A Superb Appointment for SEC Chief
President Obama has nominated my former boss, Mary Jo White, to be the next chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He could not have made a better choice.
I worked for Mary Jo for nearly a decade when she was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for nine years, from 1993-2002. It’s not enough to say she’s one of the best lawyers in the country; she’s also one of the best people I’ve been fortunate to know. She is whip smart and tough. She is also a model of integrity and rectitude. She will do what the SEC ought to do: aggressive enforcement against fraudulent actors. But she also has a world of experience representing businesses, and thus a mature appreciation of the difference between necessary regulation and paralyzing overreach.
The president has made many terrible appointments. To say that this one is a superb appointment is not to grade him on a curve. Mary Jo White will be terrific in what is a very important job.
Barack Hussein Obama making an appointment that isn’t gosh-awful? I smell a rat…
What an extraordinary piece of news. An island of rectitude and competence in a sea of degraded mediocrity. How on earth do you suppose it happened?!
“Competence and rectitude” . Huh. That will be a first for this maladministration.
I concur with Andrew. Mary Jo White is a first class appointment, completely apolitical and a great lawyer. Why did Obama nominate her? I don’t know, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. We should be happy that this one slipped through.
This is a bit over the top. I couldn’t remember exactly what it was about MJ White’s political posturing until the WSJ editorial of today (Jan 25) entitled “Political Regulators” refreshed my memory of the details about her investigation into the 1996 Clinton Gore campaign-finance scandals. She had the evidence by 1999 as presented by then Congressman Pete Hoekstra to indict former Teamsters president Ron Carey and so on. Read the piece which also brings in Terry McAuliffe and once NJ Senator Bob Toricelli.
MJW may indeed be a fine prosecutor but these are big and very political slip ups.