July 28, 2010 -
PRLog -- Just as with the health care bill, we had to pass the financial reform bill to find out what's in it and understand it. Today, a new revelation concerning the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Law was announced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Under the new law, the SEC is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in all "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities."
As lawyers from Fox News pointed out, given that the SEC is by definition a regulatory body, none of its activities are now covered by FOIA. Particularly for an administration that had pledged an unprecedented level of transparency and access in the federal government, this sort of law is truly reprehensible. This of course, underlines a significant problem in the current Congress: the propensity to pass incomprehensible 2000-plus page bills that no one has time to read, study, or debate. Surely, if such an ambitious power-grab by the SEC had been noticed by any member of the Congress (except of course, the one who put it in there), it would have raised some eyebrows. However, in addition to requiring an entire forest just to get the entire text of the bill onto paper, the speed with which the bill was rushed through Congress is an affront to core democratic values. The SEC's announcement that it will be cloistering itself from the public that it purports to serve demonstrates the problems with the Pelosi-Reid plug and chug approach to legislation.
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