Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has set up a showdown procedural cloture vote today at 5:00 pm to advance the Democrats’ partisan finance bill (S.B. 3217).
All 41 Senate Republicans have pledged to filibuster saying, among other things, the bill institutionalizes taxpayer bailouts of companies the government deems “too big to fail.”
Negotiations continued over the weekend, but no compromise had been reached as of deadline.
In a Fox News Sunday appearance, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered last week’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report as an example of his party's accurate legislative assessments.
(As reported on HUMAN EVENTS, the CMS report exposed the vast array of budget gimmicks proving Obamacare would not control costs as Republicans warned all along.)
McConnell said the report proves Republicans are more credible assessing the impact of the massive pieces of legislation being railroaded through Congress by Democrats.
“We want to make sure they don’t have the same kind of approach on financial services that they did on health care,” McConnell said.
The Heritage Foundation has a handy analysis of 14 fatal flaws found in the bill crafted by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. The partisan bill was reported out of committee by a 13-10 straight party-line vote on April 15.
The bill includes a $50 billion permanent bailout fund from bank taxes that will be passed on to bank customers; a “line of credit” extended to the Treasury for additional government funding; it authorizes regulators to guarantee the debt of solvent banks (and throw out arbitration agreements as a payoff to trial lawyers) and it creates a new “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection” with broad powers to limit what financial products and services can be offered to consumers.
Much more from Heritage at the link.
“It's my expectation that we will not go forward with this partisan bill,” McConnell told Fox News Sunday. “It's not ready yet. The Democrats were arguing this weekend among themselves over the derivatives portion of it, a very complicated portion of it. Democrats are not in agreement on that.”
“This is not a situation where anybody I know of in the Senate wants no bill to pass, but it is important to pass a good bill,” McConnell added.
