The Do-Nothing Party

Sunday, July 18, 2010 | 2:05 a.m.

After the Senate passed the financial reform bill last week, Republican Minority Leader John Boehner pledged to press for repeal of the legislation. President Barack Obama isn’t expect to sign the bill until later this week, but Republicans have been working overtime trying to drum up support against it.

On Thursday, after the Senate passed the bill, Republican leaders tried to scare the public by claiming that the bill will hurt the economy. Boehner called it a “bad bill” and “ill-conceived.” The following day, he proposed a yearlong moratorium on new federal regulation, saying it would send “a wonderful signal to the private sector that they are going to have some breathing room.”

Republican leaders just don’t get it.

The majority of Americans want financial reform because it is desperately needed. Given how much the Republican leaders like to complain about the economy and the federal government’s response, they should understand this. The economy collapsed because the federal agencies created to regulate the financial markets didn’t have the tools to do the job. As the economy boomed, the out-of-control Wall Street firms made billions of dollars in profits with fast-and-loose trades. The housing market became overheated because banks recklessly lent money in what seemed to be a can’t-miss market. Investment firms helped stoke those loans by creating risky mortgage-backed securities that would eventually turn toxic.

Eventually, the bubble burst and the economy went south. As a result, people felt an incredible pinch — businesses laid off millions of people and a wildfire of foreclosures swept the nation. To add insult to the injury, Congress had to bail out the Wall Street firms that were deemed “too big to fail” and then provide hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus money to help bolster the economy.

Boehner and other Republican leaders have trashed those programs, calling them failures because there hasn’t been a complete economic recovery. Nevermind that it took two terms of the Republican Bush administration’s policies to get to this point. The bailout and the stimulus have proven crucial in keeping the economy from melting down and millions of jobs have been saved. Republican leaders deny that, but if they had their way they would have let the economy completely crash, and that would have sent unemployment skyrocketing past today’s numbers.

Republican opposition to this legislation is stupefying. The legislation is intended to correct the problems and help the average American. For example, the legislation includes new consumer protections and cracks down on risky investment deals. It also ends the need for bailouts by giving regulators ways to deal with the “too big to fail” financial firms.

Still, Boehner is advocating going back to the way things were, and that is unacceptable. Do Republicans not understand the pain that Americans are in and Wall Street’s role? Or are they merely trying to protect their patrons on Wall Street?

The GOP should drop its opposition and back off its push to repeal the legislation. The American people want it, just as they want positive solutions from Congress. Despite what Republicans may think, opposing everything and doing nothing is not a solution.