What are Wall Street’s New Year’s resolutions, you ask? Well, not surprisingly, they probably all have something to do with turning back the clock to 2006 or early 2007—and this year, they’ll have some additional ammunition to help them in that quest in the shape of an influx of new Congressional legislators fiercely opposed to the very idea of regulating any form of private enterprise.

Nonsense? Not at all. In the first year of the financial crisis, Wall Street survivors were busy saving themselves from disaster and then rebuilding their profits (fair enough), as well as in crafting an alternative narrative for the causes of that crisis. It was all the government’s fault, they cried. Evil policymakers had put guns to their heads, the banks claimed, forcing them to lend money to homebuyers even though the latter didn’t have the income necessary to finance those mortgages and were purchasing houses at inflated prices. Even then, had government regulators just done their job and stopped investment banks from pumping up their balance sheets with excess leverage, the story goes, those financial institutions would have meekly acquiesced and the crisis would have been averted.

Of course, the truth of the matter is something altogether different. Yes, corporations have to listen to what government wants—and not defy policies that ask them to make financially prudent loans to those in a position to repay them simply because of extraneous factors such as where borrowers live or their racial or ethnic status. The demands that Wall Street players were heeding came from another group altogether: their investors, who were demanding bigger and bigger profits each and every year. Since their interests dovetailed neatly with the interests of the bankers themselves, the size of whose bonuses are—and remain—tied to the size of the profits, that was a not-unwelcome mandate.

Indeed, Wall Street showed a propensity for writing its own rules of the road and then getting them rubber-stamped by regulators, or conducting intensive, no-holds-barred battles to prevent legislation that might have curbed their ability to rake in profits. It successfully fought off an effort to regulate the derivatives business; in 2004, Wall Street firms persuaded the Securities and Exchange Commission to let them set their own optimal levels of leverage based on their own models. The latter decision cleared the way for Bear Stearns to load up to $33 of debt for every $1 of capital on its balance sheet, making it unprepared to withstand a market shock.

Now, two years after the financial crisis peaked, Wall Street wants to return to writing its own rules. Too big to fail? Forget about it. Far from breaking up Wall Street’s giants, or even trying to deal with the degree to which they are intertwined, thus posing a systemic risk, regulators and policymakers have watched as the big firms have gotten still larger—even struggling Citigroup has seen its balance sheet swell. Even before the midterm elections, proposals to separate deposit-taking commercial banks from the investment banking operations of financial institutions that take much larger risks to earn bigger profits from trading rather than simply lending, were stillborn.

Ban "naked" credit default swaps or proprietary trading? Well, only sometimes. And even then—as when policymakers agreed that prop trading shouldn’t account for more than a fraction of a financial institution’s capital—the definition of what “proprietary trading” might be has yet to be determined. That’s a battle we’re likely to see waged in the New Year, and the odds are that the banks will win it, hands down. Bluntly speaking, we believe that limitation will prove to be utterly toothless. Bankers and traders, whenever they are questioned about deploying the firm’s capital to maintain a position in a stock or other kind of security, will simply claim they acquired that position as part of their obligation to “make markets” for their clients. There are so many ways that a bank can insist it is acting in the interests of its client and not itself that even the most knowledgeable and persistent of regulators (not a terribly numerous breed to begin with) will find it hard to prove otherwise.

Under the terms of the Dodd-Frank Act, regulators must now shoulder the responsibility for drafting rules covering everything from the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market to the definition of “proprietary trading.” That means that agencies like the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will have to face off against not only a determined and deep-pocketed bunch of Wall Street firms and their lobbyists, but also against lawmakers who, out of pragmatism or principle, believe that government entities shouldn’t stand in the way of free enterprise even when they are making decisions that affect the health of the financial system on which our collective well-being depends.

Washington may have been only an "enabler" in the run-up to the last financial crisis, the one from the shadow of which we are struggling to escape. But if Wall Street’s current attempt to return to “business as usual,” circa 2006, sparks another meltdown, this time it will be Washington’s fault, and its legislators, policymakers, and regulators will richly deserve being publicly pilloried. Because another market blowup will mean that they retreated from prudent policies in the face of fierce opposition, rather than holding their ground and defending our collective interest in having a healthy and functional Wall Street. And if we elect people who can’t or won’t do that job, then we’ll deserve what we get too.