Why America Mistrusts Congress

Here’s Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) last week criticizing the banks — and the lawmakers beholden to the banks — after controversial changes were made to a House housing bill: “These guys rule this place,” she said of the finance industry, according to The Associated Press.

And here’s The New York Times reporting this morning that the same Maxine Waters helped a bank with ties to her family seek funds from the Treasury Department’s Wall Street bailout.

Top federal regulators say they were taken aback when they learned that a California congresswoman who helped set up a meeting with bankers last year had family financial ties to a bank whose chief executive asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.

This is a surprise because Waters is among Capitol Hill’s fiercest critics of the finance industry. As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, she almost never misses an opportunity to rip into bank representatives over bailout spending, not to mention the predatory lending practices that largely led to the housing crisis. And who knows — maybe in setting up the meeting, she had no idea that OneUnited leaders would use the forum to request a handout.

Still, the conflict of interest is glaring. For any lawmakers wondering why congressional approval ratings have been so low for so long, here’s a good reason.