So the House Republicans on the Financial Services Committee just voted to repeal "resolution authority."  What does this mean, and how can we compare it to previous actions by House Republicans?

A useful way of understanding both the financial crisis of 2008 and Dodd-Frank's response to it is through the idea of a "shadow banking system."  We have a set of regulatory rules, laws, practices and institutions from the New Deal that does well with the regular banking sector.  Over the past thirty years, a set of institutions started acting like banks without calling themselves banks, and thus did not have the same set of rules, laws and practices in place to regulate them as such.  Dodd-Frank's goal was to extend this regulatory framework to all "systemically risky financial institutions," or shadow banking institutions.

One of the main pillars of this is "resolution authority," which allows FDIC to takeover and wind-down a failing shadow bank.  Since the New Deal the FDIC can wind down a failing commercial bank without the system collapsing.  We found that putting commercial banks through bankruptcy was a disaster, so we created FDIC to allow a firm to fail and allocate losses in a way that mitigated panics and contagion.  Now the FDIC can use those powers on firms acting like banks but that are not hanging a "bank" sign on their window.  These powers include the ability to force big financial firms to write "living wills" to help with taking them down.

The FDIC has been making progress in formulating these powers.  They released a major report, The Orderly Liquidation of Lehman Brothers Holdings under the Dodd-Frank Act, which walks through how they would have handled 2008.  They've also answered conservative think tank critiques of resolution authority in what I think are correct and persuasive.

So when you hear people, especially on the right, criticizing Dodd-Frank's resolution authority your first step should be to analyze what they think of the FDIC more broadly.  Do they view it as a statist boot stamping on a human face forever?  Here's a Cato Handbook for Congress from 1997 arguing for the privatization of FDIC and mandating banks purchase private deposit insurance (perhaps from an exchange?).  Cato's 2001 call for privatizing FDIC is amazing for how disastrous every one of their assumptions and calls turned out to be in light of the financial crisis.  But, as they say, at least it's an ethos.

Representative Spencer Bachus (R - AL) is the current Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and just lead the Committee in a vote that, among many other things, repealed this resolution authority powers.  Bachus has argued "This authority is not a death panel for failed institutions...It is taxpayer-funded support for their creditors and counterparties.”

So where does Bachus stand on FDIC more broadly?  Here's the fascinating part: he lead a major 2002 move that expanded deposit insurance.  Bachus was the chief sponsor of the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2002 which increased "the standard maximum amount of deposit insurance coverage from $100,000 to $130,000" and also adjusted it for inflation.

It's not clear why he supports FDIC when it comes to commercial banks but not shadow banks.  It's also not clear why, if he is so concerned about even the potential for moral hazard and taxpayer-funding being at risk (remember: FDIC recoups any expenses from fees on shadow banks, so taxpayers are always paid back), he took the bizarre step of expanding the amount of coverage FDIC gives to depositors (or the "creditors and counterparties" he rails about).  Did he feel creditors in the form of depositors weren't protected enough?

I've been reading about this 2002 bill, and if Bachus showed any concern about FDIC as an institution and a preference for putting commercial banks through bankruptcy instead of an orderly winddown I can't find it.  I'm trying to get a comment from the House Financial Services Committee on this but it certainly seems like a complete about face.  So one has to ask - if FDIC is a useful and appropriate way of allowing firms that hang a "bank" sign on the window to fail, why isn't it appropriate when a firm functions exactly like a bank?

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FDR struggled to make a reactionary Court recognize that the government served a greater purpose than defending property. Today President Obama faces a similar battle over health care reform.

In our generation, a new idea has come to dominate thought about government, the idea that the resources of the nation can be made to produce a far higher standard of living for the masses of the people if only government is intelligent and energetic in giving the right direction to economic life. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

The hearings of the Supreme Court this week over the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act have led some commentators to compare President Obama's potential difficulties with the Supreme Court to the troubles FDR had with the Court in the mid 1930s, when some of the key provisions of the New Deal were struck down as unconstitutional. In response to the Court challenge, Roosevelt ultimately decided to pursue a court reform effort -- his famous "court-packing" scheme -- that aroused widespread opposition from both the public and those holding public office, even among members of his own party.

Most historians agree that Roosevelt's attempt to alter the Court in 1937 was both ill-conceived and badly handled. But the debate over the legal dimensions of FDR's attempt to alter the make-up of the Court -- like today's debate over the legality of Obama administration's Affordable Health Care Act -- has to a certain extent obscured the real issue that stood at the heart of the New Deal reforms: how the nation might, as FDR said, "use the agencies of government to assist in the establishment of means to provide sound and adequate protection against the vicissitudes of modern life."

Using government to pursue this goal was somewhat of a novel idea in early 20th century America. But it was not something that FDR came up with on his own. As the nation made the 19th-to-20th century transition from an agrarian to a modern industrial economy, questions about the health, safety, and living conditions of the working class -- more appropriately called the working poor -- gave rise to ever-increasing calls for social legislation to protect working Americans, including women and children, from dangerous employment practices like starvation wages and other forms of economic exploitation. The same sentiments also gave rise to a series of laws, such as the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, to protect American consumers from tainted foods and poisonous and/or useless "medicines," as well as anti-trust legislation to prevent the establishment of anti-free market monopolies that would lead to exploitative prices of key commodities and other goods and services.

Not surprisingly, all of these efforts aroused considerable opposition from conservative business interests, who frequently argued that such legislation was an infringement on their liberties. This was especially true in FDR's day, when, in the wake of the 1929-1932 financial crisis and the failure of the free market to provide adequate levels of employment to roughly 25 percent of the American workforce, the Roosevelt administration launched a series of efforts to reform the financial sector, offer employment to the jobless, and provide a basic measure of economic security to the average American through Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the right to collective bargaining.

Even before many of these measures were fully put in place, FDR anticipated what the wealthy conservative opposition would say about them. In a June, 1934 Fireside Chat on the subject, for example, FDR noted that a "few timid people, who fear progress," would try to give "strange names" to these efforts.

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Sometimes they will call it 'Fascism,' sometimes 'Communism,' sometimes 'Regimentation,' sometimes 'Socialism.'

But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.

I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies. I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing -- a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals...

All that we do seeks to fulfill the historic traditions of the American people...We are restoring confidence and well-being under the rule of the people themselves. We remain, as John Marshall said a century ago, 'emphatically and truly, a government of the people.' Our Government 'in form and in substance . . . emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefits.'

What emerged from the New Deal, then, was an attempt to use government as an instrument to provide basic economic safeguards within the free enterprise system, to mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism, so that all Americans could enjoy its benefits.

As was the case in previous governmental efforts to provide a measure of social and economic protection for the average American citizen, these measures were challenged in the Supreme Court as an infringement of contract and property rights, and up until 1937 -- the year that FDR's struggle with the Court came to its head -- the Court tended to rule in favor of property. For progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, this tendency on the part of the Court was unacceptable. Indeed, roughly two decades before his cousin Franklin was sworn in as President, TR articulated his firm belief that government had a responsibility to serve as "the steward of the public welfare." As such, he insisted that the judiciary should "be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property... just as... the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people."

It was this basic idea that government had a responsibility to serve the "public welfare" that animated both the social justice legislation of the progressive era and the social and economic reform legislation of the New Deal. Hence, FDR's frustration with the inability of the Court to embrace this fundamental  -- or what he would term modern --concept was not unique and in fact had led many other public figures before him to call for some type of judicial reform.

This is not to say that FDR was correct in pursuing his so-called Court packing scheme; he was most surely wrong to do so. But we should not allow this misguided attempt to bring the Supreme Court into the modern world to mask the reasons why he -- and others -- felt such drastic measures might be necessary. In the end, of course, the Court would reverse itself and from 1937 forward would uphold every New Deal provision that came before it, including two prior pieces of legislation -- the Agricultural Adjustment Act and a minimum wage law -- that the Court had previously struck down.

In the decades that followed the New Deal, Americans came to accept and understand the idea of government as the keeper of the public welfare. But in the past two decades, this basic concept of governance has come under a sustained assault from the same special interests that fought this idea in FDR's day. As a result, President Obama's attempt to provide equal access to health care for the nearly 50 million Americans who remain uninsured through the so-called individual mandate has been attacked as an infringement on our liberties. But in embracing this point of view, the Court (should it decide to strike down the law) will have failed to take in the larger argument that the purpose of the law is to provide a means to secure a greater good for all. Viewed from this perspective, requiring all Americans to purchase health care is perhaps the most important step we can take "to provide sound and adequate protection against the vicissitudes of modern life."

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

Editor's note: As President Obama's state visit with British Prime Minister David Cameron grabs headlines, we recommend reading Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow David Woolner's column on how the Special Relationship was forged in the fires of World War II. This post was originally published on May 26, 2011.

The bond between the U.S. and the U.K. runs deep, especially when it comes to their economies.

In an historic speech before both houses of the British Parliament yesterday, President Obama reaffirmed the "special relationship" between Great Britain and the United States. He made reference to the joint sacrifices both countries have made on the battlefield in defense of freedom, taking special note of the wartime alliance and friendship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt that helped give birth to the relationship as the two nations fought "side by side to free a continent from the march of tyranny."

References to the alliance between Great Britain and the United States in World War II are of course entirely appropriate, as the "special relationship" as we know it began in the dark days of 1939-40. But the president also made reference to the two countries' strong economic ties and the fact that today we "live in a global economy that is largely of our own making."

Here, too, the president is correct. Yet most Americans remain largely unaware of this economic aspect of the "special relationship." Much of the global economy we operate in today does indeed have its origins not in the 1980s or 90s, but the 1940s, as Great Britain and the United States struggled to defeat fascism in Europe and Asia.

To understand this, let's take a look at the link between the Great Depression and World War II -- especially from the American perspective. For Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull, this link was not only obvious, but tragic. The two men, in fact, were absolutely convinced that the cause of the Second World War lay in the economic depravity and dislocation of trade and commerce that were the hallmarks of the Great Depression. Near the end of the war, for example, in his State of the Union address of January 1944, FDR observed that we "had come to a clear realization...that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." And as early as the early 1930s, Cordell Hull was frequently quoted as saying, "If goods cannot cross borders, armies will."

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As a consequence of these beliefs, the Roosevelt administration committed itself to the concept of freer trade, beginning with the passage of Hull's Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act in 1934 and continuing right up through the war. Hull's policies took the United States in a new direction away from the high tariff policies of the Hoover years, and in many respects laid the foundation for the opening up of the world's trade immediately after the end of the Second World War. This was best exemplified by the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) in 1947.

Ironically, in response to the high tariffs of the Hoover administration, the British had established an intra-Empire trading system called "Imperial Preference" in 1932 that allowed most goods within the British Commonwealth to be traded with little or no tariff while keeping US goods out. This was an anathema to Hull, and during the war he used the leverage of Lend-Lease aid to try to get the British to drop it. Hull was never able to get the sort of rock solid commitment to ending Imperial Preference he would have liked, but under Article VII of the 1942 Lend Lease Consideration Agreement (governing Lend-Lease aid), the British did agree to take "joint action directed towards the creation of a liberalized international economic order in the postwar world."

By 1944, U.S. military and economic preponderance was such that there was little doubt the Roosevelt administration had the upper hand in the "special relationship." As such, the agreements that were negotiated and signed at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks that year (establishing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and laying the groundwork for the United Nations) largely reflected the American, as opposed to the British, negotiating positions. The same was true a few years later when the GATT was signed in Geneva.

Viewed from this perspective, the Second World War was as much about the re-ordering of the world's economic system along American -- and away from British -- lines as it was about defeating fascism in Europe and Asia. Still, there is no question that during these years the United States considered British cooperation in this effort not only vital, but essential, for without it they doubted their plans for a new world order could succeed. While it may true that Great Britain has always been America's junior in the transatlantic partnership, President Obama is correct when he says that the Anglo-American relationship is not merely "special" but "essential" to the development of "a world that is more peaceful, more prosperous, and more just."

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

It used to be that white men had steady employment and all the government protection that came with it while minorities and women were stuck with precarious jobs. Now we're all vulnerable.

Malcolm Harris has a New Inquiry essay on the movie Sleeping Beauty (2011) and the feminization of precarious labor. A lot has been written on precarious labor recently, including both John Schmitt's book review in Dissent and Bhaskar Sunkara's critical response. I want to elaborate on this, since looking at gender and precarious work leads to an examination of a favorite topic -- the relationship between pity-charity liberalism and unconditional, universal programs related to economic security. A perfect example is how labor in the New Deal was treated differently by gender. The wedge between the two groups illuminates the difficulty in bringing economic justice to the 21st century. Precarious, vulnerable work was once relegated solely to women, but in this day and age more and more of us will fall into that category.

For Harris, the precarious worker is "indebted, insecure, vulnerable." If the classic notion of a worker "relies on having a bargaining place at the table with the boss," then precarious workers aren't workers (even though all they do is work or try to cobble work together).

How is the work gendered? Harris focuses on gendered affect: "passivity and her eagerness to please, her vulnerability and blank demeanor would look incredibly strange on a young man. Her willingness to keep treading water without the promise of anything better to come, her ability to communicate nonthreateningly and stay quiet at the right times are parts of what Nina Power describes in the chapter 'The Feminization of Labor.'"

But there's an institutional way to think about how the precarious nature of gender and work is both reflected in and amplified by governmental regulatory regimes, and how the future looks bleak in terms of bending those regimes toward just ends. Suzanne Mettler's Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (1998) is useful for this conversation. (Mettler, a political scientist and recent author of The Submerged State, is a favorite around here -- I, II, -- and recently joined our think-tank neighbors at the Century Foundation as a fellow.)

To set up the problem, Seth Ackerman has recently discussed universal programs in the context of the Tea Party's war against the state:

...[I]t’s indisputable that Tea Partiers make some kind of conceptual distinction between universal programs like Social Security and Medicare and other government programs. But this says less about the Tea Party than it does about universal social programs. It is easy for liberals to point to the Tea Partiers and call them bigots because they make a distinction between 'people on welfare' and 'normal people.' But in fact it’s the state that made the distinction first. When the state operates a means-tested or other conditional program, it inspects each citizen and stamps him or her as belonging to one category or the other... Political scientists have long known that something almost alchemical happens to public opinion when a universal, as opposed to a mean-tested, welfare program is established.

Mettler argues that this distinction comes out of the dual administrative nature of the New Deal. Part of the New Deal was to be administered by newly created federal government programs, while another part was to be administered by local and state authorities. It just so happened that the federal government's role regulated the work and lives of white men, while the state and local role retained authority over women and minorites. Keeping part of the New Deal's welfare state and floor of economic security administered at the state and local level was predicated intellectually on Brandeis' notion of the states as laboratories of democracy and politically on getting Southern white supremacists to endorse the New Deal. This meant that how people realize economic freedom could be maintained and expanded through illiberal means.

Remember that just three years after the Lochner case, with a Supreme Court hostile to all economic regulations, it made an exception to maximum hours regulations for women. Why? In 1908, the Court ruled in Muller v. Oregon, "That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious...as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race." These are the terms on which economic regulation could exist -- protecting essentialist visions of a women's place.

Mettler argues that "programs geared toward men became nationally administered programs and those aimed toward women retained state-level authority." This welfare state led to citizens becoming "divided by gender between two different sovereignties that govern in very different ways." As she says:

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What it meant to be an "American citizen" meant very different things to the retired male breadwinner, who came to expect his monthly social security check from the national government, and to the poor mother who hoped that the social worker assigned to evaluate her eligibility for a meager welfare check would find her child-rearing and housekeeping efforts worthy. The first was treated with dignity and respect, as an entitled person; the latter, with suspicion and scrutiny.

Mettler maps out a 2X2 grid, dividing out New Deal programs:

The crucial point is that liberal inclusion was based on long-term, full-time work for a single employer. If you had a job along those lines --and these jobs were held by white men at that time -- then you were included in a regime of universal economic security. Short-term, part-time work for multiple employers -- work done by women and minorities -- falls through the cracks into a patchwork of state and local governance. That governance bases inclusion on hierarchical ideals invoking republican notions of where a person stood in his or her community. The notion of the "deserving poor" comes out of this relationship. Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), for instance, was predicated on single mothers being able to retain their "natural" work as housewives and child-raisers. ADC's spot inspections of single mothers for "male callers" gives you a sense of how this played out -- as Mettler notes, "officials monitored and regulated women's moral character."

Progress was made on these New Deal programs up through the 1970s. But there's been significant rollback over the past 30 years. The call to "means-test" social insurance programs, Ending Welfare as We Know It by block-granting welfare's administrative role back to the states, the battles over block-granting Medicaid and privatizing Social Security and Medicare -- all have shifted the momentum in the opposite direction. But where does this leave us now, especially in regard to precarious labor?

I asked Dorian Warren, Columbia political scientist, Roosevelt Institute Fellow, and union expert, about where this stands. As he puts it:

Add up the Mettler argument with Hacker's notion of "policy drift," and most New Deal social policies (especially the FLSA and the NLRA) are outdated and obsolete. They were crafted with assumptions about work and the nature of the economy in mind: an agricultural and industrial economy, where workers had long-term attachments to one employer. That's no longer the case, and labor and employment laws haven't caught up to the new employment relationship. Long story short, we don't have the adequate legal structures to deal with this new employment environment.

The battle to move the welfare state to the federal level, where it could be administered inclusively and universally, was an intellectual and political battle waged within the New Deal. How is this playing out in the Obama administration? I'll eventually build a full case against the "nudge" theory of the administrative state, but for now a theory of using subtle and unconscious government techniques to help people work better within "choice architectures" isn't up to the challenge of recreating a regulatory environment for a new age.

For insight into how the current administration's approach is playing out in this model, take a look at the administration of health care reform. I asked Richard Kirsch, recent author of Fighting for Our Health and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, about the federal/local administration of health care reform. He responded:

The House bill set up a strong federal exchange and let the states do their own only if their exchanges had stronger consumer protections. However with the Senate bill -- the law we have now -- states can set up very weak exchanges. And the insurance industry has lots of clout at the state level. The best hope is that there will be a strong federal exchange for states that don’t set up their own. But that will only be true if HHS creates one.

So we have an outdated regulatory regime, an intellectual climate geared towards local, illiberal control, and the application of economic freedoms designed to keep women yoked to essentialist and moralistic discoures. A "polarizing" workforce means that the labor market, without significant reform, will take on an exaggerated version of the split we saw in the New Deal, with the precarious work falling into a patchwork administration system of moralizing and without opportunities to organize.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.