Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 70. Sunrise is 6:00 AM and sunset 7:57 PM for 13h 57m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM. In the afternoon, the full Board goes into closed session shortly after 5:30 PM and returns to open session at 7 PM. Whitewater’s Planning Board also meets in the evening at 6 PM.
On this day in 1941, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt sign the Atlantic Charter stating postwar aims.
Parents, on welcoming a child into the world, often express aspirational hopes for that child’s career: “Dear God, let our daughter grow up to be an extraordinary baker, astronomer, carpenter, accountant, etc.”
It’s possible, but unlikely, that there are any parents who say “Dear God, let our son grow up to be a lobbyist.”
And yet, and yet… one reads that two Wisconsin Congressmen acted as though lobbyists on behalf of their own donors when they backed a lawsuit to defund a federal consumer watchdog agency while taking financial contributions from businesses the agency regulates. Baylor Spears reports that
Two Wisconsin members of Congress are among 22 Republicans singled out in a new report for backing a lawsuit to defund a federal consumer watchdog agency while taking financial contributions from businesses the agency regulates.
U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) and Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) signed on to a friend of the court brief filed by 132 members of Congress in July in a lawsuit to kill the current funding mechanism for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The brief sides with a trade group for the payday lending industry in the case, which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear this fall.
Steil and Fitzgerald have benefited from campaign donations from industries regulated by the bureau, according to Accountable.US, a nonprofit that focuses on corporate influence in politics and government that the organization contends blunts progressive law and policy.
Accountable.US issued a report August 9 that focuses on nearly two dozen signers of the letter in 10 states and their campaign contributions from industries under CFPB regulation.
….
During his congressional career, Steil, first elected in 2018, has collected $1.2 million from financial industries regulated by the bureau, Accountable.US reports, citing data compiled by the nonpartisan campaign finance monitoring organization OpenSecrets.org. Those contributors include commercial banks, the securities and investment industry and finance and credit companies.
Fitzgerald, first elected in 2020, has collected $98,000 from CFBP-regulated industries, including commercial banks and the automotive industry. The bureau’s regulatory authority includes automobile financing.
I’ll not speak in support of yet another federal regulatory agency, but instead in opposition to two shameless men who were elected as representatives of their districts but instead spent public time boosting large donors’ interests.
These men walked up the steps of the Capitol, only to descend into something lower, and closer, to a lobbyist’s work.
Hundreds of sheep cross highway in Washington: