Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., may be excused, wrote former Rep. Barney Frank and former Sen. Chris Dodd in an email circulated by the Heitkamp campaign, for her vote to dismantle the marquee banking regulation that bears their name. “The idea that Heidi’s in the pocket of big banks,” the duo argued, is “preposterous.”
Actually, the only thing that’s preposterous is for Frank, who became a board member for a bank after chairing the House Financial Services Committee, to vouch for Heitkamp’s anti-bank bona fides. It’s actually a matter of public record that she took the banks’ money and voted to roll back part of the longstanding Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law.
Before cosponsoring legislation to roll back parts of Dodd-Frank, the North Dakota Democrat took $51,600 in campaign contributions from Signature Bank, the very bank whose board of directors Frank sits. That’s doubly interesting because Signature Bank lobbied Congress in support of the regulatory rollback, and Heitkamp voted for it after taking their money.
Heitkamp is in a tough spot. On one hand, smaller banks are begging her for relief from crushing regulation. On the other hand, progressives are disowning her for offering that help, and she needs every friend and every dollar she can find to hold on to her seat in North Dakota this fall.
At issue is a statute in Dodd-Frank that designates any bank with more than $50 billion in assets as “too-big-to-fail” and subjects those banks to annual stress tests and other burdensome rules. Along with 17 Democrats, Heitkamp voted to increase that limit to $250 billion and ease regulations she says make some banks “too small to succeed.”
Progressives, specifically progressives who haven’t been wrung through D.C.’s revolving door, are not pleased. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is chief among them. “Give me a break,” Warren said in a Senate floor speech earlier this month. “This bill is about goosing the bottom line and executive bonuses at the banks that make up the top one half of 1 percent of banks in this country by size. The very tippy-top. Your local community bank doesn’t have a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets.”
Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. Since Dodd-Frank became law, banks and credit unions in rural states, like Heitkamp’s North Dakota, have been hard pressed to provide the loans that traditionally keep agriculture afloat. Facing a tough re-election this year, Heitkamp cast her lot with deregulation and called-in progressive patron saints like Frank to deliver cover.
But even if deregulation is the right thing to do, the idea that Heitkamp isn’t filling her war chest with campaign contributions from the banking industry, and that Frank isn’t a complete hypocrite is, well, preposterous.
