Billy Long: Joe Biden's not a nice guy

(From Seventh District Congressman Billy Long)

We were promised that if we would just elect Joe Biden President that we would have a nice guy in charge that would return things to normal at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. 

In fact he placed such a premium on treating people with respect that he promised his staff that 'I will fire you on the spot' if they disrespected others. 

Well he now makes the late Don Rickles truly look like the 'Mr. Warmth' he was sarcastically known as. That is unless you have a different definition of a nice guy. 

President Biden chastises female reporters for asking 'dumb questions' and called a male reporter a 'stupid S. O. B.' And, as far as getting things back to normal the Biden administration has been anything but normal. 

The past year has seen crisis after crisis, all due to President Biden’s failed leadership. Shouldn't the party that campaigned on restoring institutional norms actually uphold a few of those norms? 

The Department of Justice has been completely politicized and the Congressional leadership attempted to blow up the filibuster, all while the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee wants to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices to protect their radical policies. 

As all of this is going on, the Democrats have been quietly attempting to weaponize the banking industry, namely the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This attack on a critical industry shows that the Democrats will stop at nothing to enact their broken policies, even if it means breaking with norms that have been in place for nearly 90 years.

Created in 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, the FDIC was intended to protect depositors by providing insurance on their deposits. Without the FDIC, if your bank were to fail, your savings would disappear. This was a common occurrence during the Depression, so the federal government took action to protect deposits. An agency of such importance as the FDIC should be protected from political interference, which it was for several decades, but now that President Biden is in charge, that is changing.

Jelena McWilliams, chairman of the FDIC, recently alleged that President Biden’s appointees have been attempting a “hostile takeover” of the agency. Chairman McWilliams, who was appointed by President Trump in 2018, specifically claims that the other FDIC board members, all appointed by President Biden, have attempted to subvert her authority as chairman, and implement their own policies, against the will of either her or the FDIC career staff. 

Typically, the FDIC career staff will draft policy documents, and then present them to the board for their approval, but that process doesn’t fit into the Democrats’ plan. In October of this year, Chairman McWilliams alleges that Rohit Chopra, who serves as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and sits on the board of the FDIC, presented Chairman McWilliams with a draft request for information on bank mergers, without first addressing it with the career staff. 

When the career staff were able to review the document, they found several omissions and inaccuracies, and offered to work with the other board members to draft a better document. A few weeks later, the other board members attempted to force a vote on the CFBP’s draft, and not the FDIC’s draft. They voted over email, which does not constitute a formal vote, but decided to post the CFPB’s document on the website, claiming it was an official FDIC release.

The recent attempt by partisan board members to seize control of the FDIC flies in the face of the agency’s history. Even when the chairman is of a different party than the majority of the board, board members have respected the chairman’s authority and control over the FDIC staff. 

Sadly, this is no longer the case, and it has led to Chairman McWilliams’ announcement a few weeks ago that she will resign from the FDIC in early February. For four years, the Democrats falsely claimed that President Trump was destroying institutional norms, and that they would restore those norms when they were in power. 

Now that they are in power, they have done more damage to our nation’s critical institutions than was ever thought possible. It is imperative that this assault on our institutional norms stop immediately. We simply can’t allow the Democrats to continue undermining these vital institutions of our Republic. In the sales world advertising one product while delivering a different product of inferior quality is known as 'bait and switch' and the practice is illegal. Luckily for President Biden, 'Bait and Switch' apparently is not illegal in the political world.