Bernie Sanders during the Democratic presidential debate at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina, January 17, 2016. (Photo: Travis Dove / The New York Times)
If you watched Sunday’s Democratic debate, you learned something interesting about Bernie Sanders: he voted for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, something Hillary Clinton was all too eager to point out when the two of them got to talking about Wall Street reform.
Sounds pretty bad, right? The guy who goes on and on about how bad Wall Street is actually voted for the bill that crashed economy. So much for all that “political revolution” stuff.
But here’s the thing: Hillary Clinton isn’t telling a true story about Bernie Sanders and his vote for the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, or CFMA.
As Robert Scheer has pointed out over at Truthdig, then-Congressman Sanders voted for the CFMA, not because he wanted to, but because he had to.
The CFMA had been shoved into an omnibus spending bill at the last minute as part of a deal between Republicans and President Bill Clinton, and because this was a time when, you know, Congress actually did its job, Sanders bit the bullet and voted for the whole package – CFMA included – to keep the government open.
See more news and opinion from Thom Hartmann at Truthout here.
Only four members of Congress ended up opposing the final spending bill that included the CFMA, and one of them was Ron Paul, who opposed pretty much every spending bill. But that’s just of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how dishonest Clinton was being when she called Bernie out for voting for the CFMA.
Even if Bernie had a good reason to vote for that omnibus spending bill – like preventing a government shutdown – Sanders was angry that he been forced into deregulating Wall Street.