Washington on Thursday was rightfully consumed by the hearing at which former FBI Director James Comey discussed his many disturbing interactions with President Donald Trump. But after members of the Senate were done grilling Comey, over on the House side of the Capitol Building, the GOP caucus voted to create a sequel to the financial crisis of 2008.

Via a vote of 233-186, the House passed the Financial Choice Act, a deeply misguided piece of legislation championed by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling. The Comey hearing was extraordinary; the House's move was disturbingly ordinary, less than a decade removed from the 2008 financial crisis.

Hensarling is a Texas congressman who has never met a restriction on Wall Street of which he was in favor, who quite literally said that protecting the bottom line of a bank should outweigh protecting consumers. That should tell you a lot about the merits of this particular effort.

The Choice Act – so named because it would allow banks to opt out of much of the nation's regulatory regime if they hold enough cash on hand – is meant to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010. As such, it is chock full of provisions freeing America's biggest banks from pesky restrictions on their ability to rip off Americans and undermine the safety and soundness of the financial system, setting taxpayers up for another kick in the teeth from the titans of finance.

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For starters, it kneecaps the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has become one of the most important regulators out there, and has secured billions of dollars for consumers who got shafted by financial institutions. The bill also undoes important rules, such as those enabling the government to liquidate a failing bank without resorting to a bailout and those restricting banks from making trades for their own benefit with taxpayer-backed dollars.

I could go on and on about the deficiencies in the legislation, but at the end of the day, the bill isn't really about any particular provision. It's about the nutty belief among Republicans that going to back to a pre-Dodd-Frank style of regulation is, if not a totally realistic goal, one that is worth trumpeting and putting themselves on record about, even with so much else going on in the world.

I say the House GOP's repeal goal is unrealistic because it is unlikely that the House bill in its entirety will ever get through the Senate. Unlike, say, a repeal of Obamacare or a pile of tax cuts, a gutting of Dodd-Frank can't be passed via the budget reconciliation process, meaning Republicans would need 60 votes to break an inevitable Democratic filibuster.

If you believe there are eight Democrats in the Senate willing to join the 52 Republicans in order to toss aside Dodd-Frank, I've got a bridge to nowhere I'd like to sell you. (Hensarling, though, as U.S. News' Andrew Soergel reported Thursday, has said some budget-related provisions of the bill could pass via reconciliation.)

For that reason, perhaps the cynical view is that House Republicans, knowing full well their cascade of terrible ideas would never actually become law, felt free to vote for it and thereby pledge fealty to Wall Street and its campaign money, as well as their rabidly anti-Obama base, without facing any consequences. As Jonathan Bernstein posited in Bloomberg View, "House Republicans prefer the symbolic win of passing something that goes nowhere to the hard work of constructing a law, which sometimes requires bipartisan support." If true, this would be just one more way in which the filibuster clouds democratic accountability, and it would be a cheap way for the House GOP'ers to fire up their followers.

However, the likelier tale is that House Republicans really and truly believe that going back to the bad old days of pre-2008 is a prudent course of action, that the problem in America today is mega-banks are too hobbled in their ability to nickel, dime and perpetually dump on American consumers.

Such is their apparent fascination with deregulation that they seem to have forgotten just how bad things were during the Great Recession, and just how close to the abyss the American economy was driven by the misbehavior of big banks encouraged by nearly two decades of bipartisan deregulatory zeal. 700,000 jobs a month, millions of mortgages and trillions of dollars of wealth evaporated.

The memories of those in the House GOP caucus either don't go back that far, or they believe ours don't. Either way, it says nothing good about what they believe or what they think the American public understands.