Tea Party Faves Love Them Some Wall Street Cash

Not surprising. Congressmen who were given the Teabagger stamp of approval for their bluster about the bank bailouts are accepting cold, hard cash from those very same "too big to fail" banks.


Tea Party favorites such as Stephen Fincher of Tennessee were swept into Congress on a wave of anger over government-funded bailouts of banks.

Now those incumbents are collecting thousands of dollars for re-election campaigns from the same Wall Street firms whose excesses they criticized. They have taken no significant steps to curb them or prevent future taxpayer-financed rescues.

Wisconsin's own Sean Duffy (he who can barely scrape by on his $174,000 salary) gets a nod here:

Representative Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, who has received $19,500 from the firms, sponsored a House-passed bill to overhaul the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the cornerstones of Obama’s regulatory overhaul. Republicans opposed its creation and have pushed the change the bureau, which they say has too much power.

John Gentzel, Duffy’s spokesman, declined to comment.

Still, proposals to prevent or help manage a systemic financial crisis like that which occurred in 2008 are non- existent. Republicans on the committee voted this month to repeal the resolution process put into place in Dodd-Frank -- a process House Republicans always opposed -- yet haven’t produced an alternative proposal in the current Congress.