The Washington Post - Finally, Something That Unites Congress: Outrageous Corporate Behavior

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By Jena McGregor

On Tuesday, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) leaned onto his elbows, peered over his glasses and told John Stumpf he had done the nearly impossible.

"You have done something that has never happened in the last ten years and united this committee on a major topic," he told Wells Fargo's CEO, who'd been hauled to Washington for a hearing after his bank had fired 5,300 employees for creating phony bank and credit card accounts for customers. "And not in a good way."

Then on Wednesday, as members of the House of Representatives put Mylan CEO Heather Bresch on the hot seat over the soaring cost of EpiPens, its product that is used to treat life-threatening allergic reactions, committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said the following in his opening remarks: "Myself and Mr. [Elijah] Cummings (D-Md.) are very jointly united in trying to address this, understand it better. We may have different solutions to it, but let's come back to my original premise: Parents don't have a choice."

Watching the hearings of the two CEOs, it was often easy to forget on which side of the aisle each lawmaker sat. There were differences at times, yes -- more skepticism about the performance of regulators by Republicans, more praise for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by Democrats, and a few tsk-tsks from lawmakers over what their peers had said.

But on the whole, both Republicans and Democrats hammered the two CEOs with remarkably similar levels of vitriol about the effects of their companies' actions on consumers, the lack of straight answers from the executives, and the eye-popping paydays senior managers received at both companies.

Some former CEOs themselves took notice of the unusual Congressional harmony. "After eight years of gridlock in Congress, leave it to Wells Fargo's John Stumpf & Mylan's CEO Heather Bresch to unite Congress," tweeted former Medtronic CEO Bill George, who is now a Harvard Business School professor. "Trouble ahead."

In an election year that has brought a surge of populism, voter ire toward Wall Street and has had no shortage of political theater, the two CEOs gave lawmakers a safe bogeyman to vent their frustration and attempt to appear tough in front of voters. Though lawmakers were sometimes unclear or confused in their questions, that did not stop either side from presenting them in harshly worded ways.

"It's disgraceful what's going on here," Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said to Bresch in the Mylan hearing. "But I think in a way, like I say, you've done us a little bit of a favor here by just showing us what's wrong with this system, what's wrong with our healthcare system. I think it's disgusting."

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) joined the verbal flaying of Bresch over drug prices: "You're doing everyone a favor by charging three times what you acquired the drug for ... You're trying to make us feel good about that. I'm not buying your argument. Do you have a guilty conscience about any of this?"

Again and again, executive compensation was a focus of lawmakers' frustration, whatever their political persuasion. "To not invoke some degree of clawback for yourself and others involved would be committing malpractice," Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said to Stumpf. "At a minimum I'm sure that is going to take place. I'd be surprised if it doesn't."

"You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said to the Wells Fargo CEO.

There was similar fury toward Bresch's pay. "I suppose when you get to salaries at the level we're talking about it's easy to forget an extra $931,000," Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.) said to Bresch, whose pay had been referenced earlier in the hearing as $18 million, but was valued at $18.9 million in 2015. "The greed is astounding. It is sickening, disgusting. I am a very conservative, pro-business Republican, but I am really sickened by what I've heard here today and what I've read before about this situation."

Meanwhile, Washington D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton also pushed Bresch about her raise. "From $2.5 [million] to $18 million last year. That's the figure?" she asked the Mylan CEO. "Could I ask you this: What have you done to earn a 671 percent increase?"

Perhaps sensing the rarity of the moment, some even called on their colleagues to recognize what they could do if they worked together. As Cummings said near the beginning of the Mylan hearing, noting both he and Chaffetz had gotten "kind of emotional" talking about the issue, "I beg all of our colleagues to take this moment. This is our moment. If there is going to be something that we do in a bipartisan way, this is it."

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