Every morning in 2009 and 2010, Connaughton went to work on Capitol Hill angry at Wall Street and Washington on behalf of the American people, especially the middle class who had worked hard and played by the rules and lost half their retirement accounts. He had lost a lot too, and he was surprised that so few people seemed to be as angry as he was a government taken over by a cadre of financial elites working for plutocrats.

In the fall of 2008, he became cochair to Ted Kaufman of the vice presidential transition team. But after the inauguration, he couldn’t work for Biden because lobbyists were banned from working for the Obama administration for two years. Connaughton felt it was a bit unfair for Obama to single out lobbyists in particular when most of the people working in the administration had made tons of corporate money in one way or another. Kaufman had inherited the last two years of Biden’s Senate term and asked Connaughton to be his chief of staff. Nearly 50, Connaughton took a huge pay cut and returned to work in the Senate.

Kaufman and Connaughton agreed that the financial crisis represented a breakdown of the legal system.