Mnuchin has Dodd-Frank in crosshairs
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin delivered earlier this month a 147-page set of recommendations for reforming “burdensome” regulation of the financial industry. Banks and their Republican supporters claim regulation hampers economic growth, but the data to support that are at best mixed. This package could restore the conditions that led to the 2007-2008 economic meltdown.
Among the recommendations: reining in the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has returned $12 billion to ripped-off consumers since its creation by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2010. DoddFrank has been in Republicans’ sights since they regained control of both houses of Congress in 2014.
As a candidate for president, Donald Trump squarely took both sides: He was a harsh critic of Dodd-Frank and also a harsh critic of the financial industry that Dodd-Frank set out to reform. “I know Wall Street,” he said last year. “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.”
Then after his election he loaded up his senior staff with alumni of Goldman Sachs, including Mnuchin. The treasury secretary wants to ease Dodd-Frank regulations on banks of all sizes.
One Dodd-Frank regulation that Mnuchin wants to loosen, but not eliminate, is the so-called “Volcker Rule.” It forbids banks from making speculative investments with their depositors’ money. Risky investments in obscure trading options hastened the mortgage-market collapse that prompted the 2008 Wall Street bailout.
All sex crimes, offenders are not equal
After years of excessively punitive lawmaking against sex offenders, cooler heads are beginning to prevail. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, last week struck down a North Carolina law that effectively banned registered sex offenders from using any social media that is also accessible by children.
Lester Packingham pleaded guilty in 2002 to having taken “indecent liberties” at age 21 with a 13-year-old girl. Years later, he had a traffic ticket dismissed and posted a celebratory message on Facebook — and was arrested for violating his state’s internet restriction against sex offenders.
Defenders of the law argued that the ban was much like the ban many states have on sex offenders entering playgrounds.
But as the Supreme Court properly noted, barring access to all social media also bars access “to what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events, checking ads for employment, (and) speaking and listening in the modern public square.” The law, in effect, stripped Packingham of his First Amendment rights. The court’s ruling left room for a law more carefully tailored to protect children.
Elsewhere, states are grappling with what to do with sex offenders whose crimes were committed against adults rather than children. For example, what if an offender is convicted of sexual battery against an adult, or relieves himself in public and then is arrested and convicted of indecent exposure — a registerable offense in some states. Should such a person be kept away from social media, and required to register for the rest of his life?
It makes sense instead to distinguish among offenses and offenders, to ensure that laws protect the public without unnecessarily restricting the perpetrator’s ability to return to normal life after punishment.