David Dreier’s Epic Fail: Who’s Rubber Stamping Whom?

David Dreier was first elected to Congress in 1980, was the Chairman of the Rules Committee from 1999 to 2007 and was even in line for a time to be majority leader (oops!), yet on the biggest issue of the day -- the economic turmoil and the proposed taxpayer bailout -- the closest thing to a public statement David Dreier has made is a political one, an expression of support for John McCain's pathetic stunt yesterday.

"Senator McCain is absolutely correct that the crisis facing our economy needs urgent attention.  I applaud his decision to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to work on a bipartisan solution on behalf of the American people.

Of course, he can't be honest with his constituents on the issue because then he'd have to admit that the current crisis in the markets is a direct result of precisely the policies he's been advocating for the last 28 years.

Just a few benchmarks along the way:

• In 1994, David Dreier earned 100% on The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Deregulation Scorecard (the only year they had such a scorecard.)
• In 1995, Dreier was instrumental in pushing for deregulation of the banking industry that ultimately came to pass with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (co-sponsored by McCain's Sec. of Treasury in waiting Phil Gramm)
• In 2001, David Dreier's American Success PAC, was named one of Enron's "favored federal PACs"
• According to Open Secrets, in 2004 and 2006, Fannie Mae donated thousands of dollars to David Dreier's re-election. In fact, Dreier is one of the favorite sons of the entire finance/real estate sector -- although things did drop off after he lost his chairmanship (hmm.) In 2008 Dreier's American Success PAC's largest PAC donor was The American Bankers Association and the sector as a whole donated more than two and a half times that of any other sector to Dreier this cycle (254k) although that's less than half of what they gave him back when he was in the majority (590k in 2005-05.)
• In May, 2008, David Dreier voted NO on Housing Foreclosure Assistance Programs that would have "increased oversight and regulation of housing-related government sponsored entities." Sound familiar?

This is, of course, merely a partial list of Dreier's complicity in the epic fail that we find ourselves in right now and I will continue to document the atrocities as I dig more deeply into it. But I do find it ironic that, as much of a Bush rubber stamp that Dreier is, having voted with Bush 93.6% of the time since 2001, in some ways, George Bush's presidency has actually been one big rubber stamp of David Dreier's de-regulatory policies.