• Like Paul, I too consider the invocation of arcane parliamentary procedures to have been a positive learning experience. But what about the public? Do they care about reconciliation and self-executing votes? It would seem that process has a negligible effect on support for the legislation itself, which isn't surprising, but it's always nice to have evidence for your well-founded hunches.
  
• The foundation of modern movement conservatism is a belief that the reigning liberal order (dominant half a century ago, apparently still omnipresent today) is a radical break with the fundamental pillars of Western Civilization. When this is your starting point, then it follows that even modest liberal policy proposals such as "Obamacare" are "immoderate" and the "left-most plausible plan." It is equally unsurprising, then, that Republicans, soaked in the rhetoric of movement conservatism, will call the elimination of subsidies to student loan companies a "government takeover" of said lending, which will "eliminate borrower choice and competition."
• It cannot be emphasized enough how our alleged exceptionalism is tied to our "revolutionary" birth in 1776. There's a convincing case to be made that the American Revolution was hardly a revolution at all, and an equally good case that the ensuing war for independence hinged ideologically on restoring English liberty that was being usurped by the British Crown. Some conservatives are less interested in subscribing to ideological fairytales than others, but the rest seem content to believe that "1776 is, was, and forever shall be the birthday of human liberty."
• This Slate profile of Andrew Breibart is old news, but in light of CNN's decision to debase themselves with their latest hire, it's worth bringing up again. The main takeaway concerning Breibart is that his popularity is dependent on being crude and taking every opportunity to strike back against his detractors. I do not find this appealing or worth my time, but I understand that others might. Serious news organizations supposedly thrive off their journalistic integrity, but in practice, more and more, they're playing Breibart's game, as the Erick Erickson hire shows.
• Remainders: A primer on self-executing rules; the Obama administration is denying a lot of FOIA requests; Dem leaders remind their caucus that Medicare was once unpopular, too; The New York Times' science bureau is run by global warming deniers; Jane Hamsher wants to make sure Democrats fail to pass health-care reform; Dick Armey is a national treasure; and Victor Davis Hanson speaks of Americans making war in a disturbingly sexualized fashion.

--Mori Dinauer

Tea Party activists gathered in Washington today to protest health-care reform.

(The Washington Independent/Dave Weigel)

Mark Schmitt chats with TNR's Noam Scheiber about Rahm Emanuel, health care, and financial reform. In this clip, Mark considers the changing nature of the Senate and explains why LBJ could never have even attempted to create his Great Society under today's political conditions.

--The Editors

In light of a recent study that shows how little wealth black and Latina women have, we should be rushing to fix pay and wealth disparities. That's especially true given how devastating the recession is for families when underpaid women become the sole breadwinner.

As Latoya Peterson notes for TAP, addressing the pay gap doesn't adequately address the difference in wealth, or assets minus debts, between women of all races and their male counterparts. Still, the pay gap is one of the causes of the almost total lack of wealth experienced by women of color. A bill called the Paycheck Fairness Act that would close some of the loopholes in the Equal Pay Act, which passed the House and is now sitting in the Senate. It would be better if it passed soon, in order to give families some recourse during the recession. Fatima Goss Graves, a vice president of the National Women's Law Center, says the bill is well-placed to move, and a hearing on the act last week was well attended.

The act would make it easier to discover pay disparities and to make claims against the businesses who discriminate them. The more studies published on how poorly women do financially, the more urgent and uncontroversial passing the bill seems.

-- Monica Potts

Latoya Peterson argues that current economic policies don't address the deep financial problems facing many women of color:

How far will $5 go toward an unexpected emergency? Or even $100? Sadly, for many women of color, not even a single dollar stands between them and financial destruction.

For black women the median wealth (savings and assets minus debit) is only $100, according to a new report. For Hispanic women, it is $120. But the numbers get even worse. For black and Hispanic women ages 36 to 49, the median wealth is $5. For nonwhite women who have never been married, the amount was zero. In the report -- "Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America's Future," the Insight Center for Community Economic Development explores the horrifying financial situation faced by women of color. It shows how lower median wages and a lack of intergenerational wealth reserves contribute to the disparity between women of color and everyone else. The difference amounts to "one penny of wealth for every dollar owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women."

KEEP READING ...

Testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science, Attorney General Eric Holder faced a number of criticisms from House Republicans on the use of civilian courts to try suspected terrorists. In doing so, he addressed a number of myths underlying Republican criticism of using civilian courts instead of military commissions.

Ironically, Holder sounded least confident when defending the Obama administration's continued use of military commissions, noting that the commissions allow hearsay evidence but that “it doesn’t mean that you’re being unfair to the defendant; you’re simply looking at the particular forum that suits the particular facts of each case.” Nothing says "legitimacy" like forum-shopping for where you'll get the best result.

Classified information: Holder noted (as Spencer Ackerman reported last week) that the procedures for handling classified information in military commissions are based on the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, which governs the disclosure of such information in federal court. “The system that is in place in the military commissions is actually based on CIPA,” Holder noted.

Using trials as a platform: Holder noted that Aafia Siddiqui, who was recently tried in New York on terror-related charges, was removed from the courtroom after the first day because of her outbursts. “Article III Judges are used to dealing with people like this and know how to deal with them,” Holder said, adding that judges in military commissions "don’t feel as comfortable clamping down on a defendant who’s trying to do that.”

Civilian Trials for terrorists are a radical departure from Bush: Texas Rep. John Culberson asked Holder why one of the alleged Tanzania bombers, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, was getting a civilian trial when he was a foreign national. Holder's response was to point out that the other conspirators had already been tried in civilian court, during the Bush administration.

Federal Courts mean terrorist defendants are being "coddled": Holder said this presumption got his "blood boiling," adding that “they have the same rights that a Charles Manson would have, any other mass murderer ... those are the comparisons people should be making, not to average citizens who have done no harm and committed no crimes.”

Culberson didn't like this answer and asked Holder whether Osama bin Laden would also have the same rights as Manson. Holder seemed to joke that they were "comparable people" at which point Culberson accused Holder of not realizing that the nation was at war. The hearing hinted at the intellectual influence National Review writer Andy McCarthy has on the GOP's national-security policies. Rep. Frank Wolf entered several of McCarthy's screeds into the record, and Culberson practically quoted McCarthy verbatim when he accused Holder of wanting to "clothe Osama bin Laden in the rights of the U.S. Constitution.”

After a lengthy exchange, Holder told Culberson the debate over bin Laden getting rights was an academic one.

“We will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden; he will never appear in a U.S. courtroom -- that is the reality,” Holder said.

The GOP opposition to a trial for bin Laden is bizarre. As I've said before, complaining about a trial for bin Laden would be like winning the lottery and then complaining because the money was given to you in euros.

-- A. Serwer

Health-care reform is necessary, and House Democrats should vote for it because it’s best for the nation.

They should also remember the political lessons of history. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. As the White House and the House Democratic leadership try to line up 216 votes to pass health-care reform — and as Republicans, aided by the National Association of Manufacturers and abetted by fierce partisans like Newt Gingrich, try to kill it – I can’t help thinking back to 1994 when the lineup was much the same.

I was serving in the Clinton administration at the time. In the first months of 1993 it looked as if Clinton’s health-care proposal would sail through Congress. But the process dragged on and by 1994 it bogged down. We knew health care was imperiled but none of us knew that failure to pass health care would doom much of the rest of Clinton’s agenda and wrest control of Congress out of the hands of the Democrats. In retrospect, it’s clear Republicans did know.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

Undecided Democrats appeared unconcerned by the flap. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), a retiring lawmaker who opposed the original House bill and is undecided on the new package, mocked Republican criticism of the process. Ultimately, he said, voters will hold lawmakers responsible for any changes in law.

"I don't think anybody's going to say that we didn't vote for the bill," he said.

Indeed, they won't; Republicans will saddle any and all Democrats as "Obamacare" supporters, no matter what they do -- at least until 2012. As has been observed before, Democrats are going to pay the price for voting for the House bill in any case, so actually voting to pass the bill (no matter what the procedural high jinks, that's what House members are being asked to do) and receiving its many benefits is a very smart idea indeed.

-- Tim Fernholz

Tim Fernholz reviews Michael Lewis' new book:

In the prologue to The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis explains that he envisioned his first and perhaps most famous work, Liar's Poker, as a grim obituary for an industry that rewarded inexperience and greed. However, the byzantine banking industry continued to flourish, and young readers wrote Lewis to ask how they, too, could get into the game. His disappointment is palpable. In his new book, he may have replicated the mistake of glorifying a troubled industry.

The premise of the book is simple: A few investors had the foresight to see that the sub-prime-mortgage loans at the heart of a vast bubble in the bond markets were destined to default and made fortunes betting against them. The Big Short, then, is the story of those counter-investors and in turn, an illustration of what was (and is) wrong on Wall Street.

KEEP READING ...

In case you haven't been paying attention to the moment-by-moment maneuvering over health care, the latest twist is a suggestion that the House might pass the bill using a parliamentary device known as a "self-executing rule," which works like this: Instead of having a vote on the Senate bill and then a vote on the package of fixes to the Senate bill (the latter of which would then be passed by the Senate), the House will have one combined vote, in which they will "deem" the Senate bill passed and pass the package of fixes. Naturally, Republicans are reacting as though this is a crime on the level of genocide, even though -- you know what's coming -- it turns out Republicans used the technique all the time when they were in charge.

The supposed purpose behind this is to allow members who don't like the Senate bill to avoid casting a vote directly on the Senate bill. The idea that they would somehow insulate themselves from attacks on the particulars of the Senate bill is pretty ridiculous, and if there's even the tiniest chance that it could produce a constitutional problem, it should probably be avoided. But let's not get too worked up over this, because in the end it won't matter.

Let's acknowledge what a terrific education we've all gotten in the arcana of Congressional procedure through the health-care debate. Three cheers for civic learning! But we should keep in mind that once this bill passes, all of this will be forgotten. The Gang of Six, the Tri-Committee Bill, the Manager's Amendment, the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, reconciliation, self-executing rules -- it will all fade into the past. What remains will be the law itself.

The White House seems to get that, as you can see by the talking points they distributed to Democrats on the issue. Nearly all are about substance not process, including the suggested responses to Republican arguments about process. Republicans say they're going to extend this debate into the fall campaign, but which side of this argument would you rather be on:

Republican candidate: "My opponent's party resorted to parliamentary tricks to pass a big-government health care plan."

Democratic candidate: "My opponent thinks insurance companies ought to be able to deny you coverage because of pre-existing conditions and kick you off your insurance when you get sick. Thanks to the reform we passed, they can't do that anymore."

The process has been ugly, it's true. But the process is almost over.

-- Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman on conservative semiotics:

As much as politicians like to imagine themselves men and women of action, what they mostly do is talk. They talk to the cameras, they talk to constituents, they talk to contributors, they talk to each other. It's almost impossible to be a successful politician without the ability to lodge words and images in the public mind.

The result is that a really adept politician has to be part linguist and part semiotician. This is particularly true when you're out of power and there's so little you can actually accomplish. As Republicans are faced with the possibility that this week, Democrats might actually succeed in passing their most critical domestic initiative, is their mastery of the symbolic really enough?

KEEP READING ...

Here's another tea leaf to read on the upcoming health-care reform vote: Rep. Tom Perriello, whom you may know, voted for health-care reform in the original health bill only after supporting the Stupak Amendment, which would have drastically reduced women's access to reproductive health care beyond the status quo of the Hyde Amendment. Perriello, a devout Catholic, had pledged, along with several other members of Congress, not to vote for any bill that provides federal funding for abortion. With many of these members leery of the Senate bill's language on abortion, people have worried that this bloc would vote against final passage on the health-care bill. But here's the congressman from Virginia's 5th District:

As health care experts and pro-life leaders agree, the abortion language in the Senate bill upholds the Hyde Amendment standard. The Senate health care bill prevents federal taxpayer dollars from funding abortions, as the Catholic Hospital Association and legal experts have recently stated and as my own research has confirmed.

Furthermore, several key yet unadvertised provisions of the bill are likely to reduce the number of abortions in this country in ways that move beyond politics toward a real impact on the culture of life in our country, such as those that provide $250 million for programs to support vulnerable pregnant women and increase the adoption tax credit, also making it refundable, so that lower income families can access it fully.

... I have plenty of serious problems with the Senate bill and, until I see the final language, I cannot take a position on final passage. But the existing language on abortion in the current Senate bill meets the pledge I made to ensure no federal funding for abortion in this health care bill.

Looks like Perriello is opening the door for other members who are concerned about the language on abortion to follow his lead in voting for the bill. It makes House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's decision not to negotiate on that issue look pretty smart.

-- Tim Fernholz

Regular readers will recall that the key distinction between the Volcker rule, as proposed by the Obama administration, and similar provisions in the House bill, was that the Volcker rule was mandatory: It required regulators to ban proprietary trading, hedge and private-equity funds from commercial banks, and would offer specific limits on the size of a bank's liabilities. The House bill, on the other hand, would simply give regulators the authority to limit a firm's size and scope however they pleased if they determined it was necessary. While the House authorities were more powerful, they are also less likely to be implemented; the Volcker rule provides definitive, hard and fast lines.

Well, no more. The new method is that the Systemic Risk Council will have six months to study how and why to implement the size and scope rules, and then recommend how to write those rules, or even if they should be written at all. Basically, it's regulatory discretion with a time limit: The council has six months to do the research and nine months after that to write rules that could be either totally cosmetic or, less likely in my view, actually effective.

This is ostensibly because drawing careful lines around proprietary trading and determining the correct size of a financial institution are too complicated to legislate. I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument, but I see no reason why Congress couldn't at least draw outer boundaries to guide regulators rather than putting nearly the whole package in its hands. With the right appointees, this could still be a useful rule, but it's supporters shouldn't pretend it is much different from what the House already passed into law. That doesn't mean that the rule can't be changed further down the line, but I think Dodd is sending a pretty clear signal on this one.

(For junkies, we're talking Sec. 619. [PDF])

-- Tim Fernholz

Guess who CNN hired:

Prominent conservative commentator and RedState.com editor Erick Erickson will join CNN as a political contributor, appearing primarily on CNN's new show John King, USA, the network announced Tuesday.

In its 360-page National Broadband Plan [PDF], set to be handed over to Congress today, the FCC was kind enough to provide a Cliff Notes version of the document in the form of one literary footnote at the text's beginning:

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Welsh rebel Glendower tells his co-conspirator Hotspur: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur responds, “Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?”

"Will they come when you do call for them?" is another way of saying that all the good policy proposals in the world don't mean all that much if there's not a good strategy behind bringing them into being. Is this long-awaited document going to call AT&T, Verizon, and wireless-ISPs-of-the-future into action, and actually provide a strategy for bringing more and better broadband choices to Americans? I registered my initial skepticism yesterday. If you'll bear with me, let's take a deeper look at the ideas contained within the actual plan.

For starters, the National Broadband Plan includes a proposal to require ISPs to do a better job disclosing how fast and stable a hook-up they're promising. The plan recommends that the FCC invest more in broadband data collection. There's also a proposal to have the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) develop a flexible standard of what "broadband" even means. Those are basic, straightforward proposals that should, in a sane world, be the starting point for the broadband conversation.

Other, more creative proposals include repurposing the Universal Service Fund charge on our phones to apply to broadband, hooking up Defense Department installations with high-speed broadband to (somewhat cleverly) push broadband further into the realm of a national-security necessity. There's talk of freeing more of the wireless spectrum for unlicensed innovation. There's a slightly odd bit about putting the federal government in the position of spearheading a push for national online ID management. Then there are proposals to create special funds to increase coverage: one for 3G networks, and a "Connect America" fund to make the math work in places where there are no or few broadband choices.

Something like "Connect America" could be promising, but it would have to be a lot more robustly structured than it seems to be to actually counter the current broadband regime. Telecom companies provide services where they think it makes financial sense for them to do so. The hope of many advocates was that the FCC would challenge that dynamic with this proposal. But to simply advocate the creation of a special fund for problem cases doesn't go nearly far enough. To pay for the National Broadband Plan's collection of proposals, the FCC says that an auction of some 500 MHz of wireless spectrum reclaimed from broadcasters will cover all of the proposed costs -- which seems a little crazy, when you consider that we have no idea which of the plan's proposals would be accepted by the FCC, or, where necessary, seized upon by Congress.

To be fair, the FCC had a tough job here. America is big, and where we're not spread out, we live in old cities. Any "national" plan has to contend with a mix of federal, state, and local authorities, not to mention the tremendous economic and political power of the telecom industry in this country.

So that, more or less, is what's in the National Broadband Plan as written. I'm beginning to think that maybe eight months wasn't long enough for those within the FCC to come up with a game-changing broadband strategy.

I'm also beginning to wonder whether the FCC's tactic of holding countless public workshops and meetings was the best way of going about this. "To an extraordinary extent ... the author of this plan is America itself," the National Broadband Plan reads. Once the FCC understood what America wanted, it probably should have spent more time figuring out a strategy for actually providing it.

--Nancy Scola

Yesterday, Ross Douthat criticized the new Matt Damon movie Green Zone, which contains an unsympathetic portrayal of the Bush administration's disastrous invasion of Iraq. Douthat feels as though the film reduces the Bush administration to two-dimensional cartoon villainy, arguing that the nuances of the story demand the kind of texture one finds in Shakespearean tragedies:

Our nation might be less divided, and our debates less poisonous, if more artists were capable of showing us the ironies, ambiguities and tragedies inherent in our politics — rather than comforting us with portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.

Daniel Larison, in a classic post, notes the irony of Douthat calling for nuance in the portrayal of people who made the case for war by dividing the world cleanly into good and evil, and casting anyone who opposed the war on the side of the demons. I won't excerpt too much here because it really should be read in its entirety:

Perhaps one reason there is not much interest in exploring the tragic side of our politics is that Nemesis is ever-elusive. The ambition and pride of political leaders may lead to disaster, but the men whose ambition and pride fueled the calamity escape relatively unscathed. We have an abundance of hubris in our politics, and there are more than enough sins that invite punishment, but unlike the famous figures of tragedy our leaders never answer for what they have done. It is always “History” that is supposed to judge them. In the meantime, they walk away, and often enough they head off to a comfortable retirement. They remain unaccountable and surrounded by a small army of revisionists just waiting to rehabilitate their reputations in a few years’ time.

I agree with everything Larison says above. There's no appetite for accountability in government; what we have is a kind of bipartisan detente in which the Republican Party bristles at any notion of high-level accountability for Republican officials as, uh, "tyranny" and Democrats agree to this point out of political expedience, in the hopes that Republicans will one day return the favor.

The reason Douthat pines for the "Shakespearean" treatment for the Bushies is that such tragedies are mostly nonideological -- they are stories about the dark flaws that emerge as a consequence of human desires. Treating the war in Iraq as a Shakespearan tragedy would divorce it from the ideological dogma that made the administration focus on invading Iraq in the first place.

The other problem is that properly told, the story of Iraq is not merely the personal tragedy of hapless leaders. It's the story of a wounded country that sought to lash out and punish those who had attacked it, without enough regard for whom we were actually aiming at. It was only in the red haze of September 11's aftermath that a case for war in Iraq would have garnered public support, and the Bush administration skillfully harvested that fear and anger, concocting what they knew was a flawed case for war against a country that had no ties to al-Qaeda and no weapons of mass destruction to menace us with. But they could not have had war without American consent, and in our fury, we were all too ready to grant it.

Shakespeare's tragic figures were often monarchs and military leaders; the consent of their subjects didn't matter as much as it does in a democracy. What's tragic about the Iraq War isn't that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq -- it's that Americans agreed to it for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare's tragic figures are leaders by birth or strength of force. We vote ours into office, which is a much bigger tragedy but a much harder story to tell.

-- A. Serwer

More and more doctors are dropping Medicaid; more and more patients are unable to continue to see their doctors. The cuts come as states anticipate losing federal aid and try to close budget gaps, reports The New York Times. These kind of low-reimbursement rates are what many fear with a single-payer system. And, to some extent, critics are right that the government would regulate rates. But, of course, it's entirely different to have an insurance system that only provides for the neediest and a system that collects premium contributions from and pays for everyone.

More important is what happens to these patients, who the Times says struggle to find doctors and so delay care until they need to go to an emergency room. On a less dramatic scale, these kinds of problems are going to keep happening to more and more people who have stingier plans from their employers and have to pay more for every type of care. If a patient has to pay $800 or more toward an elective surgery that could prevent problems down the road, there's a good chance they'll wait until that bigger -- and more expensive problem -- needs to be dealt with. People are really bad at managing their own risk. That's why insurance exists in the first place.

In the meantime, many people don't have insurance they can use practically. And even if health reform passes this week, it's unlikely to help those people for a very long time.

-- Monica Potts

And David Brooks wept:

Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

Like Ezra Klein, I'd prefer a system of government where the majority party didn't have to resort to "procedural gimmickry" to pass a bill with a simple majority. But this is the system we have, and whatever party happens to be in the majority rails against the minority party for obstruction, while the minority party accuses the majority of tyranny. This state of affairs is so banal and predictable that it makes the level of emotional distress in Brooks' column really alarming. Someone get this man a Kleenex.

I also reject the premise of Brooks' argument, which is that reconciliation will lead to a place where the "normal instincts of human sympathy" have been "bleached out." We're already there. The "normal instincts of human sympathy" didn't prevent the last administration from authorizing torture, or its most radical members from accusing their political enemies of treason for upholding due process now that the administration is over. The prospect of denying health care to 31 million people swayed Democratic members of the House from the cowardly "no" votes they pray will win them re-election.

The fact is that, as Tim alluded to earlier, humans are generally very good at ignoring the suffering of other humans, and passing the health-care bill won't change that. But it will cement the idea that government has a responsibility to help those who don't have insurance get coverage, which seems to me like a very rational response to humans' distinct lack of sympathy.

UPDATE: And then there's the fact that Brooks was wrong about his factual claims.

-- A. Serwer

Fred Hiatt's latest is just something: Even though Obama is a "secure, self-confident adult" who "cares about policy," his presidency would be improved were he more visibly happy with the decisions he is making. (Needless to say, Hiatt's editorial page would no doubt be the first to accuse him of unseriousness were he joking around in the Oval Office.) Hiatt's carping seems to come in the grand journalistic tradition of late-night topic desperation, but he's also betraying the never-ending search on the right for a president who will fulfill their emotional needs as well as their presidential ones. By most accounts, Obama does have happy moments in his job, but Hiatt's concluding example is Obama talking about the sobering decisions he makes as commander in chief. Do we really want any president to take those duties lightly?

In other op-ed page madness, did you know that, thanks to budget reconciliation procedures in the Senate, "the remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out"? Me neither, but you can thank David Brooks for this truly whacky effort, which manages to place a simple majority vote in the same category as the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, and sectarian schisms in Islam. As the great Scottish poet Robert Burns once said, "Man's reconciliation to man/ Makes countless thousands mourn!" Or something. I hope it makes Barack Obama happy.

-- Tim Fernholz

Virginia's attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, has been on a hard-right bender since taking office, gutting employee protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation at Virginia colleges, an action Gov. Bob McDonnell later reversed in an executive order. But apparently homophobia isn't Cuccinelli's only flaw. Not Larry Sabato posted a video yesterday of Cuccinelli during the transition, in which he answers a "hypothetical" question from a birther during which he suggests that Obama having been born in Kenya isn't "beyond the realm of possibility."

He then tried to walk it back in this statement, via Ben Smith:

I absolutely believe that President Obama was born in the United States. I don't buy into the claims that he wasn't. On the recording, I was asked a hypothetical legal question, and I gave a hypothetical legal answer in response. As I said previously, this issue was not a part of my campaign, and it is not part of what I am doing now as attorney general.

It was not merely a "hypothetical legal answer." Here are Cuccinelli's words:

Someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility.

He wasn't saying the lawsuit was not "beyond the realm of possibility." He said that Obama being born in Kenya didn't "seem beyond the realm of possibility." His statement "walking back" his birtherism is dishonest on its face.

I'm willing to believe that Cuccinelli doesn't actually believe this stuff and that he was just engaging in a little partisan signifying for the GOP crazy wing. But that doesn't mean he should be let off the hook for saying something as outrageous as suggesting the president was born in Kenya just because he has the good sense to be embarrassed enough to lie about it later.

-- A. Serwer

Is Fox News' Glenn Beck going to turn out to be the Icarus of the current political moment, flying too close to that giant fiery ball of crazy in the sky and falling back down to Earth? He's gotten into some trouble recently after attacking churches who advocate social justice, which is ... well, nearly every Christian denomination. "I beg you look for the words social justice or economic justice on your church Web site," he said. "If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. ... Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!" He went on to explain what those are code words for: socialism and Nazism. Yes, Nazism. Churches from across the political and theological spectrum have condemned Beck, and even representatives of his own Mormon faith were appalled. Then we learned yesterday from Howard Kurtz that "there is a deep split within Fox between those -- led by Chairman Roger Ailes -- who are supportive, and many journalists who are worried about the prospect that Beck is becoming the face of the network."

Well, Fox folk, you made your bed, now you have to lie awake in it at night imagining that the Illuminati are sending you secret mind-control messages through your toaster. Something like this was bound to happen eventually. In Beck's world, there are three kinds of people: the clueless masses, gliding through the world with eyes closed to the levers that control their lives until it's too late; the small group of unhappy warriors who have glimpsed behind the curtain and seen the terrible truth (i.e. him and his viewers); and the participants in the evil conspiracy, out to destroy our way of life as they cackle and twirl their handlebar mustaches. If you think I'm exaggerating, watch this little clip compendium.

If you've constructed your world that way, then anyone who falls out of your favor on a given day can't just be described as wrong or foolish. Beck's audience doesn't tune in to hear that his political opponents are mistaken -- they tune in to hear that they're evil. And not only that, they're all part of the same terrifying conspiracy to destroy us all. Yesterday it was Barack Obama, the day before that it was Teddy Roosevelt, and today it's Christians who care about the less fortunate. Who knows, maybe tomorrow it'll be puppies. It doesn't really matter, so long as the conspiracy is always brewing and the enemies always on the march.

On Beck's show, there's no half way: You're with us, you're against us, or you're a sheep. And every time he takes a step like attacking churches for engaging in social justice, more people realize they want nothing to do with him.

-- Paul Waldman

• Christopher Hayes' short contribution to Time's "10 Ideas for the Next Decade" feature looks behind the curtain of institutional failure in America and points out that it's the elites in virtually every pillar of society who have failed, accounting for widespread disillusionment. He also notes a countervailing trend during the past decade, that of a "grass-roots activism across the political spectrum and the remarkable surge in institutional innovation, much of it facilitated by the Internet." The scope of Hayes' essay doesn't allow for addressing an obvious implication of this trend: whether this democratization and self-governance will change how we interact with government and what that means for political elites.
  
• This Peter Beinart column positing a conflict between two factions in the Democratic Party -- namely DLC types versus activist liberals -- struggles to make the case that by pursuing health-care reform, Barack Obama is gambling that "Americans prefer bold liberals to cautious ones." Ah, the perils of governing in our center-right nation. True to this genre, Beinart's column is long on conveying his special insights into the American psyche and short on any discussion of the actual reform legislation or any germane polling data on the subject. It offers little, if anything, for people who would like to be informed about the politics of health-care reform.
  
• We should all be grateful that The New York Times surveyed the barren landscape of fawning portraits of Newt Gingrich and decided a few hundred more words were necessary for the former House speaker and  officeholder. Did you know Mr. Gingrich recently spoke to 300 people in Ohio about the gut-level appeal of Scott Brown's pickup truck? Did you know Republican (and some Democratic!) strategists love soliciting Mr. Gingrich's advice on matters political? Did you know Mr. Gingrich is humble about Mr. Gingrich's accomplishments and is coy about his presidential ambitions?
  
• The biggest consequence of the decades-long push to make Americans believe that "government is the problem," is that government becomes less effective at fixing problems which are normally handled by government, like fixing aging infrastructure. But now, thanks to St. Reagan, we know that mass transit, roadways, and electricity grids are the hallmarks of socialism, and we can be confident that the market will see the need for fixing sewers and get to work on it right away. This will, of course, reduce the conspicuous proliferation of freeloaders in our society who want the government to fund their flirtations with postmodern art.
  
• Weekend Remainders: The House could "deem" the Senate legislation passed and vote for the reconciliation fixes directly; undecided House Dems get some private face time with the president; the Stupak caucus is losing cohesion; Daniel Larison says all that needs to be said concerning Ross Douthat's apologia for the misunderstood architects of the Iraq War; Senate Republicans might be obstructing Obama judicial nominees, but the president isn't exactly racing to reshape the judiciary; yes, Karl Rove is a serial liar who would be completely ignored by a more serious strain of political journalism; Clive Crook reads the public's mind, ignores data on public opinion; and Dennis Kucinich offers very little to the House Democratic caucus.
  

--Mori Dinauer

On June 14, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a judge on the U.S. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals accepts her nomination to the United States Supreme Court while President Bill Clinton looks on. Ginsburg turns 77 today.

(wikimedia)

Sarah Jaffeprofiles Anton Gunn:

Anton Gunn's e-mail promises I won't have a hard time picking him out in the Starbucks in Richland County, South Carolina.

He's right.

Easily the biggest guy in the room, the former offensive lineman looms over an older man in an American Legion baseball cap with whom he's chatting about local business. We're just northeast of Columbia, South Carolina's capital, in the heart of Gunn's state House district.

Gunn is used to standing out. An African American representative in a majority-white district, a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, and a 36-year-old surrounded by career politicians, he makes a fitting messenger for Obama's campaign-trail message about the need for a new kind of politics that moves beyond traditional divisions.

KEEP READING ...

Via Steve Benen, we see that former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, who is challenging John McCain in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona, has some interesting ideas about what gay marriage will lead to:

"You see, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, when it started this move toward same-sex marriage, actually defined marriage -- now get this -- it defined marriage as simply, 'the establishment of intimacy,'" Hayworth said. "Now how dangerous is that? I mean, I don't mean to be absurd about it, but I guess I can make the point of absurdity with an absurd point -- I guess that would mean if you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse. It's just the wrong way to go, and the only way to protect the institution of marriage is with that federal marriage amendment that I support."

This kind of thing comes up with alarming frequency from Christian conservatives. For some of them, any issue of gay rights is about sex -- hot, steamy sex, so hot they can't stop thinking about it. I've always said that James Dobson thinks about gay sex more than any five gay people I know put together. And apparently, people like Hayworth think that there is a tide of perversion lapping at our levees, and if we allow a crack in the edifice of heterosexual marriage, it will come down upon us like a tidal wave, drowning us with its forbidden temptations. I wonder what kind of thoughts led them there?

-- Paul Waldman

You can read a summary of the bill here [PDF], and see the legislative language here [PDF]. While the bill does not differ too much from what was leaked beforehand, here are a few notes:

• Still Looking for R's... . The bill still reflects the bipartisan negotiations with Sen. Bob Corker that Dodd abandoned last week, including a compromise that puts a consumer financial protection bureau inside the Federal Reserve, even though no Republicans support the bill. Dodd still hopes for support from across the aisle, if only because senators like Mark Warner and Evan Bayh are leery of voting for the bill without GOP cover. He said as much when pressed on why consumer protection would be housed at the Fed, even as he promised that the Fed would supposedly have no authority over consumer protection, telling reporters "the problem was in terms of votes."

  Dodd also mentioned his willingness to include a derivatives compromise being negotiated by Sens. Jack Reed and Judd Gregg even though his original ideas, still visible in this draft, were stronger than what the House passed. There's also the possibility that he could pick up Republicans outside of committee when the bill moves to the floor.

• ...but the devil is still in the details. At first glance, the proposal to put consumer financial protection in the Federal Reserve seems terrible. But looking at the actual legislative language, there is some hope of independence. It seems that the presidentially appointed director of the bureau would have final say over its budget, and the standard needed for other regulators to overrule consumer regulation is extremely high -- basically, systemic risk to the banking system. It also seems at first glance to allow states much more authority in enforcing their own consumer-protection laws and those of the federal government, which is a major improvement over the House bill.
• Here comes Obama. The president issued a statement on the legislation after Dodd's announcement. Though he tacitly accepts housing consumer financial protection in the Fed, the statement also marks some of the administration's first public line-drawing on the issue.

  I will not accept attempts to undermine the independence of the consumer protection agency, or to exclude from its purview banks, credit-card companies, or nonbank firms such as debt collectors, credit bureaus, payday lenders or auto dealers. ... I will oppose any loopholes that could harm consumers or investors, or that allow institutions to avoid oversight that is important to financial stability.

  Excluding payday lenders, for instance, may very well mean that Obama has given up on getting Corker to vote for the bill. 

There's a lot more to go through in this bill (1,336 pages!). I'll have more updates later today, including a response from the reform community. With only about 60 legislative working days left in this Congress to pass this bill, it's a race to the wire now.

-- Tim Fernholz

As Monica mentioned below, tomorrow was slated to be the day that the Federal Communications Commission would, finally, put out some version of a National Broadband Plan, the first of its kind for the United States. I happened to get a copy at a pen-and-pad briefing at the FCC this morning, and we were told that the midnight embargo had already been broken, so bombs away.

At first read, this 350-page-plus planning document is probably going to disappoint many people. The critical question of how the FCC and/or Congress is going to encourage provider competition was largely punted on. As we already knew, the FCC is pushing forward with a wireless auction that would reward licensees for selling back the slices of the national airwaves they no longer need. But when it comes to wireline services -- fiber in the ground, for example -- this strategy doesn't have all that much to offer. There's a bit in there about making use of federal "conduits, poles and rights-of-way" to make the math work on connecting hard to wire places. That's good, but the bad part is that that represents the beginning and end of creative thinking from the FCC about how to reverse the U.S.' slow descent into telecom mediocrity. In fact, one of the senior FCC folks at the briefing actually framed the plan's approach to broadband competition as a continuation of U.S. telecom practice, a practice that has largely been "the market shall provide." You might have noticed it hasn't thus far. That was kinda why we needed a new plan.

The absence of creative thinking in this new plan is particularly worrisome because the small crew within the FCC that produced it had the chance to stir passions about what our broadband future might look like. The National Broadband Plan isn't a set of regulations. It's not a piece of legislation. It was meant to be an aspirational plan, but it's not that aspirational. Blair Levin, the seemingly autonomous point-person appointed by Chairman Genachowski, talks about the FCC like Alaskans talk about the United States. It's not clear if recommendations in the plan made to the FCC will actually be regulations made by the FCC. In other words, is the FCC prepared to actually enact the policies, like form new public-private partnerships or re-purpose the Universal Service Fund from telephones to broadband? I was told the FCC commissioners -- the people with the power to turn the plan into action -- had seen the report as early as a full month ago and had access to the broadband team's staff.

In a perfect world you'd have a lot more FCC commitment to the plan's specific recommendations, given that unless the commission's totally on board or Congress suddenly gets motivated, all the plans in the world aren't going to amount to much. All that said, there's some solid thinking about the basics of better broadband. I'm being extra critical, because of the enormous potential a plan like this could have. But I'll have more on more of the policy details in a bit.

--Nancy Scola

The LA Times reports that the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allows unlimited sums of corporate money to be used to sway elections, will likely directly benefit Liberty Central Inc., the "Tea Party" lobbying group formed by Virginia Thomas, whose husband Clarence voted with the majority in that decision.

A notion repeated over and over in coverage of the Supreme Court is that Justices are generally "insulated from politics," which means that they don't campaign or anything like that. But in reality they are perfectly willing to vote the party line if it means putting one of their own in office. When Virginia Thomas was asked about how she and her husband planned to handle perceptions of partiality, given that corporations might give to her group expecting  favorable treatment from her husband, she responded by accusing the reporter of bias:

"I don't involve myself in litigation. Are you asking that because there's a different standard for conservatives? Did you ask Ed Rendell that question?" she said, referring to the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who is married to a federal appellate court judge.

As a matter of fact, the reporter did, and it turns out Rendell is pretty careful about making sure he's avoiding conflicts of interest:

The judicial code of conduct does require judges to separate themselves from their spouses' political activity. As a result, Marjorie Rendell, a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has stayed away from political events, campaign rallies and debates in Pennsylvania. Her husband discussed such issues in his first campaign for governor.

Since then, Judge Rendell has sought the opinion of the judiciary's Committee on Codes of Conduct when a case presents a possible conflict of interest involving her husband's political office, she said.

If Virginia Thomas' reaction is any indication of how the couple plans to handle potential conflicts of interest in the future, all we can expect is the two of them taking umbrage at the mere suggestion that neither is an infallible saint. Any suggestion otherwise would be bias, perhaps even a "high-tech lynching."

Edward Alden explains that a Supreme Court ruling in a terrorism case is making it harder for many other important lawsuits to proceed:

Javaid Iqbal lived for a decade on Long Island, working first as a 7-Eleven clerk, then as a gas station attendant, then as a cable-television installer. On Nov. 2, 2001, the Pakistani immigrant was arrested in his apartment by FBI agents acting on one of the many misleading tips that poured in after the September 11 attacks. He was taken to Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center without any notification to his American wife or stepchildren. Two months after his arrest, he was moved to the jail's Administrative Maximum (ADMAX) unit, where he alleges he was beaten repeatedly and kept in solitary confinement under bright lights that shone 24 hours a day. He was forced outside on cold, rainy days and then left soaking in his jail cell while guards cranked up the air conditioner. He lost 40 pounds during his 14 months in detention and was deported in 2003.

The following year, he filed a lawsuit against dozens of U.S. officials, claiming he was declared a "high interest" detainee and placed in ADMAX because of his race, religion, and national origin. Iqbal's lawyers sought to question former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller under oath about their responsibility for the jailing and abuse of detainees in the Brooklyn detention center. But by a 5-4 vote last May, the Supreme Court's conservative majority rejected the request, quashing a lawsuit that had spent five years climbing through the lower courts. The justices ruled that Iqbal's lawyers had not made a plausible case that Ashcroft or Mueller was responsible for Iqbal's mistreatment and barred the lawyers from asking the government to turn over evidence to which only it had access. In doing so, the court used Ashcroft v. Iqbal to rewrite more than a half-century of precedent establishing the hurdles plaintiffs must cross before they can begin discovery -- the pre-trial process that requires defendants to hand over internal documents, answer questions under oath, and provide other evidence.

KEEP READING ...

Tomorrow, the Federal Communications Commission will reveal it's plan for increasing Internet access, but some of the highlights were revealed today. The goals include getting fast broadband access to 100 million households by 2020, and getting television stations to give up their unused frequencies for wireless Internet service providers. The last part is likely to meet resistance, writes the Associated Press.

But the FCC chair, Julius Genachowski says that broadband Internet access is less a luxury than an economic necessity. Spreading access, especially to rural areas that don't have good infrastructure and to lower-income families for whom it is too expensive, will be good for economic growth, too. That's especially true since, as Paul Waldman noted in January, the U.S. ranks No. 18 in the world in broadband speeds. A big reason, of course, is that we didn't have a big government program to help increase access and make it cheaper, until now.

The push is very similar to ones that spread electricity and phone lines to poorer, rural areas in the past. The benefits will accrue not just to the economy but to those who can better access information and educational opportunities as well. And having 90 percent of the population plugged in is better for the rest of us, too.

-- Monica Potts

Imagine that you are strongly opposed to abortion rights, and what you'd like is for all abortions to be illegal. Then you're faced with two alternatives:

1. In Path 1, federal funds will not be used to give anyone abortion coverage, but the number of abortions will either stay the same or increase.
2. In Path 2, federal funds will not be used to give anyone abortion coverage, but the number of abortions will decline.

Seems like a clear choice, right? Well, not if you're Rep. Bart Stupak. Stupak is withholding support for the Senate's health-care bill and trying to get as many anti-choice Democrats as he can to join him, because he worries that the Senate language on abortion isn't restrictive enough. The truth, however, is that the Senate language is actually more restrictive. In both bills, if you're getting your coverage through the insurance exchange, you're receiving subsidies, and if you want abortion coverage, you'll have to jump through hoops. The Senate bill demands that you write two checks to your insurance company, while the House version requires that you purchase a separate "rider" to your policy, in either case announcing, "I might want an abortion some day!" Federal insurance subsidies can't be used.

So why does Stupak think the House version is tougher? It's hard to tell, because in practice they do the same thing -- the difference is between paying a separate premium and buying a separate policy, which is a technical distinction that may matter to file clerks but will make no difference to women. And the Senate version allows states to outlaw all abortion coverage within their exchanges, which means that there will be large swaths of the country where under the Senate bill there will be no coverage in the exchange for abortion at all (though if you have an employer-sponsored plan it could still cover the procedure).

In practice, this means that virtually no one who is getting subsidies will have abortion coverage in the exchange. As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, North Dakota has such a requirement right now, and precisely zero women have gone through it. But let's get back to those two paths we started with. Path 1 is not passing the Senate bill, which Stupak and a few others now say, because of their firm commitment to the little babies, is their preferred solution. This is despite the fact that no federal funds will be used for abortion under the bill, and it will make it essentially impossible for poor and many middle-class women to get coverage for an abortion. Path 2 is passing the Senate bill, which will lead to fewer abortions.

Why? As T.R. Reid explained in an op-ed, the U.S. has the highest rate of abortion in the Western world, due in no small part to the fact that we are the one country without universal health care. When a woman has secure health insurance, she'll be more likely to see her doctor and get birth control. And if she does get pregnant, the enormous cost of carrying the baby to term won't factor in to her decision on whether to get an abortion (as it is now, many insurance companies consider pregnancy a "pre-existing condition" they won't cover).

Universal health care means fewer abortions -- simple as that. Stupak and the other anti-choice Democrats are being offered the opportunity to reduce the number of abortions in America. But they won't take it, because they're worried that writing a separate insurance check for abortion might not be quite as humiliating for a poor woman as buying a separate insurance rider. Such an admirable display of principle.

-- Paul Waldman

Bruce Ackerman argues that if Biden is willing to exercise the power granted him in the Constitution, he could pass health care -- and undo the filibuster rules that threaten to deadlock our system of government:

The question of whether Congress will fulfill the dream of every modern Democratic president and pass health reform now rests on the intersection of two of the most complicated bits of congressional procedure -- the Senate's filibuster rule, which has become a 60-vote supermajority requirement, and the budget reconciliation process, which sets time limits for debate and thus can be a way around the filibuster. The current plan is to avoid the filibuster by having the House pass the bill that passed the Senate last year and then using reconciliation to make changes.

This complex, but entirely legitimate, approach makes an unelected employee of the Senate, the parliamentarian Alan Frumin, a critical figure in the weeks ahead. The parliamentarian polices the procedural rules governing the filibuster as well as what can be legitimately included in reconciliation.

KEEP READING ...

Debra Burlingame, a co-founder of the McCarthyist advocacy organization Keep America Safe, has Wall Street Journal op-ed today in which she claims that Amnesty International produced a pamphlet with information about "detainee operations in Iraq" that was "a serious breach of security." As Spencer Ackerman points out, the pamphlet, which is available here, actually just lists documented instances of torture by U.S. personnel and explains why such methods undermine the fight against terrorism.

But hey, let's forget those dirty hippies at Amnesty International for a moment. Let's look to the man who actually reformed detainee operations in Iraq after Abu Ghraib, and what he thinks about such methods, Marine Gen. Doug Stone:

Stone's battlefield was once the detention centers of Iraq, where he worked to reform the system after the Abu Ghraib scandal, reducing recidivism and therefore the flow of fighters to the insurgents. The same thing, he said, needs to happen in Afghanistan, where prison conditions and lack of due process are creating favorable conditions for the Taliban and al-Qaeda to radicalize the imprisoned.

"What if exactly what we're doing in detention is exactly what the enemy wants?" Stone asked. "Is that not aiding and abetting the enemy?"

Keep America Safe's appeal lies in fear and the perception of retribution against a frightening, amorphous, Muslim "enemy." But as Stone says, it's no way to win a war against terrorists.

I'll end with something else Stone said that Burlingame and her fellow McCarthyites Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Andrew McCarthy might want to consider:

"An individual in an orange jumpsuit in detention, may be an enemy, or may not be an enemy," Stone said. "Just because they're in a jumpsuit, doesn't mean anything."

The other week, Matt Yglesias called me out after I praised the reporting of the two recent magazine pieces on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Matt thought I was talking about interviews with Geithner, but I was not: I was referring to the analysis of Treasury's underrated policies. Another example comes in Daniel Gross' column this week, where he looks at the fate of our AIG subsidies and determines that the cost to taxpayers will likely be much, much smaller than anticipated:

It may not come as much relief to taxpayers, but the various efforts to prop up AIG are also working out much better than expected. The Fed and Treasury are still into AIG for a combined $127 billion. But—surprise!—a lot of it is coming back. And there's a not-too-farfetched scenario in which we come close to breaking even on our reluctant investment in the company. ... Some rough math suggests the final cost to taxpayers for the AIG debacle could be between $12 billion and $20 billion. Yes, that's a bitter pill to swallow. But it's a much smaller pill than we had imagined even a few months ago.

That's why it's always irritating when people wildly exaggerate the amount of money that taxpayers "lost" because of the bailouts, or try to make the case that less money has been spent on helping the regular economy than the financial sector. Obviously the moral case against the bank bailouts is clear and true, but substantively the economic losses to society without a bank rescue would have been worse. Hence the need for financial reform to make sure we don't need to bail out these institutions again, which is today's program activity.

-- Tim Fernholz

Corker complains about haste -- a joke, as these issues have been well aired. In particular, he blames the Treasury Department for pushing Dodd to move his bill "to the left," which speaks to the underappreciated efforts of the administration to keep Dodd on track. But the bill Dodd will drop today doesn't reflect the ideological concerns of the left; it really is a technocratic piece of legislation that still reflects Corker's influence. The consumer protection regulator, for instance, will  apparently still be housed in the Fed and subject to a veto from other regulators. Without seeing more details about the preservation of the agency's independence and jurisdiction -- one promising report is that state attorneys general will be able to enforce federal consumer regulations -- this doesn't sound like the kind of structures that would protect consumers very well at all.

The Fed itself will be both weakened and empowered. Consumer protection will apparently be autonomous (but why, then, is it "housed" in the Fed?); regulatory authority for small banks will be moved out of the Fed. The Fed will also have tighter rules about limiting the influence of private banks over the Federal Reserve's regional branches. For instance, the president will appoint the head of the New York Fed, but banks will still have too much say. It will also see new checks on its power to rescue firms and make overarching regulatory decisions. On the other hand, the institution will have increased power over large financial institutions of all kinds, including non-bank firms (this is a good idea -- no more unsupervised AIGs).

Issues of derivatives are still outstanding. The bill will apparently match Dodd's November version on the issue, but Dodd says he will change it to reflect potential agreements being worked out between Sens. Jack Reed and Judd Gregg. Expect Sen. Maria Cantwell to get involved in that scrap as the bill moves toward the floor. Mechanisms behind systemic risk regulation and the dissolution authorities designed to prevent the "too big to fail" problem are still hazy. And the Volcker rule will apparently be implemented through a two-step process involving a study, which seems like a hedge.

So is this good for reformers? Sort of. It's a good sign that the bill is moving forward, as is Dodd's willingness to forsake Republican support to get some momentum. But the substance still isn't quite what will be required to revamp the financial system. It will be easier to improve the bill as it makes it way out of committee and onto the floor; outside reform groups and the Obama administration have mainly been biding their time for Dodd to start marking up a bill, as has House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank. Their actions in the next week -- particularly Frank's -- will give us a better idea of what lies ahead.

-- Tim Fernholz