How ineffective is Sherrod Brown as Senate Banking Chair? THIS ineffective

Earlier this year, we reported on how Sherrod Brown was remarkably late to the party in calling for embattled FDIC Chair Marty Gruenberg to resign following a massive sexual harassment and misconduct scandal at FDIC. Brown oversees FDIC as Senate Banking Chair, for the record.

Here’s the background on the drama as reported by the Wall Street Journal, which uncovered the scandal in the first place.

Fast forward to today– six months since the Journal’s blockbuster report ran and… basically nothing has happened.

Gruenberg is still listed as the FDIC Chair on FDIC’s homepage. (We were assured he would be standing down just as soon as Biden could find a replacement. He did. Gruenberg is still there, though).

The FDIC has finally, after five months, apparently reached consensus on how to proceed.

And now, a member of the FDIC board is pissed. From Jonathan McKernan, a member of the FDIC Board of Directors:

Today, at a Board meeting that was again closed to the public over my objections, the Board finally reached consensus on how to investigate allegations of misconduct by FDIC executives. This belated consensus follows five months of debate, delays, and false starts.

Under the approach adopted today, the newly established Office of Professional Conduct (OPC) will retain and oversee law firms that will investigate allegations of executive misconduct. Hopefully, we can expect completed investigations in the spring, with disciplinary decisions not long after that.

The problem of course is that will be too little too late. Thanks to months of debate, delays, and false starts at the Board level, accountability for wrongdoing will be delayed until a year after the Cleary report and likely after some of these executives have left the FDIC. There can be no doubt that, despite my and Vice Chairman Hill’s persistent efforts, FDIC leadership has failed to deliver prompt accountability.

Some might ask what happened to the Board majority’s 3-2 decision in August to outsource these investigations to a to-be-determined government agency. That approach proved unworkable. Even at the time of its adoption, the Board majority knew there were very significant obstacles to its success. The decision to pursue this half-baked approach was, at a minimum, a serious error of judgment.

What the fresh hell has been going on at FDIC, exactly? And why didn’t Brown step up the pressure on these people? Because he was too busy running for re-election?

One is tempted to think that maybe people like Brown (or Elizabeth Warren) having slow-walked efforts to hold FDIC accountable at the same time that they screamed from the rooftops that the Republican Party under Trump was a constant misogyny-Handmaid’s Tale-rape fest helped underline to anyone paying attention that a lot of attacks on the GOP were all hype, or at least easy to discount on the basis of, well, hypocrisy.

Maybe that didn’t, like, help Brown convince voters to do what they did in Arizona, or Nevada, or Wisconsin or Michigan, and send a Democrat back to the US Senate despite lots of those same voters ticking Trump’s box. I’m just spitballing.

Thanks to Brown’s failure to beat Bernie Moreno, Warren will now be taking over as the top Democrat on Senate Banking in the coming year (so he’s delivered up that additional headache).

In the interim, though, this is still within Brown’s purview!

Does he care about doing his job, or is he basically going to take a massive vacation between now and his formal exit from office? We’ll see, but the way this entire scandal has been handled by Biden appointees and big-name Democrats like Brown has not been encouraging.