The current Chairperson is Mary Jo White, who was considered a tough, hard-nosed prosecutor of white-collar crime.  She is now being criticized intensely by both Republicans and Democrats.  Republicans are mad because she has brought a record 755 enforcement actions, and Democrats are made because she is “too soft on repeat offenders.”  I fear she will be considered just another failure,  like the past two chairmen of the SEC, i.e., Mary Schapiro and Harvey Pitt.  It may be that this job has become impossible, due to mindless partisanship.  (If Presidents Bush & Obama got down on their knees, begging me to run the SEC, I would laugh in their faces.)

The SEC has a five-person board, which currently agrees on almost nothing.  They are appointed as either Republican or Democratic and faithfully, mindlessly vote the “party-line” on all things.  I think the impotence of Congress is spilling out onto important agencies.  One may argue we can do without a Congress, but we do need an SEC!

Due to his other legal troubles, there has been much conversation this week about the “Hastert” Rule of former Speaker-of-the-House Denny Hastert.  This rule says that no vote can be taken in the House until the “majority-of-the-majority” permit it.  This keeps votes being taken on proposals brought by the minority or, in this case, the Democrats.  Blaming the dysfunction of Congress on Mr. Hastert is short-sighted and may be a case of “piling-on.”

I suspect more blame can be laid at the feet of Newt Gingrich, a prior Speaker-of-the-House, who cautioned members of his party to avoid members of the other party.  They should ‘hang with their own kind.”  As a small child in the DC area, I remember being told how members of Congress would call each other names during the day but drink together in bars at night.  That practice stopped under Newt Gingrich.

In fairness, Mr. Gingrich points out that name-calling and hostility have always frequented the halls of Congress, and he is right.  But, does it have to frequent the bars and restaurants as well?  A more important point is that we have been through periods of impotence before and always recovered.  That begs the questions of how we got through it and recovered.  We need to do so quickly!

It is painful for me to admit this, but we do need the SEC, as well as the other agencies that are being poisoned . . .