Maybe we weren’t paying close enough attention, but we don’t remember any candidates during the run-up to last year’s election demanding higher bonuses for Wall Street bankers.

We also don’t recall anyone promising that retailers and their customers would pay higher fees so the credit card companies could make even bigger profits. Or that America should stop requiring retirement advisers to look out for their customers’ best interests instead of selling them products using sales pitches disguised as neutral advice.

Those candidates must have been out there, though, because now that Congress is in session, these are the kinds of ideas headed to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives for a vote. HR 10, known as the Financial CHOICE Act, is 589 pages of largesse for the financial services industry, giving it license to carry out the kind of reckless speculation that tanked the economy just nine years ago. The bill is expected to come up for a vote this week. It’s backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan and sponsored by Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, giving it real clout inside the majority caucus. But we hope that Maine’s 2nd District Rep. Bruce Poliquin will buck his party’s leadership and vote against it, standing with his constituents, who would lose out if it were to become law.

HR 10 is a guided missile aimed at the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations, which were set up in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008 that plunged us into the Great Recession. The debt crisis put 8.7 million people out of work and threw as many as 10 million families from their homes, creating a state of economic turmoil from which many have never recovered.

But the big banks recovered, thanks in part to government bailouts that kept them afloat. Now, House Republicans are trying to pretend that it was Dodd-Frank that wrecked the economy, not the years of slack regulation that preceded the crash.

The bill’s supporters say the change is needed to help community banks that have not bounced back as completely as the big banks. But it goes much further than that, all but eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which for the last six years has been keeping individuals from being victimized by unfair, deceptive or abusive practices. It was the agency that caught Wells Fargo Bank signing up customers for multiple accounts without their knowledge.

This financial deregulation package is not the kind of bill that members of Congress promised when they came before the voters last year. Any representative who votes for this bill now should be ready to explain themselves if they go back before the voters in 2018.


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