The House narrowly passed a spending bill yesterday filled with some pretty odious provisions.
Ben Jacobs at The Daily Beast has the details:
The pill that Democrats had trouble swallowing was a provision rolling back Dodd-Frank that would allow major banks to carry out certain risky derivatives trades through funds insured by the FDIC. The idea of weakening financial reform only years after a financial crisis that almost brought down the American economy alarmed many Democrats. As Corrine Brown of Florida told The Daily Beast while almost holding back tears, “I think we care about all the people who lost their homes during the foreclosure and you giving the banks the opportunity to do it again, not one of them went to jail.” [...]
Certainly Democrats laid a marker down for the next two years. The House caucus appears to be far more populist, feisty, and ready to push the debate on economic issues than it has in the past. After all, a significant majority defied the White House to vote against the bill. The question though is whether they will be able to do a better job holding together in the next two years against an increased Republican majority in the House and with Mitch McConnell now leading the Senate. It’s clear after this vote that House Democrats are spoiling for a fight. It’s just uncertain whether they’ll be able to land any punches.
The New York Times:
When the long-lost grail of bipartisan compromise finally re-emerged on Capitol Hill this week, the spending bill for 2015 turned out to be weighted with some of the most devious and damaging provisions imaginable for good government. Written in secrecy, presented as the take-it-or-leave-it alternative to a government shutdown, the bill, which narrowly passed the House Thursday night, includes two regressive “riders” aimed at warming the big-money hearts of donors who leave Congress increasingly vulnerable to special-interest corruption.
One rider would allow a huge increase in the size of checks that deep-pocketed donors can write to win inner-sanctum clout with the major political parties. A donor now held to a mere $97,200 under party limits would be able to give a staggering $777,600. In a further invitation to luxury shopping, a couple yearning for the inside track could triple-down and give $3.1 million to party committees. This is pretty much the coup de grâce for the McCain-Feingold law’s ban on large party donations enacted to end the “soft money” corruption of Watergate.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Sam Stein and Paul Blumenthal dive into that campaign finance rider:
The DSCC adamantly denies that it is responsible for the provision, as do other Democrats not associated with the committee. [...] While Republicans are at least willing to discuss the measure, Democrats are all but sprinting from it. Aides on the Hill said that the proposal did, indeed, come during negotiations between House Republicans and Senate Democrats, who tapped election lawyer Marc Elias to handle the discussions. But it was initially presented as a "small increase in the caps for the convention," according to one lawmaker.
That was "something we could have lived with," said the lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the drafting of the must-pass bill. But when the bill's final language came out, "it became not just a small increase in the caps for conventions but a large increase in caps for many other things."
"It was not just a surprise but a shock to House Democratic leaders," said the lawmaker.
Stephen Stromberg looks at one "boneheaded rider":
In the trillion-dollar budget deal Congressional leaders revealed Tuesday, Republicans didn’t press to defund the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change rules. But they did uphold one of the most boneheaded anti-government riders of the last decade.
So Congress passed some simple light bulb efficiency standards in 2007. Lawmakers didn’t ban incandescent bulbs. Instead they demanded that bulbs produced in or imported into the U.S. use no more than a certain amount of electricity to produce a certain amount of light. If manufacturers could make incandescents less wasteful, they could produce the improved bulbs freely. One result has been a boom in the commercialization of new lighting technologies that could save Americans some $6 billion next year.[...] Among other overblown complains, critics have argued that the light that new bulb designs put out doesn’t feel the same as that of the old incandescents. In fact, bulb manufacturers have made great strides in adapting bulbs to Americans’ tastes. Even if they hadn’t, avoiding a few drawbacks in otherwise functional bulbs clearly isn’t worth wasting $6 billion and creating tons of extra emissions every year. Any rational government would push this transition along. I’m still not sure what kind of government Republican lightbulb hawks want.
Josh Silver has a list of more awful things in the bill:
#4) $93 MILLION CUT FROM THE WOMEN, INFANTS AND CHILDREN NUTRITION PROGRAM
Since those shiny new F-35s aren't going to pay for themselves, Congress did manage to trim a few areas of the budget. For example, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly referred to as WIC, was on the receiving end of a $93 million budget cut. WIC provides low-income mothers and children with vouchers that can be exchanged for food which meets certain nutrition guidelines, although I imagine they'll be handing out a few less vouchers after this deal goes through.
If you're a family that depends on WIC to put food on the table, this is terrible news. Maybe those low-income women, infants and children could try hiring some lobbyists.
Russel Berman:
In perhaps the most surprising development, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi campaigned in harsh tones against the Obama administration, accusing a Democratic president she has loyally backed for six years of backing a measure that "blackmailed" her members. "This is a ransom. This is a blackmail," she declared in a fiery floor speech. She warned that the provision weakening regulations on derivatives trading, enacted in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, could lead to the same financial calamity that befell the nation when the economy collapsed in 2008. "We’re being asked to vote for a moral hazard," she said. "Why is this in an appropriations bill? Because it is the price of an appropriations bill."
Switching topics to the continued fallout over the Senate's torture report, Adam Gopnik at
The New Yorker gives his take:
When Dick Cheney and the rest chose to cower in bunkers instead of, say, leading Wall Street workers across the bridges and back to work, unafraid; when polemicists and editorialists spoke the language of revenge and reprisal instead of the wiser language of recovery and resilience; when the thick cloud of fear was not dispelled by increased understanding but held in place by panic—when all of these things happened, the move toward the violation of all the norms of decency was almost certain to follow. Our collective fear made bad things happen that we can now hardly believe took place. “Be not afraid!” a wise man said, seven times, summing up his lesson. It is even deeper wisdom than we knew.
Reed Richardson at The Nation examine the media framing of the Senate torture report:
Not surprisingly, these embarrassing revelations didn’t get much airtime within the mainstream media itself. CNN’s “top takeaways” from the torture report, for example, completely ignored the press’s often subservient relationship with the CIA. But to dwell merely on the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon detainees—many of whom were totally innocent—by our government is to miss the other half of the torture story. That’s the half that more directly impacts our democracy going forward, since the Senate’s report also lays bare just how corrupt and broken our system of oversight and transparency is. When CIA officials can privately speak of the “Glomar figleaf” they used to uniformly stonewall every FOIA request and when they can joke to one another about the hypocrisy of proclaiming everything a state secret while simultaneously “planning to reveal darn near the entire [torture] program” to friendly reporters, it’s clear there’s bad faith on top of immoral policy. Recognizing this matters. A lot. Because there’s no duty on the part of the press to tell both sides of the story if one side is merely trying to enlist the press into spreading lies and misinformation on its behalf. To be complicit in these torture apologist’s propaganda efforts even after their deceit has been revealed transcends run-of-the-mill false equivalence; it’s tantamount to journalistic malpractice.
Elias Isquith, meanwhile, looks at Elizabeth Warren's strategy on opposing Antonio Weiss to be the next undersecretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department:
[Warren's] is the kind of rhetoric you hear a lot from Democrats of all kinds during campaign season (though, of course, the blame is always laid entirely on Republicans). But it’s not the kind of rhetoric you’d expect to hear from a newbie senator with presidential aspirations, especially one who’d just been brought into the party’s inner circle — and especially one who’d already received tut-tuts from the Dems’ formidable neoliberal wing. (Running for president is very, very expensive.) What it is instead, as Dayen rightly notes, is the kind of rhetoric you’d expect from someone whose main goal is to drive Wall Street and its defenders “out of the temple of policymaking,” and to give the anti-neoliberal wing within the party, which has been growing in strength since the 2008 financial collapse, a direction and a voice.
And the fact that many high-profile Democratic senators — including Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and even Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia conservative — are joining her in opposing the Weiss nomination shows that it may be working. For those hoping that Warren would respond to her ascension into the Dems’ Senate leadership by keeping her criticisms within the family, as it were, the speech was a bad sign. But for those who want to one day see Sen. Elizabeth Warren running the party’s economic policy, it’s a very good one indeed.