Sometime around seven on Monday night, the U.S. Senate will vote to confirm Stephen Mnuchin as the Secretary of the Treasury, and the final epitaph will be written on the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis is ongoing, but its architects already have won.

There is no question that Mnuchin at the very least barbered his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee. He said that his company did not engage in the loathsome practice of robo-signing mortgage foreclosures. It did. He tap-danced around how he'd used a tax shelter in the Cayman Islands to help his clients dodge their taxes. He claimed he didn't realize that real estate he owns that was valued at nearly $100 million was an "asset" when he failed to report said holdings on his disclosure forms. Who among us has not forgotten $100 million in real estate, I ask you.

Ever since the committee passed on Mnuchin's nomination, which was passed with only Republican votes because the Democratic members of the committee were disgusted with Mnuchin's testimony and with the Republican majority's apparent indifference to the obvious mendacity of some of it, some other developments have occurred that do not lead me to be optimistic that the swamp reclamation project is going as planned.

First, the president* already has signed an executive order that was a direct assault on the Wall Street reforms contained in the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed in the wake of the nearly catastrophic collapse of the financial system. (The latest atrocity? American companies can get back into the blood diamond business.) Moreover, as this Reuters report indicates, once he's confirmed, Mnuchin plans to lard up the top echelons of the Treasury Department with folks who flourished in the piratical culture that nearly blew up the world.

Treasury and White House representatives did not respond to requests for comment on Monday on reports that Trump would soon nominate David Malpass, a former economist at failed Wall Street bank Bear Stearns, as Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, the agency's top economic diplomacy job. Malpass, a Trump campaign adviser who had been leading Treasury transition efforts, was seen as a leading candidate for the job, with experience from international economic posts in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Other names that have been floated for senior posts include Goldman Sachs banker Jim Donovan for deputy Treasury secretary and Jason Muzinich, a former Morgan Stanley banker, for undersecretary of domestic finance.

If the Republicans in the Senate were really as concerned about a renegade presidency as they claim to be on Twitter and in anonymous mumblings to various reporters, they'd join with Democrats to block this nomination. It only takes three of them, and they all could cite Mnuchin's dubious testimony to the committee as a very plausible reason for doing so. That would be a serious shot across the bow of the erratically cruising Mary Celeste that is our current ship of state.

There was absolutely no chance of that ever happening, however. Nobody—except Bernie Sanders, who said it all the time—wants to get up and state flat out that the business model of people like Stephen Mnuchin, the people who immiserated millions out of sheer animal greed, was plain vanilla bunco fraud. This was really the last chance to make that point before these gombeen yahoos do it all over again.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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