Heroes and Losers in Congress Yesterday (Party? Irrelevant)

We will start with the bad news.  Delaware Senator Tom “I am a former governor of Delaware and I care a lot about states rights as a recovering governor” Carper (D-DE), apparently cares a lot more about the Big Banks in his state, because he is trying now to force an amendment into the financial reform bill to wipe out state Attorney General enforcement of financial fraud committed by Big Banks.  (I am sure his own AG, Beau Biden, must appreciate this as he recovers from a mild stroke in Philadelphia hospital.  Get well soon, AG Biden.) 

We had heard this might be coming, but really, tone deaf doesn’t begin to describe this proposal.  We’ve written many times about the importance of state AG’s work in financial fraud, consumer protection and many other areas. (Follow links here.) Here’s is the lead, front page article in the New York Times today, about a new investigation started by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo againt Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and Merrill Lynch, which is owned by Bank of America, “to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities.”  Unlike the fed’s investigation, “this one expands the scope of scrutiny to the interplay between banks and the agencies that rate their securities.” 

And not to leave out that other party, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) is going to try prevent understaffed and underfunded state AGs from hiring outside private counsel to help them enforce consumer protection laws.  These counsel, by the way, are hired at no cost to the taxpayer and their work often results in states recovering billions of dollars from corporate wrongdoers.  (See more in Center for Justice & Democracy's report, The People's Champion.)

Now for the heroes.  Watch Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) in action yesterday ripping apart the executive from Transocean whose company apparently coerced traumatized workers at the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion into signing legal statements that they never witnessed anything.  (See video below, questioning about a minute in.)

Why aren’t there more in Congress like Bruce Braley?  Just askin’.