Incoming House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) told the Birmingham News this week that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” And Bachus plans to provide that service by trying to slow down a whole host of measures being implemented under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

One of the targets that Bachus has in his sights is derivatives reform, the title of the Dodd-Frank law that aims to bring some prudent regulation to the currently unregulated derivatives market, which played a significant role in the 2008 financial meltdown. During the debate over Dodd-Frank, Bachus had an utterly incoherent position on derivatives reform, but that hasn’t stopped him from saying that derivatives reform is “one of the job-killing provisions of Dodd-Frank that needs to be addressed.”

And Bachus is getting some help from his fellow Republicans, who are threatening to bog down rule-writing by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is charged with implementing derivatives reform. First, comes Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), who will be chairing the subcommittee on capital markets next year:

“The rule-making bodies, especially the CFTC, seem to be eager to move along at this faster than anyone can keep up with,” said Mr. Garrett, who will try to slow the process with heightened congressional oversight.

And then Reps. Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Frank Lucas (R-OK):

Republicans on the panel said CFTC should move more slowly. Frank Lucas, who will become Agriculture Committee chairman in January, said he was “willing to consider an easing of statutory deadlines.” Jerry Moran, who will become a senator in January, said CFTC was rushing to issue a rule before it has adequate information on market size or appropriate limits.

Michael Greenberger, a former CFTC division director and University of Maryland law professor, called these complaints “a red herring offered by Wall Street to delay implementation.” But it’s not only Congressional Republicans who are trying to slow-walk reform. Republican appointees to the CFTC itself are doing the same thing, according to the Wall Street Journal:

The CFTC’s two Republican commissioners say the agency is moving too fast. Commissioner Jill Sommers said she supports giving the agency another year to write the rules.

The derivatives title is one of the strongest in the Dodd-Frank law, and getting it into place will bring much-needed light to a market that is several times the size of the entire U.S. economy. But Republicans, who did nothing to contribute to the financial reform debate, are trying to throw as many wrenches into the gears as they can, while Wall Street reaps its second-highest amount of revenue ever.

For months now, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — which is supposed to be offering a report on the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown — has been bogged down by partisan bickering, with the Republican commissioners griping about the tone of the commission’s final report, which they think is too tough on the banking industry. Now, as Shahien Nasiripour reported, all of the commission’s Republican members “voted in favor of banning the phrases ‘Wall Street’ and ‘shadow banking’ and the words ‘interconnection’ and ‘deregulation’ from the panel’s final report.”

Instead, the Republican commissioners plan to politicize the report by concluding that “government policy helped inflate the housing bubble and that prices weren’t expected to crash because the government pushed homeownership so aggressively.” Particular blame is to be reserved for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act, which have played the part of conservative bogeymen for the financial crisis ever since it struck.

The claim that Fannie, Freddie, and the CRA caused the financial crisis has been so thoroughly debunked that it’s hardly worth going over again. And even the Republican commissioners themselves didn’t always believe the nonsense they’re now selling. As the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal noted, commissioner Keith Hennessey used some of the banned words on his blog back in October:

Some of these large financial institutions were so big and so interconnected with other institutions, that their failure would create a domino effect. This is what we call “too big to fail”, which should more precisely be called “too big and interconnected to fail suddenly”.

And the commission’s Vice-Chairman Bill Thomas has also pointed to problems on Wall Street:

This was a multifaceted problem, cross-disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, if you will, affecting the government regulators, affecting a product, housing to a very great extent, but other products, Wall Street.

Commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin (who, admittedly, tends to allow his opinions to blow with the political winds), defended a pronouncement from his candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), that “we’re going to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed that have caused the crisis on Wall Street”:

“It has never hurt John McCain to tell the truth,” says policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin. “He’s running for president to help Main Street, not to be popular on Wall Street.“

Holtz-Eakin also said that Wall Street has “failed us”:

Where do you place your faith? Do you place it in the institutions that have failed us, which quite frankly are in Washington and in Wall Street, or do you put the money in the places where we know we can get effective results?

Holtz-Eakin added in May that something in the shadow banking system “went badly, badly wrong”:

The goal in these two days is not so much to understand Bear Stearns or GE Capital or the other witnesses, but to understand what happened with this set of practices that is referred to as shadow banking. Short term funding for long term investments went badly, badly wrong.

The only Republican commissioner, it seems, who has never allowed the facts to get in the way of his ideology appears to be the American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison.

As CAP’s David Min explained, “because the shadow banking system lacks risk regulation or a liquidity safety net, it is highly susceptible to the bubble-bust cycle that historically plagues unregulated banking systems. This was what we saw during the last credit cycle from 2003 to 2008.” But the Republican commissioners are instead trying to pin the blame for a global financial conflagration on poor people receiving loans they couldn’t afford.

One of the concerns raised regarding the tax deal President Obama negotiated with Congressional Republicans is that it will undermine Social Security, as it includes a one-year cut in the payroll tax (the revenue from which goes to pay for Social Security). The administration has offered assurances that the lost revenue will be replaced with money from the general fund, but Republicans are already hinting that they will fearmonger about a tax increase when the cut expires, and if they are successful in blocking that expiration, Social Security’s long-term finances immediately get much worse.

But Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) is worried about something else too. During an interview yesterday with The Wonk Room, Holt explained that he doesn’t like the precedent of placing Social Security’s finances into a broader tax deal, saying that such a move will be “devastating” for the program’s future:

With this deal, Social Security is put into a package with the Bush tax cuts, with the AMT, with business accelerated expensing, and so forth. And as a result, Social Security, in a sense, becomes just another government program. And if Social Security is a program where one year you borrow from it to stimulate the economy, and another year you use it to balance the budget, you replace it from the general fund — or maybe you don’t — the political support for this will evaporate quickly…That’s the real problem here. It changes the very nature of Social Security. [...]

What is worse [than changes to the program's short-term funding] is if people begin to believe that Social Security is just another trading chip. You can use it this year for this purpose and that year for another purpose. Whether to use Social Security to accomplish other government aims, and put it in the debate just like whether the income cut-off should be $250,000 or $1 million, means that Social Security is just like those other things.

Listen here:

Holt said, “I think we’ve got to fix the deal, if we possibly can.” Instead of shifting money over to Social Security from the general fund, he advocated raising the cap on the payroll tax, to capture more income.

Holt is not alone with his concern. Eileen Applebaum at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote that “the most insidious aspect” of the payroll tax cut “is that it threatens the idea that Social Security is sacrosanct, a reality so important to the economic security of the nation that the taxes that support it should never be tampered with.” To address this problem, the House is reportedly considering changing the payroll tax holiday into a one-time refund check, based off a proposal by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA).

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.