During the final Iowa debate, GOP candidates came out hard against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his ties to government backed mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac. But there was one man whose voice rang out particularly discordant amid his attempt to take a swipe at Gingrich’s moral character. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) has recently rebranded himself as an outspoken critic of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite his previous support for the GSE’s affordable housing programs.
Intentionally overlooking his 1998 vote in favor of a motion to increase the Federal Housing Administration’s loan maximum from $170,000 to $197,000 — a maneuver that is strongly at odds with the hardline Republican stance he’s adopted in recent months — Santorum, in a May 2010 op-ed penned for the Philadelphia Inquirer, asserted that Fannie and Freddie were to blame for the financial crisis as they sought “to accomplish Democrats’ affordable-housing goals“:
Congress created Fannie and Freddie in 1938 to provide the affordable housing that Democrats thought the market was incapable of providing. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration pushed the mortgage giants to take on more subprime debt — and therefore risk — to accomplish Democrats’ affordable-housing goals.
As Fannie and Freddie grew in size and risk profile, I and some of my Republican colleagues attempted to restrict their growth and reform them. Democrats opposed us, and they prevailed until it was too late. In 2008, Fannie, Freddie, and the real estate bubble burst.
This particular brand of rhetoric isn’t unusual during the GOP primaries, where candidates have generally “embraced a theory that blames government policies aimed at expanding access to homeowner[s]hip for the 2008 financial crisis.” Neither is this widely accepted claim foreign to Santorum, though in suggesting that he agrees with the misguided theory that federal policies aimed at expanding access to affordable housing amongst low-income families were a preeminent factor in the 2008 financial meltdown, Santorum is, in effect, refusing to acknowledge the role he had in the matter.
In fact, in 2005 Santorum told his fellow Republicans that he was “very concerned about making sure that we do things in working with this legislation [on Fannie and Freddie] to improve the access to affordable housing,” adding that he wanted to orient Fannie and Freddie “toward taking a more active role in creating housing opportunities for low and moderate income families.”
In 2000, Santorum authored an academic article titled “A Compassionate Conservative Agenda: Addressing Poverty for the Next Millennium,” which stated that “access to safe and affordable housing is … a significant concern for low-income Americans seeking to pull themselves out of poverty,” he wrote. Now though, he’s more than happy to blame those same policies for causing the financial meltdown.
Previous in TP Economy
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.