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Dem leader hits Toomey on financial reform

State Democratic Party chairman T.J. Rooney on Tuesday sharply criticized Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey for supporting GOP moves to block financial reform legislation in Congress, as Democrats continued their efforts to define Toomey ahead of this year’s general election.

“Pat Toomey announced that he, too, would have voted to join his ‘Fabulous-Fab’ Republican colleagues in voting against a bill designed to protect consumers and hold Wall Street accountable,” Rooney told during a morning conference call, using a moniker for Goldman Sachs executive Fabrice Tourre. “Democrats are committed to creating a financial system that works for all Pennsylvanians, not just rich Wall Street executives like Fabulous Fab and Pat Toomey.”

Toomey was a derivatives trader in the late 1980s, though the derivatives blamed for helping stoke the recent financial crisis had not yet been developed during his time in the industry. Republicans claim the financial reform bill before Congress will inevitably lead to more bank bailouts, a contention that has been partly debunked.

In opposing the bill earlier this week, a Toomey spokeswoman cited the possibility of future bailouts.

“The bill, in its current form, is fundamentally flawed because it not only fails to eliminate the ‘too big to fail’ phenomenon, but, in fact, codifies that approach into federal law,” the spokeswoman told The Morning Call. “It thereby makes corporate bailouts permanent U.S. policy, rather than a thing of the past.”

Correction: Because of an editing error, this article originally misstated a fact-checker’s analysis of Republican claims about the financial reform bill. Claims that the legislation “guarantees” future bailouts have been debunked, not claims that the bill may lead to future bailouts in general.

April 27, 2010 at 4:33 pm

--Donald Hoegg

Tags: Democratic Party, Pat Toomey

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