In her excellent story on the withdrawal of Antonio Weiss's nomination as Undersecretary of Domestic Finance, Joan McCarter links to an article from Bloomberg News condemning the withdrawal. It quotes an obscure Bush administration official saying that the White House should have backed Weiss's nomination more strongly.
Clicking though to the article, I found its concept of what makes a nominee perfect for a regulatory position highly striking. The author, Joshua Green, doesn't focus on a record of cracking down on financial malfeasance, but rather on Weiss's political and financial connections.
More below the fold...
In his essay, Green extols all of the qualifications that made Weiss a "perfect" candidate for the Treasury position.
Friends and allies of Weiss and Warren say the Lazard banker began eyeing a high-level government job several years ago and deftly positioned himself to land one. The firm’s long lineage of senior partners who have served in top government positions (Felix Rohatyn, Steven Rattner) gave him no shortage of patrons and advisers. Weiss donated money to the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, which enabled him to burnish his policy credentials by appearing alongside Democratic luminaries such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers as a co-author of a 2012 white paper on tax reform. He became a major donor and fundraising bundler for Obama. He’s publisher of the Paris Review—a useful credential to deter liberal intellectuals in politics and journalism who might otherwise be inclined to criticize him.
Perhaps shrewdest of all, Weiss hired two senior Obama veterans, Pete Rouse and Mark Patterson, to shepherd his nomination. Rouse, who was once Obama’s longest-serving aide and worked on nominations inside the administration, and Patterson, the chief of staff to the last two Treasury secretaries, run a “strategic affairs practice” at the law firm Perkins Coie. Both are well regarded by the liberals in Warren’s ambit. Hiring them, as Weiss was no doubt aware, could have had the effect of dissuading potential critics from speaking out.
Note that there are no references to actual regulatory experience, no signs of genuine willingness to stand up to financial misconduct, not even any signs of concern over Wall Street corruption. Apparently, donating money to a few liberal groups and befriending a few centrist Democrats qualifies you to walk a beat on Wall Street.
Even more stomach turning is his lament of Senator Warren's reason for opposing Weiss: "Warren and her allies were able to broaden the list of politically inexpiable financial sins to include tax inversions, which doomed Weiss. As she put it last November, 'One of the biggest and most public corporate inversions last summer was the deal cut by Burger King to slash its tax bill by purchasing the Canadian company Tim Hortons and then ‘inverting’ the American company to Canadian ownership. And Weiss was right there, working on Burger King’s tax deal. Weiss’ work wasn’t unusual for Lazard.'"
G-d forbid we oppose having people in high positions in the Treasury Department who've made their living helping large corporations skip out on their taxes!
What's most disgusting about this is that, as Green acknowledges, Weiss is still going to be at Treasury, just in an informal counselor position. Corruption will still have its sway; it just won't get paid.