ICYMI — David McIntosh Blasts Biden for Digital Asset Shadow Ban
Washington, D.C. — In case you missed it, Club for Growth President David McIntosh penned an OpEd in the Washington Times calling out the Biden Administration’s renewal of President Obama’s “Operation Choke Point” targeting digital assets. Contact Joe Kildea at [email protected] if you are interested in interviewing David McIntosh.
EXCERPTS:
In the spring of 2013, the Obama Justice Department launched an initiative known as “Operation Choke Point,” which pressured banks to close accounts with oil companies, payment processors, and gun manufacturers – businesses the Obama Administration saw as undesirable. Republicans and Democrats alike look back on this operation as a shameful example of what happens when regulators restrict banking due to the political whims of the White House. A decade later, the Biden Administration is pulling from the same playbook to subvert free enterprise via shadow banking. This time, the victim is the crypto industry.
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The statements show the Administration doesn’t understand this technology. They focused solely on the risk of crypto assets, without acknowledging even a single one of the abundant rewards brought by an industry that employs tens of thousands of Americans and is tackling major problems, such as providing financial access to the unbanked and underbanked… As a result, New York’s Metropolitan Commercial Bank is closing its crypto business, and Signature Bank, one of crypto’s leading banks, is drastically reducing the amount of crypto clients that it services. By making sweeping and reckless generalizations and pressuring banks behind closed doors against servicing crypto, these regulators have taken on the role of shadow bank executives, circumventing legitimate policymaking procedures to de-bank crypto in an authoritarian and politically-motivated power grab. Legitimate, legal businesses are losing their bank accounts as a result.
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Not only is the Administration effectively resigning the U.S. from the race to grow the crypto and web3 sector here at home – along with the security, leadership, jobs, and economic benefits that come with setting the standard – but this regulatory shadow banking is a blatant subversion of our democratic values. Policymaking is supposed to be done by policymakers in open forums, not in one-off regulatory actions.
These actions also set a dangerous precedent that could harm American consumers and their individual liberties for years to come.
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This, ultimately, is not a partisan issue. It’s an American one. One party’s view of an industry should not dictate that industry’s fair access to financial services. That’s bad banking policy that threatens the core of our economic system and values.
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Legislators, not regulatory bureaucrats, make laws. It needs to stay that way.