Banking Law

While some readers have been trying to get me riled up over a headline in yesterday's American Banker that claimed Sheila Bair had been given a "Hero's Welcome," by the ICBA on Tuesday, I just consider the fact that the word "hero" has become so devalued these days that helping an elderly person cross a busy intersection is considered "heroic," and that in Ms. Bair's case, not being spit upon by bankers would be considered by some "unbiased" observers to be a positively orgasmic audience response. Read the two speeches she gave, the first to the ABA and the second to the ICBA and tell me she wasn't poking a stick in the eye of the first and kissing the hindquarters of the second. Like most people, bankers love folks who come not to bury them but to praise them.

Sorry, I won't rise to the bait.

The "major" topic that's got me all in a tizzy is one that every time I write about it on my blog, it causes loony leftists from St. Petersberg to St. Louis to open up a can of "tolerance" on me and show me what the word "inclusion" means to the unhinged. That topic is, of course, the derailed House Ethics Committe investigation of Maxine Waters over OneUnited. It's been out of the MSM since late last year, when the Democratic head of the Ethics Committee suspended two of the lawyers working on the investigation. With a Republican in charge of the Committee, that car is not only not out of the ditch, it appears to have busted an master cylinder, caught on fire, and might be ready to melt down into a blob of waste.

The Republican chairman of the House Ethics Committee has accused his Democratic predecessor of violating House rules and acting without cause in forcing two staff lawyers to take paid leave amid a contentious committee probe of alleged misconduct by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) last year.

Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.), who moved into the chairmanship in January, made that claim about former chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) in a letter he sent early this month to the two lawyers, who played lead roles in the Waters probe. They were idled just as Waters was to be tried by the committee over her actions involving a bank in which her husband had a financial interest.

In the letter, which Bonner said he wrote after consulting other members, he said that Lofgren's decision was unilateral and taken "without cause, in my view," and that the two staffers - counsels Morgan Kim and Stacey Sovereign - had "acted appropriately and consistent with the highest ethical standards."

Although Bonner claims both lawyers have been "reinstated," their lawyer said that they both landed jobs elsewhere. Neither had gas masks strong enough to protect them from the partisan stink bomb that the House Ethics Committee has become (or perhaps always was). The investigation of Waters has not resumed, and as Waters' attorney put the matter with eloquent understatement, "The investigation obviously has problems." Of course, he thinks the invetsigation should be scuttled becuase of everything that's occurred, while other see in everything that's occurred further cause to expand the investigation, or launch a separate investigation, of Lofgren.

The safe bet is that the investigation is dead. Let's throw a little dirt on it and focus on 2012.