When the fraud charges against Goldman Sachs were announced last week, the Republican response was deemed by liberals to be completely nonsensical. House Minority Leader John Boehner, for example, suggested that the White House was somehow doing Goldman's bidding:
"These are very serious charges against a key supporter of President Obama’s bill to create a permanent Wall Street bailout fund," Boehner said Friday in the statement. "Despite President Obama’s rhetoric, his permanent bailout bill gives Goldman Sachs and other big Wall Street banks a permanent, taxpayer-funded safety net by designating them ‘too big to fail.’ Just whose side is President Obama on?"
Boehner further noted that Goldman employees made the company Obama's biggest contributor during the 2008 election. It's worth pointing out again that Boehner's objection is substantively nonsense -- the status quo offers Wall Street a de facto permanent bailout fund, and that the GOP is attempting to preserve that status quo in the interest of companies like Goldman Sachs. What the bill would currently do is force stockholders rather than taxpayers to fund the bill in the event the institution fails.
Steve Benen reacted to Boehner's words with disbelief:
I'm trying to imagine the conversation in Boehner's office when the statement was being written. Which genius on Boehner's staff discovered that the Obama administration is going after Goldman Sachs, regardless of its campaign contributions to Obama, and thought, "A ha! Now we've got 'em!"
Look, in an environment where only a fifth of the American people trust the government, the Republican counterargument against financial regulation doesn't have to make sense. All they have to do is sow enough doubt to make people distrust whatever effort the administration might make. At least, that's what they're betting on.
Democrats, however, can take heart in the fact that Americans' love of small government seems as fickle and conditional as ever -- distrust the government as they might, 61 percent still want stricter government regulation of financial institutions.
-- A. Serwer
