One possible obstacle to moving quickly: many members of the commission have close ties to the elite financial institutions that played a central role in the crisis, and several are known as dogged supporters of the political party that named them to the panel. Will the inquiry truly turn over every rock and question every tight-lipped bank executive? We could begin to see the  answer today. In the meantime, let’s meet the investigators.

Phil Angelides: The commission’s chairman was most recently in public view as the Democrats’ 2006 nominee for California governor, but he has vowed to use famed 1930s financial investigator Ferdinand Pecora as a model and pursue a non-partisan, just-the-facts approach. Angelides’ first test may be the reluctance of White House or Wall Street officials to abide by subpoenas for testimony; such refusals became a problem for the 9/11 Commission in its early days.

Bill Thomas: During his years as GOP chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee, Thomas earned a reputation as a brilliant and fierce combatant in the fight for broad deregulation of industry. He voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that allowed banks to amass unprecedented amounts of risk, and he raised $1.8 million from the financial industry during his political career.

Brooksley Born: This former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission became a folk hero of sorts after the economy began its free fall, when her struggle to regulate the shadowy world of derivatives trading burst into public view. Born lost the battle she waged in the late 1990s with then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers, then and now a senior White House economics adviser. But she could well be the most vocal commission member when it comes to unmasking the government’s failure to guard against financial risk – because she had a front-row seat.

John W. Thompson: Formerly chairman of the high-tech company Symantec, Thompson was singled out by the Center for Responsive Politics as the commission’s most prolific political campaign donor. During the 2008 cycle alone, he and his wife gave more than $405,000 to Democratic candidates.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.): This former chairman of the intelligence committee is no stranger to bank-industry cash, raising $2.1 million from financial firms during his career.

Keith Hennessey: This former economic adviser to President George W. Bush could be a witness for the panel, were he not a member. Hennessey joined the White House in late 2007, and he told Foreign Policy magazine last month that few on the president’s team saw the financial crisis coming until it hit in mid-2008.

Byron Georgiou: Based in Las Vegas, Georgiou is an attorney whose firm represents shareholders in several lawsuits filed against bailed-out banks, including Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin: After heading the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office during the GOP’s years in control of Congress, Holtz-Eakin left to start his own private consulting firm and serve as a senior economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign last year. Whether the CBO-era Holtz-Eakin or the more partisan McCain-era Holtz-Eakin will emerge should be interesting to watch as the commission digs deeper into the crisis.

Peter Wallison: This GOP appointee, a longtime fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has already claimed to have uncovered the cause of the financial crisis – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s role in helping low-income homeowners obtain mortgages. While Fannie and Freddie were certainly not blameless, Wallison’s narrative is shared almost exclusively by other conservatives.

Heather Murren: Named to the commission by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Murren is a veteran managing director at Merrill Lynch, the firm that paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses in the final days before its shotgun wedding with Bank of America.

With the commission stacked with so many of its friends, the financial industry is likely breathing a little easier than it was when the panel was proposed in April.

A little background: After the Great Depression, a Congressional panel called the Pecora Commission investigated Wall Street’s misdeeds and set the stage for financial regulations that lasted for decades. Since the current meltdown, some have been calling for another commission. That seemed unlikely at first, because Congress itself undid many of the regulations the Pecora Commission created — and it appeared unlikely lawmakers would choose to investigate themselves.

But that view has turned out to be overly skeptical. Reuters reported recently that Congress in on the verge of naming members to a bipartisan panel known as the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, based on the Pecora model. While that should be welcome news, some of the names emerging as possible panel members are already causing consternation.

From Reuters columnist Matthew Goldstein:

But there are already worrying signs that this commission will lack the political nerve to tackle the tough issues, let alone ask the right questions. Reuters reported last week that some of the people being considered for the commission include many former Congressmen, governors and familiar talking heads from Washington think tanks. Let’s hope that will not be the case because the financial system can’t truly be fixed until there’s a candid assessment of who let things get so out of control.

Sure, put some wise political statesmen on the commission. But also allow room for some longtime Wall Street critics, derivatives traders and hedge fund managers — the kind of people who know the system from the inside out.

But not so fast. Sam Stein at The Huffington Post reports that Congress may move soon on an investigation modeled after the Sept. 11 commission to examine the financial meltdown:

The House of Representatives came to agreement on Monday afternoon on the establishment of a 9/11-styled commission that would be independent of Congress and granted the power of subpoena to investigate the origins of the financial crisis.

Aides on the Hill said that the House will likely vote on the measure Wednesday, adding that the chances of passage were high. The office of the bill’s cosponsor, Congressman Darrell Issa, said the legislation would be similar to that recently passed by the Senate.

The concept of the commission is pegged to the investigative body that looked into the intelligence collapse precededing the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

The key, in this case, is that the body – eight or (likely) ten members, split evenly by party affiliation – would have the power of subpoena, compelling the key players to testify. “It is,” said one staffer involved in the creating of this legislation, “essential.”

If a commission does get approved, look for it to be extremely busy. There’s plenty to investigate, from securities fraud to all the political moves to strip financial regulations. This may not mark the return of the Pecora Commission, but it could come pretty close.

But it wasn’t always this way, as Thomas Frank reminds us today in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Frank reviews the history of the Pecora Commission, a congressional panel that investigated bank misdeeds during the Great Depression. Its findings were used to create new laws to curb financial industry abuses that kept banks in check for decades, until many of those regulations went out the door, beginning in the 1990s.

In the course of its investigation, the Senate Banking Committee, which brought on as its counsel a former New York assistant district attorney named Ferdinand Pecora, heard testimony from the lords of finance that cemented public suspicion of Wall Street. Along the way, the investigations formed the rationale for the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities Exchange Act, and other financial regulations of the Roosevelt era.

Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” writes that the idea of a new Pecora Commission is catching on, at least on the left. But it’s not likely it will become a reality. This time around, Congress would have to investigate itself — and its role in paving the way for the deregulatory zeal that is cited as the source of many of the financial system’s problems today.

The crisis today is not solely one of bank misbehavior. This is also about the failure of the regulators — the Wall Street policemen who dozed peacefully as the crime of the century went off beneath the window.

We have all heard the official explanation for this failure, that “the structure of our regulatory system is unnecessarily complex and fragmented,” in the soothing words of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. But no proper Pecora would be satisfied with such piffle. The system was not only complex, it was compromised and corrupted and thoroughly rotten even in the spots where its mandate was simple.

After all, we have for decades been on a national crusade to slash red tape and stifle regulators. Over the years, federal agencies have been defunded, their workers have grown dispirited, their managers, drawn in many cases from antiregulatory organizations, have seemed to care far more about industry than the public.

Frank also points out the difficulties of investigating how the free market philosophy of the Bush administration went too far:

Consider in this connection the 2003 photograph, rapidly becoming an icon of the Bush years, in which James Gilleran, then the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision (it regulates savings and loan associations) can be seen in the company of several jolly bank industry lobbyists, holding a chainsaw to a pile of rule books. The picture not only tells us more about our current fix than would a thousand pages about overlapping jurisdictions; it also reminds us why we may never solve the problem of regulatory failure. To do so, we would have to examine the apparent subversion of the regulatory system by the last administration. And that topic is supposedly off limits, since going there would open the door to endless partisan feuding.

But as Frank notes, Republicans alone aren’t to blame. It was former President Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Larry Summers who pushed for the measure that overturned Glass-Steagall’s separation of investment from commercial banking.

Given all this, what are the chances that Republicans and Democrats will join hands to probe what went wrong during the financial crisis, and then work together to craft purposeful regulations to make sure another crisis never occurs? Pretty much nonexistent.

Based on the cramdown experience, banks are rolling over Congress already. It’s as if the Pecora Commission is already just a distant memory. The lack of action by Congress to figure out what really went wrong, and to take steps to fix it, will be the enduring scandal of this financial crisis.