Republicans hate regulation so they will do anything and everything to dismantle regulations. According to the Republican philosophy, we don’t need to regulation green house gases. And Pat Toomey, the “Wall Street Warrior”, while serving on the House Banking Committee, helped write a resolution which lead to the repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act that protected American’s financial investments.
Toomey’s first order of business as a freshman congressman: getting some good committee work. His Wall Street credentials—as well as the Republican majority—helped him score a seat on the House Banking Committee, where he sits on the Capital Markets, Securities and Government Sponsored Enterprises subcommittee as well as the Domestic and International Monetary Policy subcommittee. Toomey has already helped draft House Resolution 10, a proposal to roll back some of the Glass-Steagall legislation of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, Toomey is virulently opposed to unnecessary regulation. “The trend in deregulation, beginning in the early 1980s, is one of the biggest reasons for the sustained economic expansion,” he says. “I would like to see us continue to deregulate on many fronts, including the financial services industry.”
And what of the much-ballyhooed hedge fund regulation talk emanating from Washington lately? “It’s not clear to me that the problem with Long-Term Capital Management requires new regulation,” he says. “I think we need to continue to work on understanding what really happened there and what the magnitude of the threat to the infrastructure of our financial services industry was. Frankly, I think that the outcome was appropriate. The equity investors lost everything—and under the circumstances that had to happen—but the bailout essentially worked. I would be very leery about, and I will resist, any effort to impose inappropriate regulations as a knee-jerk reaction to what was a big problem but was essentially solved.”
Read more about Toomey and his Wall Street connections here.
The bottom line is this: Republicans are against regulations (Banks, Oil/Gas Industries). However, when deregulation creates problems (Bank Failures, Oil/Gas accidents, pollution), then Republicans want the taxpayers to bailout the banks and pay for the environmental clean up.
Pat Toomey is just another Republican that supports deregulation and he would have voted “Yea”, in favor of the bank bailouts. After all, Toomey would not have wanted to place any hardships on his friends in the banking industry or on Wall Street.
Organizing for Change 