Opening Packet – Negative – hss 2017 offcase materials start here

A-to the Agency Deference Advantage

Frontline

Financial Deregulation---1nc

Deference not key – financial deregulation inevitable – personnel is policy – staffing will mean underenforcement

Pozen 2-6 [Robert C. Pozen is currently a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.2-6-2017 https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/02/06/what-will-happen-to-dodd-frank-under-trumps-executive-order/]

Agency Revisions of Dodd-Frank Rules

The Trump Administration will be able to replace most financial regulators within the next year. The Chairs of the SEC and the CFTC have already resigned, while the terms of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC will end by the fall. The Fed Chairmanship of Janet Yellen expires in early 2018, and the Obama Administration never appointed a Fed Vice Chairman for regulation. Under a recent court ruling, currently stayed on appeal, President Trump may remove the head of the Bureau without “cause”

Of course, Trump officials will have to go through the notice and comment process to revise substantially or eliminate major rules adopted under Dodd-Frank. However, financial regulators can more easily relax these rules by flexible interpretations or minimal enforcement. As the new head of the President’s National Economic Council remarked on Friday, repeating a prior comment from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass): “Personnel is policy.”

Large financial institutions will definitely benefit from this turnover in regulatory personnel. For example, although legislation would be needed to repeal the Volcker Rule’s restrictions on proprietary trading by banks, their regulators are likely to add exemptions and interpret existing regulations liberally. Similarly, the new members of the Financial Stability Council will probably back away from labeling large insurers as systemically risky – a label now subject to a judicial challenge.

Constraints solve Trump lash-out

Goldsmith 17 (Jack, Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founder of Lawfare. He teaches and writes about national security law, presidential power, cyber security, international law, internet law, foreign relations law, and conflict of laws. He served as Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003. “Checks on Presidential Power Are Stronger Than You Think” 1-20-17 https://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/north-america/checks-presidential-power-are-stronger-you-think-1091)

TCB: Which are the most resilient currently existing checks on his power, and which need to be bolstered?

JG: There are many, both inside and outside the Executive branch. On the inside, a bevy of lawyers, ethics monitors, inspectors general, and bureaucrats in the intelligence and defense communities have expertise, interests and values, and infighting skills that enable them to check and narrow the options for even the most aggressive presidents. On the outside, the press, which did such an extraordinary job of holding Bush, and to a lesser extent Obama, to account, is more motivated than ever to hold Trump accountable. The same goes for civil society groups like the ACLU, which have used lawsuits, reports, and Freedom of Information Act requests to expose government operations and misdeeds since 9/11, and whose coffers have ballooned since Trump’s election. Spurred on by the press and civil society, the judiciary, which often stood up to Bush, will stand up even more to Trump if he engages in excessive behavior. Finally, Congress has been more consequential in constraining the national security president since 9/11 than people realize. And as we have already seen in some pushback from Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Rand Paul (R-KY), it will stand up to Trump on many issues, even though his party nominally controls Congress.

None of these institutions are perfect. They are especially ill-suited to prevent the President from using military force as he sees fit, which is why the Obama Administration’s precedents in this context are so troubling. But the institutions do a much better job in other national security contexts than they have been given credit for, and they will be watching president Trump with a very skeptical eye and an array of powers to push back.

No diversionary war

Bershidsky 17 – Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg View Columnist, Founding Editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and Founded Slon.ru, “Trump's Forever War of Diversion”, Bloomberg News, 1-25, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-25/trump-s-forever-war-of-diversion

There's even a term for the tactic: "diversionary conflict." Faced with economic difficulties or other problems potentially threatening to its survival, the regime starts a war somewhere or sharpens domestic ethnic divisions. Since the oil price plummeted in late 2014, the Putin regime has kept Russians on a steady diet of war news from eastern Ukraine and Syria (Russia and its allies have been winning). With the Syrian operation, Putin sharply raised his international standing, but a big reduction in protests against worsening economic conditions has probably been more important to him.

In neighboring Ukraine, every time a government finds itself in trouble and particularly unpopular, the matter of the country's linguistic division surfaces, with various groups trying to promote or ban the Russian language. Former President Viktor Yanukovych used the language matter as cover for passing other unpopular legislation. Now, with president Petro Poroshenko's popularity at a nadir, reforms stalled and the cost of living rising sharply, Ukrainians are distracted by the discussion of a new language law that would make Ukrainian obligatory in public life, under threat of fines.

Trump doesn't need to start wars: He and his team know how emotional many Americans are about him. He can choose what he wants to be hated for -- preferably for something silly and unrelated to his actual priorities at the moment. He used this to his advantage during the campaign: His alleged sexual misconduct took up so much media time and public attention than issues like his business history, his tax returns and his proposals.

As the inauguration attendance argument played, Trump has been busy. Apart from starting the Obamacare rollback and withdrawing from the TPP, he has frozen a reduction of mortgage insurance premiums, allowed the Keystone Pipeline to go ahead and prepared to sign an executive order to begin construction of a border wall. Well aware that some of these important actions might cause indignation and targeted protest, Trump has tossed out another meaningless football for the media and the public to fixate on.

"I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and even those registered to vote who are dead," he tweeted. Sure enough, at the time of this writing, the CNN story about this was the most shared in the last 24 hours, with news about the border wall order coming a distant second.

Just as it was unimportant how many people attended the inauguration, it doesn't matter at all at this point whether undocumented immigrants actually voted last November and whether any votes were cast for dead people. No one is challenging the results of the election. The wall and the Keystone Pipeline matter, yet are much smaller stories in terms of readership. Trump and his team are already showing a flair for diversion. Is it enough to discourage the kinds of mass protests that such aggressive moves on lightning-rod issues might spark? We'll know in the coming days and weeks, though protesters' energy was certainly sapped by the massive women's march, which took place before Trump actually did anything damaging to women's rights.

Trump's and his team's communications look awkward, inept, gallingly primitive. It's time to wise up: These people know what they're doing. They want their political opponents to be confused, to flail at windmills, to expend emotions on meaningless scandals to distract them from any targeted, coordinated action against specific threats. There are going to be many of these: Trump appears intent on keeping his promises. Calm concentration is needed to counteract dangerous policies.

Deregulation is better for growth and competitiveness

Ehrlich 1-28 [Bob Ehrlich and J.C. Boggs Mr. Ehrlich is a former Maryland governor. Mr. Boggs is former counsel to Sen. William Roth, Jr. Both are now at King & Spalding. 1-28-2017 http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/28/the-next-repeal-and-replace-dodd-frank/#31e2d90c6978]

The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, better known as “Dodd-Frank,” was constructed hastily and upon poor foundations that will require significant structural alterations. Fortunately, help is on the way. President Trump supports dismantling Dodd-Frank for the simple reason that “banks aren’t lending money to people who need it.”

Not only has Dodd-Frank restricted overall loan making by banks, it has made it more difficult for marginally credit-worthy smaller businesses and consumers to secure favorably priced loans. A recent University of Maryland study found that because of Dodd-Frank, “lenders reduced credit to middle-class households by 15%, and increased credit to wealthy households by 21%.”

Under Dodd-Frank, all bank holding companies with consolidated assets of more than $50 billion were automatically designated as “too big to fail.” The irony is that Dodd-Frank’s focus on “too big to fail” created a new problem – “too small to succeed” – as complex and costly regulations required small banks to hire compliance officers instead of lending officers.

Today, the five biggest banks control 44% of all U.S. banking assets – more than before Dodd-Frank was enacted. At the same time, more than 1,700 small and community banks - nearly one quarter of the industry - have been forced to merge or shut down.

With Dodd-Frank, Congress rewrote 140 years of banking law, going back to the National Bank Act of 1864, in just 14 months. During our respective tenures as a Member of Congress and Senate Banking Committee counsel, we have never witnessed such audacity. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

In an unprecedented delegation of authority to federal regulators, the legislation resulted in the promulgation of approximately 24,000 pages of new regulation. Six years after enactment, only 70% of the nearly 400 regulations required by the Act have been finalized, 10% are pending, and 20% have yet to be proposed.

Nowhere is such regulatory abuse more obvious than the so-called “Volcker rule” prohibiting banks and their affiliates from trading securities for their own account, although Democratic bill drafters could produce no evidence that proprietary trading contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. To make matters worse, a recent Federal Reserve staff working paper concluded that the net effect of the Volcker Rule is a less liquid corporate bond market.

Equally problematic, the new Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) was given the extraordinary power to designate nonbank financial firms as “systemically important financial institutions.” While traditional insurance activities played no role in the financial crisis and pose no risk to the financial system, these nonbank “SIFIs” are now subject to increased capital and regulatory requirements, which costs are ultimately being borne by the consumer.

Dodd-Frank also created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a $600 million annual behemoth generating more than $5 billion in fines since its inception. The CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve, evading our constitutional structure in which Congress appropriates funds for executive-branch operations. Its rulemaking is equally out of control with one regulation on mortgage lending exceeding 1,000 pages.

While Dodd-Frank is the primary villain here, associated legal risk remains a factor. Banks hit with legal settlements in the billions because of subprime mortgages also were forced by government agencies to repurchase loans. The end result – the slow recovery and one of the lowest growth periods in our nation’s history.

Innovation is another casualty. Smaller banks, in particular, complain that new rules and regulations limit the types of products and services they can offer. The result has been to drive much of today’s financial innovation to non-bank companies outside of the regulated rails, and often outside the United States. To compound matters, the FDIC has approved only three new bank charters since 2010, by far the lowest approval rate in our nation’s history.