A REPUBLICAN I'D #standwith

News you're probably not focusing on:

Mary Jo White, President Barack Obama's pick to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, will likely face tough questions Tuesday from senators about her decade of legal work representing some of the nation’s largest banks and corporations.

But after the Senate Banking Committee hearing is over, White is ultimately expected to win confirmation from the full Senate....

White, 65, would step into the job at a critical moment for the SEC.

Critics have complained that the agency has failed to act aggressively to charge top executives at the biggest U.S. banks who may have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis....

Last night, on Rachel Maddow's show, Eliot Spitzer and guest host Ezra Klein briefly discussed the fact that Democratic senator Sherrod Brown has been working with a Republican colleague, David Vitter, on legislation to break up the big banks. I have no idea what they'll come up with -- though it doesn't really matter, because we know that the legislation won't even come close to passing.

But you know when I'd stand up a cheer a Republican senator, and happily join in a Twitter "#standwith" campaign? I'd cheer if David Vitter conducted a 13-hour talking filibuster against Mary Jo White's nomination, just to protest the mollycoddling -- the bipartisan mollycoddling -- of the big banks, the way Rand Paul used Chuck Hagel's nomination as an excuse to inveigh against drones.

I'm not saying that Vitter has any intention of doing something like this. I'm just offering this as a hypothetical.

Here's the thing: It is extraordinarily unlikely that anyone I know will ever be the noncombatant victim of a U.S. government drone strike. It's not going to happen to anyone you know, either.

But we will all suffer in the next financial crisis -- and there will be another crisis, probably within a decade or so. That's about how often we've had them since Reagan became president.

If a Republican broke with party orthodoxy and bipartisan conventional wisdom and stood in the well of the Senate for hours to protest an outrage that will actually happen? Then I'd #stand.