BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

This should give a sense of how politically far afield the conservative movement has gone.

The CPAC convention has invited Richard Fisher, the head of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank and big-time Democrat, to address the group while going out of its way to make sure that everybody knew that Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie, the two most popular Republican governors in the country, have not been invited.

Fisher has been invited because he agrees with Bernie Sanders that the U.S. government should somehow break up America’s largest banks.

McDonnell and Christie have been dis-invited because they governed in such a way as to make them the most popular Republican governors in the country.

So, a guy who believes that the free market is so broken that it requires the government to come in and chop up the banks is now a hero to the conservative movement. And two guys who took effective action to either build roads in their ever growing state or rebuild communities that had been devastated by a terrible hurricane are no longer allowed the opportunity to make their case to conservative activists.

This is populism run amok.

I understand why big banks are not popular. They are big banks. They are not supposed to be popular. But these big banks provide an essential role in our national economy. They provide the bulk of the loans. They provide the majority of the mortgages. They are the bankers to big business. They also are the bankers to small countries. And thank God some of these big banks are owned by Americans. Most of the biggest ones are owned by the Chinese. If we want to be competitive, we need to have at least a couple sizable financial institutions.

They are the ones that provide the liquidity to the marketplace so that the marketplace can thrive.

They don’t give as many loans as they want chiefly because the Obama Administration sues them all of the time. They spend so much of their efforts worried about the latest incoming missile from the Holder Justice Department that they practice defensive lending.

The Obama team is most worried about disparate impact. They don’t care a hoot about how many loans go out; they care about whom the loans go to. And if the loans don’t go to the right racial profile, well, then, Holder sues them.

What caused the financial crisis is that too many loans went to too many risky borrowers under pressure from politicians. And now, instead of stopping that insane practice, the Obama Justice Department has doubled down, punishing banks that don’t make the right loans to the right people (from their perspective).

And now conservatives want to attack not the Obama Justice Department. They want to attack the banks.

And instead of supporting the banks and supporting Governors with sky-high popularity ratings, they want to stick with this curious strain of populism that just might make things worse for the private market-place.

This is not the work of CPAC, the conservative political action committee. This is the work of the CSAD, coincidentally sad-ass Democrats.

Richard Fisher might be from Dallas, but just because he is from Texas doesn’t make him a conservative. The conservative movement has to get its act together. Bashing banks is not a path to victory for the future.

Whatever happened to defending the free-market?

Editor’s Note: John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. Feehery is president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. He is a contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com.