Is Chris Dodd's decision (finally!) to spurn GOP "bipartisanship" on banking reform a harbinger of things to come?

by Ken

News today, as reported on the NYT website by Sewell Chan:

The chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, hoping to break a months-long logjam on the biggest overhaul of financial regulations since the Depression, will unveil his own proposal on Monday, without yet having a single Republican endorsement.

You want to think that this could be a a breakthrough for Democratic congressional decision-makers: the realization that nothing they can do, no amount of concession, will induce Republicans to support Democratic initiatives that are in any way controversial. After all, the only political "idea" the GOP has going is obstruction: the conviction that it has the power to make Democrats fail in the eyes of the public by making it impossible for Dems to do anything, however beneficial it might be to that public.

Heck, we can take it further: The more beneficial any legislative idea might be to Americans generally, the more it scares the bejezus out of Republican "strategists," who are terrified of Democrats being able to take credit rather than blame for anything.

Of course we on the sidelines have been screaming about this since we began to see signs that the Obama administration was not only uninterested in undoing the toxic legacy of the Bush regime but actually seemed quite comfortable with a wide range of its policies. (I don't think I have to retrace this bit of history for DWT readers.)

And the point we always have to remember about the wreckage-to-date of this session of Congress is that you really can't blame the Republicans. Especially in the time when the Democrats had their at least theoretical Senate supermajority, the problem has been the leadership's inability or unwillingness to deal with its internal ConservaDem blight.

But even that would have depended on the Dems' rare willingness to go it alone, which so far has appeared only as an absolute last resort. Following the lead of the White House, the Dem congressional leadership has positively groveled across the aisle, not to mention to its own Republican Lite members.

The notion currently being peddled to gullible buyers, of which there appear to be an alarming number, especially inside the Beltway, by the biggest liar inside that same Beltway (quite a distinction)!, Master Rahm Emanuel, that the Obama administration's woes are all the result of the president's failure to heed his urges to moderation might be worth discussing if there were recorded instances of the administration paying anything but (usually much-belated) lip service to its progressive constituency.

At some point we've all had to face up to the reality that the progressive legislative agenda we had hoped might be given serious consideration hasn't, not because "we don't have the votes," but because "we don't wanna do it." It's amazing how easy it is to never have the votes for stuff you actually don't want to do.

Which brings us back to Chris Dodd and "the biggest overhaul of financial regulations since the Depression." First, an aside to reporter Chan: Might we not want to wait and see what if anything is actually signed into law before announcing this as a fact?

Dodd, we all know, is on his final Senate lap, which inevitably raises the "legacy" question. You always worry when pols take to worrying about their legacy. In theory, it opens the possibility that such a person may finally feel able, if not quite impelled, to act out of principle rather than the usual "what's in it for me?" considerations. However, in practice it usually signals One Last Chance to Cover My Outsize Butt.

And there's been heightened concern in the case of Chris Dodd as Senate point man for this attempted overhaul of banking regulations, given his close ties to the financial services industries. We know the Big Money interests are on the job, in a big way, and as I was suggesting yesterday, in the spirit of "following the money" in evaluating legislative initiatives, the high-pressure effort to sabotage meaningful reform is being felt all over the place, both on and below the radar.

Of course Big Money can always count on Republicans to fight to the (political) death to protect their interests, and the news that Dodd has been huddling these weeks if not months with Tennessee dim bulb Bob Corker has led many of us to fear the worst. It's unclear to begin with, as Timesman Chan notes, why it's Corker rather than Banking Committee ranking member Richard Shelby of Albama whom Dodd has been shacked up with. Not that I think Shelby, another proud son of the Confederacy, would have been a more serious negotiating partner. If anything Shelby, with several extra decades' of Village insiderism under his belt, would have been even more impossible a negotiator, assuming there's such a thing as degrees of impossibility. It's just strange.

Even now, though, the stories are being framed, not in terms of the urgent need for meaningful financial-services reform and the Republicans' lockstep conspiracy to undermine it in any way possible, or in terms of the country's rather visible hostility to the banksters' conniving, but in terms of the wounded feeling of the "bipartisan" Senator Corker. Even now the Right knows how to control messaging with the Village media.

So maybe it really does mean something that Chris Dodd has had enough of phony bipartisanship. To Republicans it's only bipartisan if it's Republicanly partisan.

It's not the only issue, but for both practical and symbolic importance the immediate question of how much independence and authority any Consumer Financial Protection Agency is given is the obvious thing to watch.

Even in the worst-case scenario, where Dodd's committee reports a serious financial reform bill that falls victim to the Senate GOP filibuster buzz saw, at least the Dems will have a meaningful issue to take the voters, offering them a reason to return Dems to Congress. And if other Democratic legislative leaders finally rouse themselves to a serious effort to do what's best for the country, the party might even have, you know, a "platform" on which to run.

#