From the Fact Check Desk: Could McCain ‘Fire’ the SEC Chairman?*

Sayers compared his success as a member of the Chicago Bears with the Navy’s as a fighting force, using teamwork as the common denominator.
“There’s no way I would have made the Hall of Fame or set any of the records I did by myself,” Sayers said. “No matter how many yards I gained, whether it was three or 300, someone had to be there to make the block. Well, I played football, but you guys are out here giving a lot to make lives and to save lives. You need each other as much as we need you. Please continue to do what you’re doing.”
Fact Check – Sayers was talking about teamwork in the military not liberals in Congress.

According to NRO in response to McCain calling for Cox’s firing:
Cox loyalist Quin Hillyer hits back: “Did he even know until yesterday that naked shorts weren’t some sort of sheer panty-hose that one of his old girlfriends wore way back when?”
OUCH!

McCain has lost a lot, but this is the real McCain who has lost credibility, who is no more honorable and no more presidential stuff. What a disaster. Republicans will regret that they have not chosen somebody with a brain like Mit Romney.

Fire McCain.
McCain and Gramm are the ones who brought about the deregulation nightmare responsible for this mess.

Actually Paulson is the one who needs to get axed. That guy is in way over his head and he’s scaring the hell out of everyone. McCain couldn’t even get that one right. He’s imploding worse than Barack a few weeks ago, only this time it’s on a very important issue. Yikes.

McCain wasn’t pushing for oversight and enforcement of regulations back when he was involved with the Keating Five scandal . Obama should talk about that every day. A lot of people are not aware of that episode in McCain’s life.But I guess it’s OK because he was a POW !

Steve, jiving? Would you say that Obama is a jive turkey?
I don’t eve know what that means actually, I just think 70′s slang is funny. :)

Palin just canceled her appearance at two big fundraisers in CA.
I wonder what’s going on.

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a maverick Republican from Maryland, endorsed Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for president in an interview Wednesday with WYPR, Baltimore’s National Public Radio station.
Wait, McCain is now the populist now right? Can you be a populist and a maverick at the same time?
Has the word ‘maverick’ just entirely lost its meaning at this point?
I swear, I’m just going to call everyone a maverick. You know George Bush is a maverick right? Oh and Bill Clinton was a maverick and Richard Nixon was a maverick and JFK was a maverick…

Ryan C: “Palin just canceled her appearance at two big fundraisers in CA.
I wonder what’s going on.”
Is it moose-hunting-season?
Or maybe there’s another unplanned expansion of her family? Who knows.

Jake, you got played by the McCain campaign. I’m assuming you got this bit about McCain being “attacked” by the Obama campaign for saying he’d fire the SEC chief from Brian Rogers. Well, if you read Rogers’s statement carefully, you’ll note that he doesn’t say McCain has been attacked by the Obama campaign; rather, he says the Obama campaign is “about to” attack McCain. In other words, as Talking Points Memo points out, the McCain campaign is preemptively attacking Obama for something he hasn’t done.

I would agree with that except that these are fundraisers for both the national & state party and they will be without the star of the party right now vs say rallies.
With McCain relying heavily on the RNC for funding, I don’t understand why the VP would cancel fundraiser appearances. That’s what VPs are supposed to do, raise cash while the candidate is out campaigning.

Though a president cannot fire any member of the SEC, in the sense of forcing a resignation from the Commission, he does have unquestioned authority to remove the chairman from his chairmanship and designate another existing member of the Commission to serve as the new chairman.

Chris Cox was appointed to do exactly what he has been doing, which is NOTHING! Bush, and McCain, were all about de-reg and part of that was gutting the regulatory bodies and neutering the oversight.
Now he’s McCain’s scapegoat, even though he was doing what he was hired for. Pretty disingenuous on McCain’s part.
He’s not bringing up Phil Gramm a lot these days, is he.

and by the way, California, you cannot even get your house in order. Quit acting like you are the cat’s meow and get your own state’s finances in order. You have no right to criticise anyone when you can’t budget yourselves.

From:
Head of State
Thursday, September 18, 2008
ABC News:

“At a joint rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Thursday, Republican John McCain slammed the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being “asleep at the switch” saying that if he were president, he would fire Chris Cox, the chairman of the SEC since 2005 and a former Republican congressman…
But while the president nominates and the Senate confirms the SEC chair, a commissioner of an independent regulatory commission cannot be removed by the president.”

Perhaps he could name him President of Spain.

Edward Henderson wrote (with corrections): “The people of California are using our oil and gasoline extracted from our Coast, the Gulf Coast.”
You might want to do your homework. According to the 2006 statistics: 39% of California’s crude oil comes from California; 16% comes from Alaska; and 45% is from out of the country (Saudi Arabia-13%; Ecuador-11%; Iraq-9%; Brazil-3%; Angola-2%; Mexico-2%; and the remaining 5% comes from Columbia, Oman, Venezuela and Argentina).
Sorry not a drop from the Gulf Coast.

Lately McCain seems to be slipping often. If he does this in the debates the story becomes his age.

As if. None of McCain’s blustering is going to make a bit of difference to average Americans who can remember how many houses they own – or hope they still own one. All of us would be a lot better shape if John McCain and his friends had not spent the last 20 years deregulating every aspect of our economy and let the free market run itself. I didn’t hear him whining about Wall Street before. If this is what deregulation does to Wall Street, imagine what it will mean when the free market economy has free reign over our health insurance and our lives.

It’s true that the SEC is an “independent agency,” and that the statute creating the SEC (specifically, Section 4 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934) doesn’t expressly state that the president can fire SEC commissioners. But the law on this point is well settled: As the D.C. Circuit reiterated as recently as last month, in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, 537 F.3d 667, 668-69 (D.C. Cir. 2008), “[m]embers of the Commission, in turn, are appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate and subject to removal by the President for cause; its chairman is selected by and serves at the pleasure of the President.”

Jake Tapper and Lisa Chinn have NOT DONE THEIR LEGAL HOMEWORK. There is but no question that the president has the power to fire the SEC Chairperson. While SEC Commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a five year term, the Chair is selected by the president under executive regulations. The commissioner who is designated as chairperson serves at the pleasure of the president, and can be removed as chair as the president sees fit. While a removed chair might still be able to hold onto his or her seat as a commissioner, and there is some judicial authority that say the president can fire a commissioner, he or she certainly has no legal claim to the chairperson’s seat once the president has taken him or her out of that position. ABC News and the McCain campaign are woefully uninformed on this matter. Shame on both.

A quick follow-up – while he could fire Cox, I’d rather he appointed him to a cabinet position because he’s smart, conservative and honest – if a bit unlucky to be here now.
It would be a more apt step in the right direction to have Sens. Dodd, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et al taken out of the Congress in handcuffs. They are the ones who have plundered the accounts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, etc. over the years.

I truly don’t think he has a clue
It’s like when Palin keeps talking about putting the federal checkbook online when it has already been done and in fact was the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act that Barack Obama teamed up with a Republican to do.
She needs somes lessons.

Palin Email Hacker is Son of Democrat Tennessee State Senator Mike Kernell according to the FBI.
David Kernell, a college student has been positively identified as the perp who hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account.
State Rep. Mike Kernell said today that he was aware of Internet rumors about his son being the subject of speculation that he accessed the personal e-mail of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Asked whether he or his son, a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, had been contacted by authorities investigating the break-in of Palin’s account, he responded:
“Me, no.”
As far as his 20-year-old son, David, he said: “I can’t say. That doesn’t mean he has or hasn’t (been contacted by investigators.”
Kernell, D-Memphis, cited the father-son relationship.
He said he had talked to his son today, but that he talks to his son regularly.
He declined further comment.

The fact checkers at the Annenberg Foundation run Factcheck-conveniently nonpartisan although Obama ran the Annenberg challenge with Bill Ayers- is wrong. Maybe instead of looking to the DNC they should check real legal facts. the SEC Chairman serves and can be removed by the President.

I agree with the guy who said we ought to fire the whole lot of them, inluding the former chair of the Commerce Committee on whose watch much of this happened.

Susie, John McCain is not only close to Phil Gramm, who was the leader of deregulation, and John McCain VOTED for deregulation, one of his closest economic advisors is John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch. Merrrill Lynch – as in the firm that is close to the center of this mess. Both candidates have taken money from Wall Street – not just Obama, as your post suggests – and McCain has actually taken more than Obama (John Thain raised $500,000 alone).

All the posters who are insisting that the President can fire the SEC chairman are simply cutting and pasting from an article by a conservative attorney on the Weekly Standard’s web site. But that argument begs the question: If the president actually has the power to fire the SEC chairman, why has that never happened even once in the history of the institution?