Wall Street Reform: First Vote Imminent
Update:
“Senate Republicans, united in opposition to the Democrats’ legislation to tighten regulation of the financial system, voted on Monday to block the start of floor debate.
Majority Leader Harry Reid has promised the first vote on Wall Street Reform Monday evening. Republican have said they will filibuster. Reid, it appears, is going to call their bluff.
Reid has not backed down (though it’s still possible he could) from tonight’s scheduled vote on financial reform, even though Republicans say they will filibuster and even though negotiations over a bipartisan compromise continue. What Reid is doing is so rare for Democrats that you might not immediately recognize it for what it is: it’s called pressing your political advantage.
Robert Kuttner says that Obama has lost his enthusiasm for bi-partisan caving in and has urged Reid to cut no deals.
Rep Jeff Merkely blasts the hypocrites of the GOP for this threat.
For the better part of a year, the GOP has blasted Democrats for legislating “behind closed doors” and making “secret deals.” On Monday afternoon, the Senate will vote on a motion to proceed to debate Wall Street reform in public on the Senate floor.
Yet Republicans say their 41 members are united and will oppose the motion, in order to encourage Democrats to continue negotiating with them behind closed doors.
Condemning closed-door negotiations yet voting to prevent public debate is the height of hypocrisy, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) told HuffPost on Monday. “By voting against cloture, Republicans are voting to keep Wall Street negotiations behind closed doors, demanding changes to the bill without public scrutiny. Instead of closed-door deals, they should support open floor debate,” said Merkley.
What is really going on in the run-up to the vote isn’t clear, as apparently staff from the “negotiating” sides haven’t met since Thursday.
Despite claims by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) that they were nearing a deal, their staffs haven’t been doing the kind of legwork usually required before any breakthrough – locking themselves in a room and writing the legislative language.
What will the bill look like? Not nearly as tough as many observers hope for. Ryan Grim reports that if the bill gets to the floor that are a passel of amendments ready to add some beef.
Most interesting might be from Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman:
Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Ted Kaufman will be pushing for an amendment curtailing the activity of the biggest banks and breaking many of them up. The amendment would limit the size of a bank’s total assets to two percent of GDP and cap the insured deposits that one institution could control at ten percent of the aggregate.
I’m sure you’ve all read what Krugman said on ABC Sunday Morning, but in case not:
“Anyone who says we need to be bipartisan should bear in mind that for the last several weeks, Mitch McConnell has been trying to stop reform with possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics, which is the claim that having regulation of the banks is actually bailing out the banks,” Krugman asserted. “Basically the argument boiled down to saying that what we really need to do to deal with fires is abolish the fire department, because then people will know that they can’t let their building burn.
RawStory and MediaMatters for a video clip.
Handled rightly I can’t think of a better thing to do than to force the GOP to filibuster Wall Street Reform for a couple of days. Of course they, and their Tea Party supporters — who were once FOR financial reform — will scream bloody murder and tell us that reform is the status-quo and that the status-quo is reform.
If you remember, the Tea Parties were originally formed to protest the bailouts. They were so mad at the Wall Street bankers who destroyed the economy and then took our hard earned money for their efforts.
[BUT] They’re not going to do anything. They’re going to sit out this fight on financial reform and put absolutely no pressure on Wall Street at all. Because they are tools easily manipulated by right-wing organizations funded by corporate America.
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