Heller’s unfulfilled promise

Six years ago, Dean Heller ran for a full term in the U.S. Senate seat to which he had been appointed. He faced Democrat Shelley Berkley in that election, and he made an issue of her vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act.

Glass-Steagall was a Depression-era law barring banks from conflicts of interest and risking money in investment or insurance businesses. More specifically, the law divided commercial banking from investment banking.

Every member of the Nevada congressional delegation, except U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan, voted to repeal Glass-Steagall. Two of them, Berkley and Sen. Harry Reid, later admitted that they had made a mistake in deregulating the field, triggering the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. But Heller didn’t let Berkley off the hook in 2012.

“I want to move to going back to Glass-Steagall,” Heller told the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal in October 2012. Based on that assurance, the right-wing Review-Journal editorial page supported him with an editorial that read in part, “Rep. Berkley also voted in 1999 to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept consumer banks from risking depositor capital in high-risk ventures. … She now admits that vote, which played a major role in creating the Great Recession, was ’a mistake,’ though she still rakes in contributions from grateful Wall Street financiers. … Sen. Heller? He’d restore Glass-Steagall to save the community and small commercial banks that have traditionally funded American small business.”

That Heller promise to support reinstituting Glass-Steagall has never been kept, although he has had plenty of reminders.

In February 2013, the Review-Journal—suspecting Heller was weakening—asked in a headline, “Where does Heller stand now on restoring Glass-Steagall?”

In October 2015, the RN&R reported, “But since being sworn into office for an elected term of his own, Heller has done nothing to reinstitute Glass-Steagall, either by introducing his own measure or by joining legislation sponsored by someone else, as Sen. John McCain did by cosponsoring Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed ’21st Century Glass-Steagall Act’.”

In April of last year, the Wall Street Journal ran a graph showing where every single senator stood on Glass-Steagall. Heller was listed among 14 senators under the heading “Did not comment.”

Some Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, have argued that Glass-Steagall is no longer needed, that the new Dodd-Frank Act will serve. Others say that Glass-Steagall is a better vehicle, that it has important legal provisions, and that it is a symbolic curb on Wall Street excesses.

But Heller doesn’t even use Dodd-Frank as an excuse. He said in 2012 that Dodd-Frank’s purpose was not to protect consumers but to provide political “cover for those who voted for the bank bailout.” We know where Heller’s opponent, Jacky Rosen, stands. She has endorsed HR 2585 to revive Glass-Steagall.

It’s not often possible to hold a glib-talking politician to a clear promise. But that’s what we have here. Heller promised to try to revive Glass-Steagall, and he never even tried. So we’re asking for an answer to the people of Nevada. What happened to your promise, Senator?