Sen. Carl Levin
Kelsey Snell of Politico writes that corporate America will be glad to see Sen. Carl Levin leave at the end of the year.
Levin, who decided not to run for re-eleciton, runs the obscure Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) , which has quite a bit of power and has used it to take on some of the giant's in the corporate world.
Snell writes that the subcommittee has subpoena power "to shine a harsh light on the otherwise unseen financial workings of the country’s largest corporations — from Apple to JPMorgan Chase. His retirement as of January has executives exhaling."
“The first thing I tell people is, PSI stands for ‘pretty scary investigations,’ ” Reginald Brown, vice chair of the Financial Institutions Practice Group at the law firm WilmerHale, who has represented several Levin targets, tells Politico. “There probably will be some people who will sleep easier [once he is gone].”
Politico writes:
After more than a dozen years at PSI, Levin is just four months and one final report from packing up mountains of investigative history and going home. That leaves the future of probes into the kind of financial wrongdoing that Levin has unearthed — from the convoluted tax maneuvers of the biggest tech companies to the dicing of mortgages in the run-up to the financial crisis — murky.
Potential candidates to fill his spot include Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and, on the Republican side, Sen. Rand Paul. McCaskill is interested; Paul has been quiet. But it is not clear either has the political capital or inclination to take the aggressive approach to corporate wrongdoing employed by Levin.
