldon, then Warren’s top aide, cited nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warnings that more bank failures could result from rolling back Dodd-Frank, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
Geldon argued at the time that Warren was fighting on principle and not just to target other senators, while aides to senators that supported the bank bill blanched at her tactics and said they were merely reacting to banks back in their states, according to those three people.
Now Democrats can at least face that dispute from the majority, when they’re able to choose what comes to the floor. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been careful about how he characterizes a potential congressional response, saying Capitol Hill will “look closely” at next steps. He opposed the bank bill five years ago.
New Hampshire Democratic Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen both said they’d be willing to reexamine the 2018 law, which both supported, if investigations find that was the cause of the failures. But they evinced no regrets about their position.
“The reality is, it was very bad management at SVB. And you can’t fix that with any regulation,” Shaheen said.
Did they take bribes? These are some of the worst Democratic scumbags who voted to deregulate and how much they took (not counting what lobbyists gave them) from the sector. Shouldn't they, at the very least, recused themselves from voting?
Claire McCaskill
Securities & Investment- 3,101,635
Commercial Banks- 448,513
Kyrsten Sinema
Securities & Investment- $2,950,537
Commercial Banks- $371,243
Mark Warner
Securities & Investment- $2,298,169
Commercial Banks- $411,379
Joe Manchin
Securities & Investment- 2,045,693
Commercial Banks- $193,936
Michael Bennet
Securities & Investment- $1,806,070
Heidi Heitkamp
Securities & Investment- $1,432,456
Commercial Banks- $448,350
Joe Donnelly
Securities & Investment- $1,160,506
Commercial Banks- $374,174
Bill Nelson
Securities & Investment- $1,068,912
Chris Coons
Securities & Investment- $785,070
Commercial Banks- $133,076
Tom Carper
Securities & Investment- $356,830
Commercial Banks- $145,440
Bernie, of course, fought against the regulations rollback. Yesterday he sent this (in part) to his supporters:
In America today, if you're a wealthy vulture capitalist with over $250,000 in uninsured deposits at a loosely-regulated bank, the federal government will guarantee that your money is safe in a weekend.
If you’re a struggling working person with no health insurance and get cancer, you're on your own.
That’s what Martin Luther King Jr. would call "socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor."
It outrages me to watch wealthy bankers and their lobbyists repeatedly endanger the American economy, fight common-sense efforts to regulate them, and then expect the government to bail them out when they create a crisis.
Five years ago, I helped lead the effort— sadly, an unsuccessful effort— to stop a bank deregulation bill that President Trump signed. That bill played a role in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
Now is the time to repeal that bill, break up too-big-to-fail banks and address the needs of working families, not vulture capitalists.
The good news is that the legislation which was introduced in the Senate yesterday would restore much-needed regulations on some of the largest banks in America. It will also demand that we claw back the bonuses and excessive pay from these failed bank executives.
…Just 15 years ago, as a result of the greed and recklessness on Wall Street, this country was plunged into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
As a result of the illegal behavior of Wall Street, American households lost over $13 trillion in savings, which shattered retirement dreams, wiped out life savings, and made it impossible for families to send their kids to college.
That is what Wall Street did 15 years ago.
Now, we've seen vulture capitalists at it again with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
How pathetic is that?
When the bank deregulation bill was up for debate in 2018, the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that the legislation would "increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail."
Unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened. That's why today is an important day to show that you support repealing that disastrous legislation.
