If you’re looking for a core principle that defines the modern Republican Party, a good candidate is the never-ending smokescreens they use to cover up their true intentions.  This is especially the case when the GOP goes to bat for the Wall Street plutocrats that stuff their campaign war chests.

Consider a new House GOP push to strip the FDIC of the power to liquidate failing financial institutions:

The House Financial Services Committee voted along party lines to repeal the section of the law that allows the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp to liquidate large, failing financial institutions seized by the government.

This authority was included in the law in an attempt to avoid the type of market chaos and government bailouts that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 by giving the government a mechanism for better controlling the breakup of a financial giant.

Now consider the weak tea they’re serving up on why they want to repeal the provsion:

House Republicans justified repealing the provision by claiming that it would reduce deficits by $22 billion over the next ten years. This was based on a rather bizarre score from the Congressional Budget Office, which said the provisions “costs” $22 billion because, in the event that the government needs to unwind a failing firm, it might not recoup all of the money spent unwinding it within a ten-year budget window; therefore, CBO said, the provision “costs” money (though no money is actually being spent). As financial analyst Brian Gardner said, “it’s tough to understand where the $22 billion comes from — it’s a wild assumption since there are currently no cash flows involved with this part of Dodd-Frank.”

I know there are lots of complex issues wrapped up in the financial crisis and the resulting bailouts – but this ain’t one of them.  The biggest reason why Bush was forced to bail out the big financial institutions is that the FDIC didn’t have the authority or capability to dissolve the institutions that became “too big to fail”.  Instead of being able to conduct what is, in effect, a structured bankruptcy liquidation that mitigates the risk of blowing up the entire financial system, we were forced to desperately pump hundreds of billions of dollars of life support into the very institutions that pushed the country off a cliff.

With all that in mind, it’s no wonder that Wall Street lobbyists want their paid GOP lapdogs to undo a law that forces failing financial institutions into bankruptcy liquidation.  But it’s kind of sad that Republicans can’t even keep up the pretense that they’re not just doing what their lords and masters bid of them.