Credit Where Credit is Due

From Kevin Hassett of Bloomberg News:

...For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

Different World

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

[snip]

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Read it all. The McCain campaign would be wise to hammer the Democrats relentlessly, every day, hour and minute, on this matter. Barring unforeseen international events, the Fannie/Freddie debacle should prove to be the number one issue for the rest of the campaign and for years to come. And while there are Republicans who bear culpability, never before has there been a disaster of such magnitude that nevertheless could so easily have been prevented (the Wall Street Journal was warning us about it fifteen years ago) were it not for the cynical expediency and greed of Democrats, who thwarted any attempts to rein in the millionaire grifters running Fannie and Freddie.

(Thanks to the Instapundit.)