Feingold to vote against Wall Street reform, says it “doesn’t do the job”

This kinda flies in the face of the argument that Sen. Russ Feingold only votes against his party when his vote won’t really matter…

Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold is expected to be the only Senate Democrat voting against the hotly debated financial reforms backed by President Barack Obama when they are put to a final vote in the coming days.

Feingold’s stand has made it more difficult for his party to muster the 60 Senate votes it needs to pass what is a huge priority for the White House and frustrated some progressive groups who are his natural allies.

His position on the issue is unique in the 100-member Senate.

All the measure’s other opponents in that body are Republicans. Feingold is the only senator opposing the bill from the progressive side of the debate and the only one who is arguing that the new regulations are so timid and easy on Wall Street that passage would do more harm than good.

“It doesn’t do the job, and I’m not going to be part of basically defrauding the American people into thinking it does,” said Feingold in an interview that underscored his pointed differences with his own party on a reform package intended to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic financial meltdown of 2008.

Not surprisingly, Sen. Feingold’s stated opposition to the financial reform legislation has drawn criticism from groups on the left pushing for passage of the legislation. Heather Booth, the Executive Director of Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of over 200 national, state and local consumer, labor, retiree, investor, community, business, and civil rights organizations who are pushing for reform in our nation’s financial system, saying in an interview on June 30 that Sen. Feingold was effectively “standing with Wall Street and against Main Street” by voting no. In the same interview, Sen. Feingold shared his thoughts on the Senate’s financial reform legislation, saying, “The most progressive elements know this is a bad bill,” and he went on to assert that some of the bill’s progressive supporters were groups financed by powerful interests who want to “paper over the real problems in order to say they’ve solved it.”

Sen. Feingold went on to add that despite there being some good things in the bill, it fails to fix the most important problems: financial institutions that are “too big to fail” and the breakdown of old boundaries between different entities such as commercial banks and investment houses, a breakdown that was brought about in large part due to the repeal in 1999 of the Glass–Steagall Act, a bill that Sen. Feingold also voted against.