No One Wants to Serve on House Financial Services?

The Washington Post reports today that many of the incoming Democratic freshman representatives do not want to serve on the House Financial Services Committee, traditionally a plum assignment because it facilitates representatives' ability to fund-raise for their reelection.  I'm proud to say that the member-elect who is proudly bucking the trend is our former co-blogger, Katherine Porter, and I can confidently say that her interest in the committee has nothing to do with fund-raising and everything to do with its jurisdiction.  

There are a lot of good reasons an incoming member might not want to serve on HFS--the member might have expertise or interest that more closely tracks the jurisdiction of another committee.  But I worry that the lack of interest also reflects a really problematic trend on the left. While many progressive politicians like to decry abuses in the financial services industry, they often have little to no understanding of the industry and aren't interested in gaining one.  The industry and its regulation are complex.  Its often not as intuitively understandable as, say, issues of criminal justice reform.  But its consequences are at least as far-reaching, both because all Americans depend on financial services and because of the influence of financial services on the whole political process.  Any politician who is concerned about social inequality ought to be deeply engaged with financial regulation.  It's not the low-hanging fruit, perhaps, but it's where the future of the middle class will be decided.  

Sadly, this phenomenon isn't limited to progressive politicians.  It's endemic on law school faculties.  I recall several years ago hearing colleagues bemoaning the financial crisis foreclosure crisis, but having absolutely no clue about what led up to it and what was contributing to it.  They did, however, have lots of strong normative views on methods of Constitutional interpretation.  The irony here is that my colleagues very much understand that dry, technical legal rules can have enormous social consequences.  But they prefer to engage primarily with social justice, rather than economic justice issues, even though the two are intimately linked.  I suspect this is part of the general phenomenon of the legal academy having disengaged with its traditional bread-and-butter---commercial law.  But it meant that much of the progressive establishment was asleep at the wheel (if not financially co-opted) when financial deregulation occurred in the 1990s and 2000s. 

To be sure, there's a small cadre of progressive thought-leaders and politicians (most notably some of our former co-bloggers) who have taken the time to understand the financial system in depth, and they've contributed in an out-sized manner to financial regulatory debates.  But the fact remains that most progressives don't want to touch financial and commercial regulation.  And we're all the worse off for it.