Bipartisanship is alive and well

Last week [...] numerous congressional Democrats – including Nancy Pelosi and chief Russia hawk Adam Schiff – voted to reauthorize the virtually limitless surveillance powers of this president. This is despite the fact that those same congressional Democrats spent much of the last year claiming Trump is an agent of a foreign power.

This is a classic example of something that's been axiomatic in Washington for ages: that both parties tend always to be interested in expanding executive power, no matter who's in office or what the political situation. In this case, the principle of expanding presidential authority outweighed even concerns of abuses by the likes of Donald Trump.

In another bizarre episode, at least ten Senate Democrats recently crossed the aisle to support a rollback of key provisions of the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill, the killing of which of course has long been a major policy goal of Trump's.

The Dodd-Frank bill story is particularly disturbing, because it signals a rare potential area of consensus amid the otherwise reassuringly dysfunctional three-headed monster that is the lunatic Trump, establishment Republicans, and Democrats.

[...]

The Dems who crossed the aisle to support the Dodd-Frank rollback bought into the lobbyist-flogged idea that Too-Big-To-Fail banks have too many punitive regulatory requirements, and moreover that "smaller" companies (i.e. firms with less than $10 billion in assets) should be exempt from the already watered-down Volcker rule, which prevents depository banks from gambling for their own accounts.

[...]

This moves us in the opposite direction of the most urgently needed kind of Wall Street reform. De-concentrating financial power (and the systemic risk associated with such concentration) would be the best guarantee that we never have a repeat of 2008, in which all the biggest depository banks put the entire financial system at danger by acting like giant hedge funds.

[...]

Although the bill is opposed by powerful Senators like Elizabeth Warren, other influential Democrats co-sponsored it, including Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Jon Tester of Montana, and Mark Warner of Virginia.

  Matt Taibbi

You don't suppose they have any personal interest involved, do you?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.