Republican Amnesia

Rachel followed that up with an interview with Barney Franks. Here are his zingers.

In a Republican strategy memo the idea is to link any legislation they don't like to the bank bailout, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. You know, that outfit chartered to protect consumers from credit card abuses, overdraft abuses, payday lending abuses, and so forth.

The bailout of AIG, the TARP for banks, the automobile company bailouts was all done under George Bush.

The agencies that are exempted from the protection agency oversight were exempted by Republican votes.

When it came down to voting on financial reforms, there was no additional regulations that got a Republican vote. Not any regulations on derivitives. No restrictions on risky loan practices.

The original AIG bailout allowed the Bush adminstration to give out the money anyway they wanted to. That has since changed.

When the final financial reform bill came to a vote, the minority party has an opportunity to offer whatever amendments they wanted. The only amendment the Republicans offered was "strike all after the enacting clause". Essentially that means kill the whole bill. They wanted no reform whatsoever leaving us with the system that caused the meltdown in the first place.

In 2007 and in the current bill, the House passed a bill to restrict bad loans, to forbid loans to people who couldn't pay for them. Republicans voted against it both times. They say that liberals wanted people to buy houses they couldn't afford but the Republicans had a chance to stop it from happening and they voted against it.

One of the things that led to the housing meltdown is that the people who lent the money were able to sell those loans. Essentially they were able to pass the risk of the lending off to some other poor shmuck of a banker. So they had no incentive to make sure the loans were good. The system made it easy to for the originators to make lots of money off bad loans at no risk. Financial reform would close the door on that.

[So whenever you hear a Republican expressing righteous anger about bank bailouts and bad financial practices, remind him or her that it was Republicans who voted against policies that could have prevented the meltdown, it was Republicans who asked for the bailouts, and it's Republicans who continue to vote against reforms to prevent a repeat of the meltdown.]