Never Ending Battles
A terrific article by Haley Sweetland Edwards about how the passage of progressive legislation is always the beginning, rather than the end, of policy struggles. Particularly when it comes to the federal judiciary, this is something that too many Democrats have been slow to grasp. Contemporary liberals are right to have leaned the lesson that there are only very limited circumstances in which litigation can produce progressive social change, but it doesn’t follow from this that staffing the federal judiciary should be a low priority. Courts can do a great deal of damage to progressive legislative victories.
Made it about halfway through this over lunch. There’s plenty to be both saddened and frustrated about, but this jumped out as something that even a significant leveling of the monetary advantage wouldn’t correct:
“One thing all that industry money buys is a well-disciplined army. According to public records, representatives from the financial industry have met with the dozen or so agencies that regulate them thousands of times in the past two and a half years. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top twenty banks and banking associations met with just three agencies—the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the CFTC—an average of 12.5 times per week, for a total of 1,298 meetings over the two-year period from July 2010 to July 2012. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs alone met with those agencies 356 times. That’s 114 more times than all the financial reform groups combined.
“For every one hundred meetings I have, only one of them is with a consumer group or citizens’ organization,” said Chilton. While it’s good that regulated industries have a chance to express their opinions and concerns to those who regulate them, he said, “the deck is just stacked so heavily against average people.””
“slow to grasp”, as with all these sorts of criticisms, means “not rich”.
It sounded like the preface to a noir novel, just letting us know what the protagonist is in for.
[...] Monthly on how financial and other regulations get gutted by Congress and industry. As LGM points out, getting a bill passed is only the beginning of the fight, and getting liberal judges on the courts [...]