Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) questions Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra during a Senate Banking Committee hearing, April 26, 2022, at the Capitol in Washington.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
J.D. Vance’s triumph in Ohio’s Republican primary on Tuesday has set off yet another round of beard-stroking from centrist and center-right pundits about the rise of the populist Republicans. Sarah Longwell, publisher of the never-Trump Republican website The Bulwark, mourned that Vance’s win means “at this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.”
The election of Donald Trump, we’ve been told, has led to a wholesale collapse in the old GOP order. No longer do country-clubbers set the policy agenda, since the most racist and hateful elements of the party (which also boasts thinly veiled classism sold as the salvation of the white working class) have overthrown the genteel leaders of the last century.
That any of this represents a change in the actual content of the GOP project, rather than just its tone, however, is dubious. Nutcase politics and outright hate have been central to the Republican Party policy agenda for decades, from hysterical anti-communist paranoia, to Reagan’s wars on drugs and “welfare queens” sold to the public through racist dog whistles, to bilious anti-LGBTQ bigotry, to the impending overturn of Roe v. Wade (a project decades in the making). But if anyone thinks Republicans have actually embraced a populist spirit, they should know that reports of the death of Republican laissez-faire economic policy have been greatly exaggerated. The GOP is still very much a party that exploits poor and middle-class Americans, just as it oppresses non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-cisgender Americans.
The proof is in the actions and attitudes of their elected officials. Consider a pair of concurrent congressional hearings last Wednesday: On the morning of April 27th, the House Oversight Committee heard testimony from Bob Sternfels, an executive at McKinsey & Company, on how his consultancy’s advice to Purdue Pharma directly worsened the opioid epidemic that’s claimed millions of lives. At the same time, the House Financial Services Committee held one of its semi-regular hearings with Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who has focused much attention on large, recidivist Wall Street banks.
Here we have two of the most bread-and-butter populist issues you could ask for: predatory prescribing and predatory lending. If Republicans have truly become populists, one would expect them to rail against both big banks and urbane consultancies. McKinsey and Wall Street are even both based in New York City, a Democratic haven. This should be an easy layup. So what did Republicans do?
They certainly didn’t question Sternfels about McKinsey’s egregious malfeasance. That includes advising Purdue to “band together” with other opioid manufacturers to oppose “strict treatment” by the Food and Drug Administration, while potentially illegally leaning on its own revolving door in and out of the agency to get the corporate drug-pushers off the hook. At one point, it literally advised Purdue to offer rebates to health insurers for each of their clients who died of an opioid overdose. Presumably, the idea was to soothe insurers’ worries about literally facilitating addiction and death by compensating them for every customer Purdue’s product killed. It was a proposal so horrific that even Purdue thought it was beyond the pale.
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Sternfels’s written testimony did not suggest that McKinsey is feeling particularly chastened. In fact, he bragged that McKinsey “decided to end all work on opioid-specific business globally” in 2019, and “provided more than $600 million to prevention, treatment and recovery” in 2021. He didn’t mention that both of these actions were mandated by McKinsey’s settlement with 47 attorneys general—Sternfels wanted brownie points for the things his company did to avoid criminal charges.
Republicans failed to confront him on any of these points. Clay Higgins, a former police officer who once described himself as “a warrior armed with the Constitution” and who bragged about breaking into someone’s home without a warrant in the middle of the hearing, best summarized his party’s position: “McKinsey obviously was involved in some gray areas … and they’ve been held to account. We must move on to the actual threat to our country, which is fentanyl pouring over the border.”
The populist Republican, in other words, had absolutely no interest in confronting an actual elite about his actual abuses against the public. Rather than pursue “law and order” against a corporate scofflaw who helped get millions of Americans hooked on opioids in the first place, he chose a racist rant blaming immigrants for America’s drug problem. And his co-partisans were more than happy to join him. Congressman James Comer (R-KY) raged that President Biden was “decreasing funding at the border, halting border wall construction and allowing illegal immigrants to make a mockery of our immigration laws.” Ralph Norman (R-SC) proclaimed, “We’ve got an invasion that’s taking place right before our eyes.” Neither asked Sternfels a single question.
What about Chopra’s hearing? Surely the newly populist Republican Party was willing to bash Wall Street greed and predation, even if they had to frame it in a way that didn’t praise the Democratic agency director?
Nope. Republicans assailed Chopra for daring to interfere with banks’ rights to plunder the accounts of their poorest customers. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-MO), who delivered opening comments on behalf of her entire party, railed that Chopra has “attempted to frame widely used credit and deposit products as harmful or unfair to consumers. What’s more, the bureau’s ‘regulation by enforcement,’ which Republicans have long criticized, has only worsened under your watch.”
Those “widely used credit and deposit products” are mainly overdraft fees, which are effectively short-term loans to low-income people carrying interest rates that would embarrass a loan shark, and overdraft protection. Wagner’s anger at “regulation by enforcement” is especially telling: This is a jargon-heavy way of saying that Chopra applies existing law against new predatory behaviors which the CFPB has not cracked down on before. This can involve some legal risk, but it helps vulnerable people—Chopra isn’t a member of the “Chickenshit Club,” a term then–U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York James Comey used to describe government lawyers so afraid of losing cases that they let wrongdoing go unchallenged. He goes to bat for the little guy, and that’s precisely what Republicans find infuriating about him.
The whole charade hit a pinnacle with Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX). He spent half his time ranting that student debtors and people facing overdraft fees won’t “uphold their end of the bargain” and “are killing Main Street America,” then confronted Chopra about a shift in enforcement to factor racial discrimination into crackdowns on unfair and deceptive practices. “If we asked everyone in this room to guess your ethnicity, based on your appearance and last name, it’s very unlikely that everyone [would] land on the same answer,” Williams bizarrely said to the mostly white room. (Chopra is Indian American.) The policy shift means that if there’s an otherwise inexplicable racial disparity in who a company does and doesn’t lend to, the CFPB can consider that an unfair practice, even if the company claims they didn’t intend to discriminate. Williams apparently was trying to imply that a lender can’t be discriminatory if they aren’t sure of someone’s specific ethnicity—which, uh, just isn’t true.
Nor was this an outlier: At Chopra’s Senate testimony the previous day, faux-populist Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) repeatedly asked, bewildered, if an action can be racially discriminatory without intending to be. This from the same senator who saw Saule Omarova, a Kazakh immigrant whose grandparents were killed in Soviet purges, and bellowed, “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”
Republican populist legislators’ “innovation” is a classic piece of reactionary misdirection—scapegoating immigrants for problems actually caused by the ultra-rich executives who fund their campaigns. This should come as no surprise. The real question is: Why are Democrats (who have a much more legitimate claim to being the voice of the people) failing to call Republicans’ charade for what it is and claim the mantle of populism for themselves? Biden seems to be testing the waters on making populist Republicans his bogeyman for the 2022 midterms, telling audiences, “This isn’t your father’s Republican Party,” a line which, tellingly, he has been saying for decades, through Democratic wins and losses. That should indicate that calling out extremism is insufficient on its own. Biden needs to show that Democrats can actually fulfill the needs that Republicans deflect from with racism and bigotry.
As last week’s hearings made clear, Republicans almost never miss an opportunity to grovel at the feet of some of the country’s least popular figures: corporate executives. They’re the ones actually responsible for so much of what has gone so wrong in this country. So say it!
Nor can Democrats afford to limit themselves to simply calling out the other side’s thinly disguised hatred for the general populace. They can prove that they do care by using every available power they have to help regular people. There’s a lot more than just what’s housed within Chopra’s CFPB, from student debt forgiveness to marching in on prescription drugs to generating millions of clean-energy and green-transition jobs through the Defense Production Act.
Failing to call bullshit on Republicans’ leaning into their worst do-nothing instincts, in contrast, is a surefire path to failure. And as we’re seeing this week, that means a terrifying future for all of those forced to live out the putrid fruits of Republicans’ worst, most fascistic campaigns.
