Senate Objections to Geithner

posted by John Nichols on 01/27/2009 @ 11:41pm

Before we let the matter of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's confirmation by the Senate pass, it should be noted that the objections to nomination of Wall Street's candidate to manage the economy did not come merely from conservative Republicans who wanted to take a poke at President Obama.

In fact, while a number of top Republicans -- led by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch -- provided essential votes in favor of Geithner, three progressive (or, at the least, populist) Democrats and one progressive independent voted against confirming Obama's nominee to serve as the new administration's pointman on economic issues.

The final vote to confirm Geithner was a reasonably solid 60 in favor, 34 against.

Of the 60 pro-Geithner votes, 49 came from Democrats, 10 from Republicans and one from Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

Of the 34 anti-Geithner votes, 30 came from Republicans, three from Democrats (West Virginia's Robert Byrd, Wisconsin's Russ Feingold and Iowa's Tom Harkin) and one from Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders.

Byrd and Harkin joined Republicans in fretting about Geithner's failure to pay $34,023 in self-employment taxes from 2001 to 2004 when he worked at the International Monetary Fund. The nominee has said that it was an unintentional error. But Byrd said, "Had he not been nominated for treasury secretary, it's doubtful that he would have ever paid these taxes." Contrasting the nominees much-vaunted "financial sophistication" with the fact that he failed to pay his taxes even when errors were pointed out to him, Harkin wondered: "How can Mr. Geithner speak with any credibility or authority?"

It is notable, however, that Feingold and Sanders have been ardent critics of the Greenspan-Bernanke-Paulson-Geithner approach of favoring Wall Street over Main Street in economic debates.

Sanders and Feingold were among the handful of Democrats who on January 13 supported a Republican-sponsored measure that objected to the the allocation of additional money to banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Breaking with the Bush administration, Obama and Geithner, Sanders and Feingold expressed the view that there was insufficient oversight.

They were right about that.

And there is good reason to believe they were right about rejecting Geithner, a man who told the Senate earlier this month that: "As Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, I helped shape and supported the monetary policy decisions by the FOMC under Chairmen (Alan) Greenspan and (Ben) Bernanke. I also helped shape regulatory policies over this period, although those policies are the responsibility of the Federal Reserve Board."

Geithner's tax problems may have been unsettling.

But Geithner's tax (and spending and investment) policies -- which extend from those of Greenspan and Bernanke and are likely to continue former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's "slush-fund-for-bad-bankers" response to the economic crisis -- demanded an application of the Senate's authority to check and balance wrongheaded presidential nominations.