In today's
LA Times Jamie Court plaintively asks, "Why are Democrats Caving in on Cox?"
Rep. Christopher Cox is the cat nominated by Bush to set amongst - or over- the pigeons at the SEC. It was Cox who authored the 1995 bill making it harder for investors to take corporate swindlers like Enron and WorldCom to court.
Court wonders why the Democrats are "eerily silent."
In a better world, next week's Senate confirmation hearings on the nomination of Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission would be the Democratic Party's finest hour. The hearings offer a perfect opportunity to decry Wall Street's looting of Main Street and to put the GOP on trial for creating the conditions under which corporate criminals flourished.
Instead, Democrats have been eerily silent on Cox, a right-wing Republican who wrote a 1995 law making it harder for investors to take corporate swindlers to court. Cox's Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which became law over President Clinton's veto, has been blamed for allowing some of the nation's worst financial scandals -- including those at Enron and WorldCom -- to proceed unchecked. The law let corporate executives off the hook for exactly the kind of utterly misleading statements Enron Chief Executive Kenneth Lay made to keep his company's stock price artificially high.
I'm just sitting here reading the news in the comfort of my home, out of the frenzy of a Congress in session, and already I'm exhausted. I can only imagine how our Democratic representatives feel.
We're attacked on so many fronts, it's impossible to man all the barricades. We need reinforcements.
Where is the cavalry?