Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX) Files for Bankruptcy

Who better to trust with financial decisions than this guy?

US Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-Mercedes, TX) has filed for personal bankruptcy. Rep. Hinojosa has $2.9 million in liabilities, though he also has nearly $1.5 million in assets.

Oh…and by the way…Rep. Hinojosa happens to also sit on the House Financial Services Committee. Just freak’n great. Dude can’t even manage his own finances, but he’s in charge of making rules that govern ours? We’re in the very best of hands.

The Financial Services panel has jurisdiction over legislation affecting banks. House aides and outside experts say the House has no rules forbidding a lawmaker who owes large sums to a bank from serving on that committee.

Well maybe there should be…

Other than running companies into the ground, the only thing notable about Hinojosa’s record as a Congressman is his ability to vote exactly how Nancy Pelosi tells him to each-and-every time.

Hinojosa represents the mostly-Hispanic District 15 along Texas’ southern coastal border, where he won his 2010 re-election bid by 14 pts, though he was 10 percentage points lower than his 2008 victory.

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More at Politico, which shows there’s much more to this story:

But the arbitration award against Hinojosa was for a different company, H&H Foods, also known as H&H Meat Products. That company makes Mexican foods and has been one of the largest employers in Texas’s 15th District, which Hinojosa represents. H&H filed for bankruptcy in 2008, according to a local newspaper.

Hinojosa said he has no “managerial control or oversight over H&H,” but he was paid $85,671 in consulting fees by the company between 2002 and 2007.

It is unclear why there was a discrepancy in Hinojosa’s official financial disclosure reports regarding his financial liabilities, but ethics experts called the discrepancies troubling.

“It’s a huge gap,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The disclosure reports are supposed to provide a clear financial picture of a member’s finances. That hasn’t happened here.”