This vote shows exactly how little Republicans care about the possibility for Too Big to Fail Banks to extort a taxpayer bailout in the future.
Senate Test Vote Shows Broad Support For Breaking Up Banks
The legislative language was complex, but the vote was understood as a simple question: Should big banks be broken up so that they no longer pose a risk to the financial system?
Eight Republicans joined the four Democrats in opposition: Sens. Judd Gregg (N.H.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Mike Enzi (Wy.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), John Ensign (Nev.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) and John Cornyn (Texas). (Cornyn said he backed making the banks smaller just last week.)
Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) was the lone Republican to join the Democrats in support:
Who were the craven Democrats?
Four Democrats opposed the amendment, standing with the big banks: Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.), Bill Nelson (D-N.D.), Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mark Warner (Va.).
Protecting Too Big to Fail Banks from being cut down to a manageable size so they can't threaten the larger economy..
..is far more likely to lead to more taxpayer bailouts for Big Banks in the future, than a Bank funded $50 billion Resolution Fund is as the Republicans would try to misdirect our attention. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment to the budget resolution that would have created the authority to break up Too Big to Fail Banks. These big banks have grown so enormous even their top managers probably can't know everything their far flung organization is involved in.
Frank Rich writes:
Fight On, Goldman Sachs!
But now we’ve learned that Blankfein was actually, if inadvertently, on the side of the angels. It’s his myopic, unrepentant truculence that left Goldman exposed to a Securities and Exchange Commission accusation of fraud that will be litigated in public rather than bought off in private. And it’s that S.E.C. legal action that has, in a single week, radically transformed the politics and prospects for financial reform in America.
In just that week, the Party of No’s intransigent campaign of obstruction and obfuscation went belly up. The Obama White House moved to get its act together with an alacrity lacking in its health care campaign, abruptly adding Thursday’s New York speech to the president’s schedule. The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at last issued its first subpoena — to Moody’s, one of the rating agencies that for a fat fee slapped AAA ratings on the toxic garbage Goldman packaged and sold to benighted suckers on the other end of a huge bet placed by a favored client, the hedge fund player John Paulson.
Salutary as this rush of events is, it still adds up so far to just one small step for mankind. We don’t yet know how many loopholes lobbyists will slip into the bill-in-progress. We don’t yet know the outcome of the S.E.C. case, let alone what other much-needed legal pursuit of Wall Street may follow it. And we still don’t know what, if any, true correction lies ahead for the financial sector’s runaway casino culture — much of it legal — that turned a subprime-mortgage bubble in a handful of overheated American states into an international economic meltdown.
While he couldn't bring himself to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders Too Big to Fail amendment Chuck Grassley has shown signs of not towing Mich McConnell's Party Line on the Financial Reform Bill.
Three craven Republicans who voted to keep the Too Big to Fail Banks too big are up for reelection this year. They are Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), and John Cornyn (Texas). Grassley would seem the most vulnerable to having his favors for the Too Big to Fail Banks exposed during the campaign.