Hypocrisy, much?
Via Free Beacon.
A U.S. senator who took advantage of a loophole in ethics laws to avoid disclosing a $1.3 million credit line against her home is now warning that incomplete financial disclosures from cabinet nominees put the country at risk.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D., Mass.) warning came in the Washington Post, where she wrote that “it is critical that each nominee follows basic ethics rules to ensure that they will act for the benefit of all the American people.”
Warren argued that financial disclosures are needed to “reveal potentially damaging information that may undermine fitness to serve” and that nominees with “complex financial histories” need to be “forthcoming and transparent.”
Warren, meanwhile, continues to skirt congressional ethics laws by failing to include a $1.3 million line of credit against her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home on financial disclosure forms….
An aide for Warren, who is worth millions, defended the omission, stating at the time that a home equity line of credit like the one that Warren received from Bank of America doesn’t have the same reporting requirements as a typical home mortgage, which would have to be reported.
The STOCK Act, which was signed into law in 2012, mandated that all members of Congress disclose details of any mortgages on their personal residences in their annual filings.
The legislation, however, does not mention home equity lines of credit, which banks offer as alternatives to a mortgage.
The Warren aide said that the senator had yet to borrow on the line of credit, which allowed her to leave it off disclosure forms.
The exact terms of Warren’s deal with Bank of America such as her interest rate remain a mystery due to the lack of disclosure….
In the time honored tradition of politicians increasing fees while campaigning on not raising taxes.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it’s not obvious to me what the relevance of either a line of credit or a home mortgage is. Isn’t our concern with income, not legitimate credit? Borrowing money against one’s house is financially neutral; some cash (or potential to borrow cash) balanced by a corresponding debt. So this doesn’t enable corruption, unless the banks have provided some sort of sweetheart deal on better terms than the average Joe could get. (Yes, there’s plenty of room for corruption in real estate deals; check out the questionable dealings between a young Barry Obama and Tony Rezko as examples. But that involved, as I recall, buyings and sellings at artificial prices for the presumed purpose of exchanging influence for money. You know, the sort of thing that put Gov. Rod Blagojevich in jail after he sold Obama’s Senate seat on eBay. Naturally, Obama had no idea his Senate seat was up for auction; he paid absolutely no attention to where his seat was going to go, none at all. How dare you suggest Obama was in on it? But I digress. I just don’t see an inherent problem with a line of credit.)