by Jack Lee
This is how the GOP loses elections, all it takes is some high profile people to do really bad things and then we all pay! Did you read the story today about the money from Freddie Mac paid to a GOP consulting firm? They spent 2 million bucks to bribe republican legislators not to pass legislation! This reform would have trimmed back Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and it would have been done 3 years before the mortgage meltdown! In otherwords…just in time to save us or at least minimized the horrificly costly damage we see now!
The story is in the ER and you really need to read it, this is what I was talking about earlier… it’s a matter of character. It also goes back to what I have been preaching about for many years…the dire need for campaign finance reform. But, neither the Dems nor the GOP want to give up this cash cow, no matter where the money comes from or for what low purpose.
What passes for contributions from special interest groups is just another form of briberydone legally, but not ethically! We’re being dumber than a brick to think otherwise. Plainly put, lobbyist have ZERO business giving legislators money in any form (free ads, dinners, hiring relatives, etc.,) directly or indirectly, to buy political favors.
Sen. Hagel (the author of the bill) and 25 other Republican senators pleaded with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote…he denied it. Sen. Frist has got some splainin to do come his next election!
The Senators wrote…”If effective regulatory reform legislation … is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole,” Oh brother and were they ever right!
But, the ultimate irony here is the very legislation they stopped would also have protected them, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, would have been spared their near total collapse.
WASHINGTON Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.
In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI’s chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain’s campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.
Freddie Mac’s payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel’s bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.
In the midst of DCI’s yearlong effort, Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote.
“If effective regulatory reform legislation … is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole,” the senators wrote in a letter that proved prescient.
Unknown to the senators, DCI was undermining support for the bill in a campaign targeting 17 Republican senators in 13 states, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The states
and the senators targeted changed over time, but always stayed on the Republican side.