James Comer, chair of the United States House of Representatives Oversight and Accountability Committee, has threatened Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler with a subpoena. He wrote in the letter dated Oct. 12, that the committee will have “no choice” but to use compulsory measures to obtain documents if the SEC does not start cooperating with it.
Comer also expressed concern about SEC “actions taken to circumvent Congress to further an agenda that harms American taxpayers.” Cryptocurrency proponents in Congress have often complained about Gensler in similar terms, but this letter is not about crypto. Rather, Comer was writing about coordination with the European Union (EU) on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and climate-related issues, as well as SEC stonewalling.
Gensler is before the SEC’s oversight committee. The Chairman opened by threatening him with a subpoena as they haven’t been responding to requests from this committee Chairman McHenry is going after him hard Also this… pic.twitter.com/uYLhyCyLRG
Comer and Senator Tim Scott, who is now running in the Republican presidential primary, wrote to Gensler in June asking for information about United States’ cooperation with the EU on climate legislation that could impact U.S. companies. They sent a similar letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In his latest letter, Comer said:
“To date, the SEC has not produced documents that are substantively responsive, and to date the overwhelming majority of documents produced have been publicly available on the SEC’s website, […] or documents that were already released pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.”
These words practically mirror Patrick McHenry’s letter of April 12, where he wrote, “The 232 pages of documents provided by your staff after the briefing are publicly available and not responsive to the request.” McHenry was writing about his information request relating to the prosecution of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. McHenry also threatened Gensler with a “compulsory process.” McHenry repeated that threat in person in a House Financial Services Committee hearing.
Crypto supporters will also hear echoes of themselves in Comer’s phrase “it is not clear that the law provides such authority and we must determine whether legislation is necessary.” In his first letter, Comer reminded Gensler of the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA ruling, which pertained to the major questions doctrine and could have an impact on the SEC’s activities in the crypto sphere as well.
The Archbishop of York has told Sky News the UK should resist Reform’s “kneejerk” plan for the mass deportation of migrants, telling Nigel Farage he is not offering any “long-term solution”.
Stephen Cottrell said in an interview with Trevor Phillips he has “every sympathy” with people who are concerned about asylum seekers coming to the country illegally.
But he criticised the plan announced by Reform on Tuesday to deport 600,000 people, which would be enabled by striking deals with the Taliban and Iran, saying it will not “solve the problem”.
Mr Cottrell is currently acting head of the Church of England while a new Archbishop of Canterbury is chosen.
Image: Pic: Jacob King/PA Wire
Image: The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell in 2020.
File pic: PA
Phillips asked him: “What’s your response to the people who are saying the policy should be ‘you land here, unlawfully, you get locked up and you get deported straight away. No ifs, no buts’?”
Mr Cottrell said he would tell them “you haven’t solved the problem”, adding: “You’ve just put it somewhere else and you’ve done nothing to address the issue of what brings people to this country.
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“And so if you think that’s the answer, you will discover in due course that all you have done is made the problem worse.
“Don’t misunderstand me, I have every sympathy with those who find this difficult, every sympathy – as I do with those living in poverty.
“But… we should actively resist the kind of isolationist, short term kneejerk ‘send them home’.”
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What do public make of Reform’s plans?
Image: Nigel Farage at the launch of Reform UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers. Pic: PA
Asked if that was his message to the Reform leader, he said: “Well, it is. I mean, Mr Farage is saying the things he’s saying, but he is not offering any long-term solution to the big issues which are convulsing our world, which lead to this. And, I see no other way.”
Mr Farage, the MP for Clacton, was asked at a news conference this week what he would say if Christian leaders opposed his plan.
“Whoever the Christian leaders are at any given point in time, I think over the last decades, quite a few of them have been rather out of touch, perhaps with their own flock,” he said.
“We believe that what we’re offering is right and proper, and we believe for a political party that was founded around the slogan of family, community, country that we are doing right by all of those things, with these plans we put forward today.”
Sky News has approached Mr Farage for comment.
Farage won’t be greeting this as good news of the gospel – nor will govt ministers
When Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell told journalists that “We don’t do God”, many took it as a statement of ideology.
In fact it was the caution of a canny operator who knows that the most dangerous opponent in politics is a religious leader licensed to challenge your very morality.
Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, currently the effective head of the worldwide Anglican communion, could not have been clearer in his denunciation of what he calls the Reform party’s “isolationist, short term, kneejerk ‘send them home'” approach to asylum and immigration.
I sense that having ruled himself out of the race for next Archbishop of Canterbury, Reverend Cottrell feels free to preach a liberal doctrine.
Unusually, in our interview he pinpoints a political leader as, in effect, failing to demonstrate Christian charity.
Nigel Farage, who describes himself as a practising Christian, won’t be greeting this as the good news of the gospel.
But government ministers will also be feeling nervous.
Battered for allowing record numbers of cross- Channel migrants, and facing legal battles on asylum hotels that may go all the way to the Supreme Court, Labour has tried to head off the Reform challenge with tougher language on border control.
The last thing the prime minister needs right now is to make an enemy of the Almighty – or at least of his representatives on Earth.