A man walks by the headquarters of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10, 2023 in Santa Clara, California. | |Liu Guanguan | Getty Images
The Arizona senator helped pass bank deregulation seen as a culprit behind SVB’s downfall, and she has accepted thousands of dollars from the bank’s PAC.
By Ja’han Jones || The Daily Beast
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who recently switched her party affiliation from Democrat to independent after facing intraparty criticism for her conservative stances, is yet again the subject of criticism for her political work in service of uber-wealthy finance executives.
The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly framed Sinema’s dilemma succinctly, noting Monday: “Whether she’s calling herself a Democrat or an independent, her voting record is the same. And it marks her a shill for the banking industry.”
Daly explained:
Before she went from the U.S. House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate, Sinema was party to an early effort by the banks to undo the provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that was passed in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, she was a supporter of H.R.992 — The Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act of 2013 — which sought to exempt certain financial instruments from some Dodd-Frank restrictions. Bank lobbyists drafted key amendments, which appeared word for word in the bill she supported in the committee and when it reached the House floor. The measure passed, but this was during the Obama administration and it had no chance of becoming law.
Michael Daly
Some Democrats are blaming SVB’s collapse on Sinema and company’s Trump-era rollback of many of the Dodd-Frank regulations.
