Republicans just catching up with Ron Paul on Sarbanes-Oxley
“Again, observers have to ask why Ron Paul, almost alone, had the foresight to know that Sarbanes-Oxley would be a disaster,” says the Ron Paul campaign.
This comes in response to an article by National Review Online (NRO) highlighting the bill’s massive imposition on American business:
If there is one issue that may somewhat unite the GOP presidential field and the Obama administration, it’s disdain for a nearly ten-year-old law signed by George W. Bush. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, rushed through Congress as a “fix” after the Enron and WorldCom implosions, added billions in regulatory costs in the supposedly deregulatory Bush era. And it has little to show for itself in preventing subsequent financial scandals.
Ron Paul was one of only three Representatives who voted against Sarbanes-Oxley when it passed. Now, nine years later, after Paul’s predictions have come true and American businesses pay on average $2.3 million annually to comply with just one section of the regulations, other Republican leaders are just now catching up:
Now, as presidential candidates are championing the cause of paring red tape, the burden of Sarbox’s accounting mandates on small and midsize public companies has been picked up by nearly every GOP candidate from new front-runner Newt Gingrich to media favorite Jon Huntsman. Even the Obama administration has joined the Sarbox critique to a surprising extent.
Gingrich has said, “I would repeal Sarbanes-Oxley.”
But NRO has gotten its perspective backwards. It says that all the Republican leaders “stand with Gingrich in calling for repeal.” Correction: Gingrich and the others stand with Paul who’s been standing there for nine years already.
The Paul campaign was quick to explain why:
The answer is simple. Paul has a consistent limited government message that recognizes that such burdensome regulation by the state is almost always bad. When you have a consistent Constitutional philosophy, these are not difficult predictions. Most of the other 2012 GOP candidates are conservative in their rhetoric; only Paul has been conservative in reality. This is just another example among many.
There is one group consistently lobbying Congress to keep the regulations in place: the accountants who profit from it. NRO explains how ”the accounting lobby is loath to give up its government-granted riches,” and it has the ears of “at least two Republicans on the Financial Services Committee who seem willing to do its bidding: Reps. John Campbell (R., Calif.), and Steve Pearce (R., N.M.).”