House Republicans pass anti-ESG package during ‘anti-woke’ week
3 min readThe House last week passed a package of bills aimed at curbing the use of environmental, social and governance factors in retirement investment decisions and limiting Securities and Exchange Commission climate-related disclosure rules.
The bills were part of what the GOP dubbed an “anti-woke week” on the Hill. The legislation has little chance of advancing in the Democrat-led Senate, but offers a glimpse of how Republicans would tackle the issue if they gain power in the November elections. SEC Chair Gary Gensler is set to appear before House and Senate committee this week.
The Republican battle against ESG in Congress, which has featured
The Republican state laws have led to “billions of dollars of value lost for fiduciaries,” said Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., who held a press call Friday with Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., hosted by Unlocking America’s Future, on the House bills. “If states are the laboratories for democracy, we’re learning exactly the wrong lessons from these bills,” Casten said.
“The good news is, these bills are going nowhere,” Vargas said. “The Senate is not going to act on them and certainly the president, after he stops laughing, would veto them,” he said. “The sad part is these are moments when we should be working together to try to figure out how to make investing sustainable for the long term.”
Biden said in a statement last week that the latest legislation would “reduce savings and retirement security for Americans” by “artificially limiting fiduciaries’ ability to consider material information in making sound investments.”
“This week’s legislation is a culmination of almost two years of work by House Republicans,” said Huizenga in a statement. The bill “corrects the misguided social policies that have been weaponized by rogue regulators and liberal activist investors at the expense of financial returns.”
Casten and Vargas were among the Democrats who tried to insert an amendment into H.R. 4790 that noted that the SEC has authority to require disclosures from private companies. The Republicans rejected the amendment as out of order. The point of the amendment, Vargas said, “was to show how crazy this thing is; that in fact that’s why the SEC is there, to be the cop on the beat and make sure there are disclosures for people to get the information on what they want to know.”
The End Woke Higher Education Act,
In his statement, Biden criticized all three bills, and said the SEC bill would “severely limit the ability of federal financial regulators to protect consumers and investors.”