Sen. Byron Dorgan: the Good and the Bad

Sen. Byron Dorgan (Dem.-N.D.) got some good press from Huffington Post a couple of days ago; turns out back in 1999 Dorgan was one of the only senators to vote against repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (the Depression-era law that established a firewall between commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies):

Other senators to vote against the repeal: Barbara Boxer, Barbara Mikulski, Richard Shelby, Tom Harkin, Richard Bryan, Russ Feingold, and the late Paul Wellstone. HuffPo also cites a few other people who got it right, including Edward Kane, a finance professor at Boston College, Jeffrey Garten, a Clinton Commerce undersecretary, and Ralph Nader. (No mention of D&S, which opposed the repeal consistently (e.g. here, where Jim Campen said "dominant effect is likely to be a further concentration of economic and political power, and the use of this power to benefit the new financial giants at the expense of the rest of us.").  Read the full HuffPo article here.

It seems Sen. Dorgan is an inconsistent watchdog, however. Firedoglake recently reported that Dorgan voted against the "cramdown" legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to write down the value of first mortgages (we reported on this here and here). Turns out Dorgan's wife lobbied against the cramdown legislation on behalf of the American Council of Life Insurers:

Read the full article.