Get Ready. Up Next: Financial Reform

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be speaking this afternoon about financial reform at the American Enterprise Institute, not exactly a place brimful of folks who give smiles to reforms that involve the government unless it's reducing its oversight role. Over the weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made some rumblings about the need to do something about firms that are "too big to fail," calling their existence "pernicious" and an "insidious" barrier to competition. And starting at 5 p.m., Senator Dodd will lead the executive committee of the Senate Banking Committee in the first round of marking up the 1336-page Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010. (Summary here.) The session will be web cast live.

Thus, with health care (almost) headed for the President's desk, the next legislative elephant in the room is finally making its appearance. And, like those fabled sightless men who each touched a piece of their own elephant and described the whole by the virtues and deficits of its trunk, tail and other parts, the interested factions are each seeing the proposed changes in financial regulation rather differently.

Already whittled down considerably by compromise from what it might have been - from what its House counterpart already is - the question now is whether the Senate's version of financial reform will generate as much storm and drama as the health care bill. One thing is fairly certain, the number of Republican Senators who eventually vote for it will be measured in single digits, quite possibly with another GOP goose egg.

Before arriving at that all-too-predictable obstructionist vote, however, the Party of No will do everything it can to dilute the legislation. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee have already introduced some 200 amendments to the Senate bill. I suspect some Democrats will choose to accept a hunk of those amendments in hopes that this will mollify some Republicans into approving the final package. This is, frankly, delusional.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/3/22/849178/-Get-Ready.-Up-Next:-Financial-Reform