This week the U.S. Senate went into recess until after the elections. It was the end of Ted Kaufman’s time in the U.S. Senate. The election in November is a special election and the winner will take over the Senate seat. Ted Kaufman turned out to be a great asset to the U.S. Senate and he will be missed. He was able to talk eloquently about the failures of our banking sytem and became a voice for people who have suffered from them. Senator Kaufman did an interview with the Huffington Post and reminded us of why we love him:
But, Kaufman said in an interview with the Huffington Post, there’s a paradox at work: If he’d been running for reelection, he wouldn’t have those rabid backers, because he never would have waged his campaign against the banks – not because he would have worried it would hurt him politically, but simply because he would have had to spend more than half his time raising money and organizing his campaign.
“It is a perfect Catch-22,” said Kaufman, explaining that his campaign against the banks “wouldn’t have existed, no, because I’m not on the banking committee. I would have stuck to my bidding on judiciary and foreign relations.”
And without the campaign against the banks, he wouldn’t have the supporters he now does. “I wouldn’t have this rabid” following, he said. “That’s the whole thing. It was a Catch-22. There’s no way I could have — my race, if I ran, would be totally, you know, standard, cookie-cutter campaign. I wouldn’t have had anything to show. I never would have been able to do any of the things that would really be the major things in my campaign, because the whole stuff I’d done on financial reform–we never would have been part of the debate.”
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Kaufman said that the only way out of the paradox he experienced is to create a system of public financing for campaigns, but the Supreme Court is making that increasingly less attainable. “If I’m czar, not president of the United States of America, I’d institute public financing of campaigns. But that cat’s long out,” he said. “So I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what to say about the system. The system is so awful.”
Amen to that, Senator Kaufman. Ted Kaufman may be leaving the Senate but he isn’t leaving public service all together. He’s been tapped to take over the Bailout Oversight Committee, replacing Elizabeth Warren.
Sen. Ted Kaufman, the outgoing Delaware senator who battled to break up major banks the past year, will replace Elizabeth Warren as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, an aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told HuffPost.
Reid initially appointed Warren to run the panel, launching her as a national champion of the middle class. The committee oversees the federal government’s bailout of Wall Street.
The TARP program is actually ending soon but we’ll be shareholders in banks and AIG for many more years. It’s good to know that we have a champion like Ted Kaufman there to try to keep these banks honest.