Capitol Hill News Open Thread : Roll Call

by: CA Berkeley WV

Fri Mar 26, 2010 at 15:00:00 PM EDT

This is an open source project, so feel free to add your own insights.

No trolls on the highway. Here's the news I found lurking around the Internets...

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.
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While doing so, Mr. Summers realized that the federal government had not passed major social legislation in decades. There was the frenzy of the New Deal, followed by the G.I. Bill, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights and Medicare - and then nothing worth its own section in the history books.

NYT on BFD

Now that that is over . . .

You may have read the GOP was not showing up for work.

In the meantime, everyone can occupy themselves with some committee meetings (listed below the fold), at least until it comes time for Senate Republicans to decide whether to even bother objecting to allowing those meetings to be held, as they've been doing for the past two days.

Last night in the Senate there was a live quorum call.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) late Thursday afternoon called a rare "live quorum" in the Senate chamber in an effort to break an impasse over a one-month extension to unemployment insurance benefits.

Sen. Dodd passed the chair's version of financial reform out of committee on Monday.

It's the next BFD. The experiment of Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan as been what makes labor compressible.

They propose that no financial institution should be allowed to control or have an ownership interest in assets worth more than 4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, or roughly $570 billion in assets today. A lower limit should be imposed on investment banks -- effectively 2 percent of GDP, or roughly $285 billion, they say.

So any body remember what made the TEA Patriots so made in the beginning? Something about bailouts for big banks. They just waited until three months after the Obama inauguration to show how mad they were. How did that outrage get so misdirected, and as hard as this is to say, can it ever redirected for the good of the country.

danps is issuing a challenge to the other side, in a Seneca Doane sort of way.

Sure, it would annoy some big contributors in the business world, but how well has catering to them worked out for you? You need to shake it up. The big picture is, for God's sake forget about the teabaggers already.
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Right now the entire political discourse is contained on the Democrats' side of the spectrum - both supporters of initiatives and opponents. The right has nothing but lunatic raving. Choose your battles a little better and your prospects will improve dramatically. There are plenty of gettable votes out there.

This is not about the next election, yet. I am all about the committee that we have right now. This is about racking up another BFD.  So we have to know the players. Sen. Corker R-TN is already realizing he got pwned by letting Sen Dodd D-CT. That does not mean the bill is the best it can be.

I ask if you knew anything about your representative committee assignments. Capito WV-02 critter is on this one. The counterpart in the Senate is here

Here's the link in CasualWednesday's series on Shelley's committee. He has a whole series.

House Financial Services Committee

Up Next week: the ever expanding list of nominations on the executive calendar. But I have talked about that before you say. It's gotten worse.