During a recent town hall appearance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene answered questions, written on scraps of paper by audience members, that she picked out of a fish bowl on stage. One question was whether she would “lead the charge in [sic] reapplying the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933?” Seems simple enough. But Greene’s response defied even the lowest expectations: “I was born in 1974 so I’m not familiar with that. But I can have my staff look into it.” Gazpacho police anyone?
The Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933, eroded over the decades and fully neutered under President Bill Clinton in 1999 (when Greene was 24), was arguably our country’s strongest ever banking regulations. Among its provisions, it kept commercial and investment banking separate, and established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect bank depositors’ money.
If one of your jobs is to make laws that affect our economy, you should at least have an opinion, even if it is a wholly uninformed one, on Glass-Steagall. Greene’s bizarre defense that she doesn’t know about things that happened before she was born in 1974 isn’t anti-intellectual as much as it is a lie.
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Based on Greene’s criteria for things she is “not familiar” with, here is a list:
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The Constitution.
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People like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
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Slavery
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The Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade
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The Civil War
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The Civil Rights movement
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The Vietnam-Paris Peace Accords
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Watergate
Wait, maybe she is telling the truth!
Here’s the video and some responses.
But we know Marjorie is full of … meadow muffins.
Since our economic collapse and crisis at the end of the second Bush administration, there have been steady calls for new Glass-Steagall-type legislation. Not unlike gun-safety legislation, strong popular support for new banking regulations have been ignored by Congress. Senators such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have repeatedly offered up new legislation that seeks to end the “too big to fail” phenomenon.
Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t be bothered with even knowing that legislation like that existed once—during her lifetime.
This week on “The Downballot,” we’re joined by guest host Joe Sudbay and law professor Quinn Yeargain for a deep dive into major political developments in three states. First up is Arizona, where a key GOP retirement on the Board of Supervisors in jumbo Maricopa County gives Democrats an excellent chance to win their first majority since the 1960s. Then it’s on to Arkansas, where citizens are working to overturn a Republican bill that purports to ban “critical race theory” in public schools by qualifying a referendum for the ballot. Finally, we hit Michigan, where Democrats just advanced a measure to have the state add its Electoral College votes to a multistate compact that would elect the president by the national popular vote.
