Would you take a fellow who lobbied for deregulation on behalf of an Enron-like energy company that was busted for manipulating markets and place him in a top regulatory job, where he's supposed to ensure other firms don't violate the rules?

You would if you were following business as usual in Washington. And that's what's happening -- with nary a peep of protest.

Let me first declare that I have some skin in this game. On Thursday, my colleague Daniel Schulman and I broke a story reporting that the Obama administration had nominated Scott O'Malia, a Republican Senate aide, to be a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC is a somewhat obscure federal agency, but an important one. Its mission is to protect consumers and investors by preventing misconduct in futures trading that could distort the prices of agricultural and energy commodities. In 2000, the CFTC wanted to regulate credit default swaps -- complicated and privately traded financial instruments that helped grease the way to the subprime meltdown -- but Republican Sen. Phil Gramm, then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Fed chair Alan Greenspan and Clinton administration officials (including Lawrence Summers, now President Obama's top economic adviser) blocked that effort. Had the CFTC been allowed to police swaps, the housing finance crisis that begot the economic crash of last year might not have been as bad.

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So the CFTC is a critical agency. And under Obama's proposal for more robust financial regulation -- which he talked about during a Wall Street visit on Monday -- the CFTC would have greater responsibility to make sure no one was gaming the financial system. Consequently, the composition of the CFTC is more significant than ever. And that's why O'Malia poses a problem.

For the past seven years, he's been a GOP staffer in the Senate. But before that he was a lobbyist for Mirant, an Atlanta-based electricity company. According to House and Senate records, while at Mirant O'Malia was registered to lobby for greater deregulation at a time when his company was exploiting the then-ongoing deregulation of the energy market to bilk consumers. Remember the Enron-driven electricity crisis in California of 2001, when Enron and other companies were manipulating the state's deregulated electricity markets, causing prices to go sky-high, creating rolling black-outs and triggering a statewide emergency? Mirant was one of those other companies. According to state investigators, Mirant deliberately held back power to force prices up.

After the crisis, Mirant was investigated by various federal and local agencies and became the target of a number of lawsuits. It ultimately agreed to pay California about half a billion dollars to settle claims it had screwed the state's residents. It also was fined $12.5 million -- by the CFTC! -- for attempting to manipulate natural gas prices.

The CFTC needs to protect consumers and investors from firms like Mirant. So why would a Mirant vet be named to one of the agency's five seats? The answer: politics. Once again, the lesson is that change in Washington is hard.

Here's what's transpired. O'Malia is close to Sen. Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate; he worked in McConnell's office for nine years. Last year, when there was an opening on the CFTC, President George W. Bush nominated O'Malia, presumably at McConnell's urging.

When O'Malia subsequently testified at his Senate confirmation hearing, he noted that he had worked at Mirant. But he said nothing about lobbying for the firm, and he did not acknowledge its sordid history. No senator asked him about any of that. Afterward, he was cruising toward confirmation, but Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) put a hold on his confirmation (and that of two other CFTC nominees) because she was upset that the CFTC under Bush had not been policing oil and gas markets. O'Malia's nomination withered.

Yet Obama has brought it back. Why would a president who craves change in Washington and who wants the CFTC to be a tougher watchdog do that? Because of a tradition in the nation's capital. By law, two of the five commissioners on independent federal agencies can't come from the president's own political party. Thus, the senior senator of the opposition party usually gets to recommend people for these slots. McConnell chose O'Malia again, and the White House put up no fight. In fact, the press release it issued announcing O'Malia's nomination neglected to mention his days as a lobbyist and touted his efforts at Mirant to create "standards for corporate risk management and energy trading."

Letting McConnell place his pal on the commission, a White House aide told me, "is the sort of precedent we defer to." Also, the White House personnel office these days is probably too overwhelmed to mount a fight on this front. Consequently, the administration unveiled O'Malia's nomination with no fanfare, and Obama certainly didn't mention it when he was on Wall Street talking about creating a tougher regulatory framework.

Is it discouraging that Obama is playing by routine Washington rules that place patronage ahead of policy priorities? Perhaps. What's discouraging to me is that our story drew little attention. Not many links. Not much traffic. These days, the news is dominated by the silly: the "You Lie" kerfuffle, Obama calling Kanye a "jackass," Tea Baggers gone wild, and anything -- and I do mean anything -- involving race . . . or Sarah Palin. As for who's in charge of keeping the financial system honest -- that's no big deal.

Not even in the Senate. Cantwell was up in arms last year about the CFTC being weak on energy speculators. And this year she introduced legislation that would make it easier for the commission to pursue firms engaged in market manipulation. But a Cantwell spokesperson says the senator has no qualms about O'Malia serving on the CFTC. My suspicion: She's not willing to rock the boat by poking McConnell, the Senate minority leader, in the eye. And Democrats have certainly enjoyed the privilege of naming their own folks to independent agencies when the Republicans held the White House.

So due to the same-old/same-old, the CFTC -- which is supposed to provide stability to a crucial corner of the financial sector and which has a say in determining the prices you pay for food and energy -- will probably end up with a commissioner who once tried to weaken regulations to help a sleazy energy firm. That's hardly reassuring. That's hardly change. And for the moment, it seems this is going to happen without many people noticing.

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