The Consumer Finance Protection Agency seems to be joining the public option as a reform that is supposedly dead. Arianna Huffington summarizes the progressive view (emphasis mine):
On Saturday, Dodd told Bloomberg Television’s Al Hunt that he prefers an independent agency, but said it might not be possible to reach the 60 votes needed to break the inevitable Republican filibuster.
Maybe so. But how about at least trying before waving the white flag? Instead, Dodd, in the hope of attracting Republican votes, appears to have preemptively surrendered. But there’s no evidence that Dodd’s concession has achieved anything other than kneecapping the bill. Democrats have mastered the art of negotiating against themselves.
I’d have to counter that with exactly sixty Democrats in the Senate, the GOP’s obstructionism left the Democrat-on-Democrat conversation as the only way to move legislation forward in the Senate. That situation gave the Blue Dogs the power of a swing vote. With the election of Scott Brown, cloture requires at least one Republican vote. There are simply no Democrats left to whip. Which brings me to Nate Silver’s excellent chart:
Obama hasn’t been able to push reform through like FDR because he doesn’t have FDR’s majority. He doesn’t even have LBJ’s majority. Perhaps the answer, then, is to stop letting the GOP filibuster omnibus bills and force them to block lots of smaller reform bills instead — as Harry Reid has done with jobs bills. If Blue Dogs and Republicans want to side with banks and credit cards over consumers live on C-SPAN, let them.
