Sen. Richard Shelby, fighting on behalf of banksters everywhere.
Senate Republicans might be giving up on the idea of fighting President Obama through his recess appointment of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and refocusing on dismantling the bureau through other means. The current line of attack is the amount of work the bureau will require for the banks. It's not their usual bugaboo that it will add to the deficit by requiring work on the part of the regulators. It's that the banks will have to pay people to make sure they're not screwing us over.
Since Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010, Republican lawmakers, nearly all of whom opposed the law, have been warning of the burdens it would impose. In addition to the remittance rule, regulators have estimated that the Volcker Rule limiting banks’ proprietary trades could require more than 6.5 million hours of employee compliance work, and a requirement to draw up “living wills” to assist federal regulators liquidating a bankrupt firm might need more than 1.6 million hours.
The rules have “created a cottage industry for Wall Street lawyers and special-interest lobbyists,” Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Banking panel, said last year.
In case you're wondering, Shelby probably doesn't really have a problem with full employment for Wall Street lawyers and special-interest lobbyists. After all, they're his base. Just look at the top seven industries contributing to his campaign committee for the past five years.
What Shelby, and all of his Republican colleagues, have a problem with is all of that work being done to actually protect consumers and keep the banks from stealing everything they missed in the first round of this recession.
That's a winning argument for them.