Is SOX a Republican problem?

While we're on the subject of Congress changing SOX, one might wonder where the political support for such a radical move might be.

Don't look at the Republicans. As Henry Butler and I discuss, drawing on details from Roberta Romano's exhaustive study, the Republicans deserve much of the blame for SOX.  In particular, they caved in the Senate, with the result that the most radical version of SOX was passed under cloture, approved with only three dissenting votes in both houses, and signed into law with breathtaking speed. Nor have I seen any support for revision from that party despite all the problems that have surfaced in the last four years.

But the House Democrats' "innovation agenda" would explicitly "require specifically-tailored guidelines for small public companies to ensure Sarbanes-Oxley requirements are not overly burdensome." This has been highlighted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a force behind the recent suit over the constitutionality of SOX.

The Democrats' position on SOX doesn't go far enough, but at least it goes somewhere. It's not that I'm ready to conclude that the Democrats can be trusted as the party of business. But somebody has to defend business's interest, and on the critical issues concerning SOX, it hasn't so far been the Republicans.

Comments

[Robert Schwartz]

As I pointed out in the previous thread, the administration threw the interests of Main Street under the bus to get away from the MSM harping on Ken Lay being Bush's friend.

The Democrats on the other hand are catamites for the trial lawyers. The only business interests they cotton to are Wall Street and Hollywood.

The entire securities law is best understood as an elaborate ruse to convince the suckers that Washington is looking out for them and will protect them against those evil Corporate Barons. Of course, Wall Street and its army of commission seeking bandits needs to be protected from those malefactors of great evil also.

You may want to ask why NYTimes never campaigns against the salaries of movie stars, trial lawyers, shortstops or wall streeters.