What would a committee chaired by Waters produce? Fire, brimstone and the creeping socialism they associate with.

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“It’s hard to think of anyone more polarizing than Barney Frank, but Maxine Waters manages to do it,” Mark Calabria, the lead banking expert at the Cato Institute, told MarketWatch.com after Frank’s surprise retirement from Congress shifted focus to his likely replacement as the most powerful Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee.  In the case of both Frank and Waters, ‘polarizing’ is code for crass, corrupt and inappropriately controversial. 

Consider Frank’s tenure. 

In the late 1980s Frank was reprimanded by the House, 408-18, for allowing Steve Gobie, his live-in boyfriend, to run a prostitution service out of their home.  (Frank also leveraged his connections as a congressman to arrange for Gobie to receive a salary.)  In 2003, Frank, then the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, resisted calls to increase oversight of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government-sponsored entities long known as cash cows for politically connected operatives, including Herb Moses, another Frank intimate.  After an unusually difficult reelection fight against Republican Sean Bielat in 2010, Frank is harrumphing off into the sunset now that his “legacy” has been cemented with the implementation of Dodd-Frank, the mammoth financial regulation bill larding on rules while preserving the too-big-to-fail fallacy.   

The bar to improve on Frank’s sordid career may be low, but Waters will struggle to reach it. 

Waters, a serially mistaken representative of the loony left, is the Democrat next-in-line to replace Frank as the ranking minority member on the House Financial Services Committee.  If she succeeds in taking Frank’s position, Waters will be the Chairwoman-in-waiting if Democrats retake the House of Representatives in 2012 or beyond. 

What would a committee chaired by Waters produce?  Fire, brimstone and the creeping socialism they associate with. 

Based on Waters’ comments over the last few years, her agenda would likely include increased pressure to nationalize the banking and oil industries.  In a February 2009 appearance on ABC’s This Week, Waters was one of several lawmakers to suggest that nationalizing the American banking system was the best way to solve the financial crisis.  In August 2011, Waters told a group of constituents that unless mortgage service providers “come up with loan modifications and keep people in their homes” she would support government action to “tax them out of business.”  How Progressive! 

When Standard and Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the United States’ credit rating late this summer, Waters responded with a press release screaming for hearings and investigations.  Lost amid her demands to root out unfounded accusations of S&P’s “potential conflicts of interest” and “subjective political analysis” was any acknowledgment that Congress’ unsustainable spending spree under President Barack Obama led to more national debt than accumulated from George Washington to George W. Bush.  Blaming S&P for faulting a Congress that can’t pay its bills is illogical and unproductive, even if it is popular among Waters’ diehard liberal supporters. 

Then again, being illogically liberal is what Waters does best. 

During a congressional hearing in May 2008, Waters threatened the head of Shell Oil with “socializing” the oil industry and putting the “government” in charge of “running all of your companies,” unless gas prices came down.  Characteristically for Waters, her comment came after the Shell president reminded her that gas prices are a function of supply and demand, and that they would continue to rise if Congress refused to allow oil companies to increase supply with more domestic drilling and refineries. 

To date, Waters has done nothing to ease consumers’ pain at the pump.  According to the website OnTheIssues.org, Waters has voted against opening the Outer Continental Shelf to oil drilling, against barring EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, against granting permits for new oil refineries, and in favor of keeping the moratorium on drilling for oil offshore.  Every one of these votes gives the lie to Waters’ professed desire to push down gas prices. 

For all of her policy ineptitude, it’s Waters’ ethical problems that may serve as the biggest obstacle to her replacing Frank. 

For more than two years, Waters has been the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether she used her influence as a member of Congress to get a $50 million bailout for a bank where she and her husband were investors.  (After agreeing to a meeting Waters initiated, the Treasury Department denied the bank’s request.)  Her lawyers found a way to challenge some technical aspects of the ethics investigation, leaving the issue unresolved but highly prejudicial in Waters’ attempt to take Frank’s seat. 

At the moment, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is getting opposition from caucus members who don’t want Waters becoming their party’s face of financial regulation.  Pelosi should conclude that the costs of Waters embarrassing swing district Democrats in an election cycle next year will dramatically outweigh any feel-good vibes her Hugo Chavez impersonations will generate in liberals who have nowhere else to go. 

The one bright side to letting Waters replace Frank would be giving conservatives an opportunity to capture and repeat a treasure trove of socialist-inspired rhetoric when liberals are desperate to show everyday Americans they’re not as crazy as we know they are.  Who knows; maybe with a few more outbursts Waters will reach the height of liberal usefulness: the subject for fiscally conservative fundraising letters.