Did You Know That Antonin Scalia's Son Is Sabotaging Wall Street Reform? [View all]

[deminks]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/eugene-scalia-court-antonin-financial-reform-dodd-frank

Ambrose Bierce once quipped that a lawyer is one skilled in the circumvention of the law. By that definition, Eugene Scalia is a lawyer of extraordinary skill. In less than five years, the 50-year-old son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has become a one-man scourge to the reformers who won a hard-fought battle to pass the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to rein in the out-of-control financial sector. So far, he's prevailed in three of the six suits he's filed against the law, single-handedly slowing its rollout to a snail's pace. As of May, a little more than half of the nearly four-year-old law's rules had been finalized and another 25 percent hadn't even been drafted. Much of that breathing room for Wall Street is thanks to Scalia, who has deployed a hyperliteral, almost absurdist series of procedural challenges to unnerve the bureaucrats charged with giving the legislation teeth.

(snip)

Scalia's legal challenges hinge on a simple, two-decade-old rule: Federal agencies monitoring financial markets must conduct a cost-benefit analysis whenever they write a new regulation. The idea is to weigh "efficiency, competition, and capital formation" so that businesses and investors can anticipate how their bottom line might be affected. Sounds reasonable. But by recognizing that the assumptions behind these hypothetical projections can be endlessly picked apart, Scalia has found a remarkably effective way to delay key parts of the law from going into effect.

Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) says Scalia and the big banks are attempting an end run around the law he coauthored: "These are ideologues who want to kill the rules. They can't say they're unconstitutional. They are doing this because it's the only possible way to knock them out." (Scalia declined to comment for this article.

(snip)

In 2001, President George W. Bush tapped Scalia to work as the Department of Labor's solicitor. "It was the classic fox in the henhouse situation," says Lynn Rhinehart, general counsel at the AFL-CIO. When Senate Democrats blocked his confirmation, his father perceived a deeper slight. "Gene, I'm sure, didn't get his appointment as solicitor of labor in part because of his name," Antonin Scalia told his biographer, Joan Biskupic. In the end, Bush bypassed the Senate via a recess appointment and Scalia spent a year at Labor before returning to private practice.

(end snip)

Soooo, Scalia's son was a Bush recess appointment to Labor? Interesting. Ironic. I wonder if he was appointed during a break of 10 or more days.

emphasis mine