An obscure parliamentary snafu has stymied Democrats' aggressive efforts to extend Violence Against Women Act protections to same-sex couples, illegal immigrants, and tribal communities, and provided the GOP leverage to keep those provisions out of legislation to reauthorize that law.

It has been weeks since Senate Democrats -- and several Republicans -- passed VAWA legislation, and left House Republicans in the tough position of arguing that the law's scope should not be explicitly widened. Last week House Republicans passed a narrower reauthorization bill, which the White House has threatened to veto, giving Dems what they believed to be an upper hand.

Typically, this ordering of events would give Democrats a great deal of leverage over Republicans, and possibly force them to agree to provisions that would alienate GOP voters by benefiting constituencies the base is hostile to.

"The House Republicans passed a bill that takes us backward in terms of protections for women," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared Thursday.

But instead of walking away with wins for gay, immigrant, and native American communities, or of messaging against GOP holding up VAWA, they hit a snag.

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One of the most dogged Wall Street reformers on Capitol Hill says there's a small but golden opportunity to close key loopholes in the 2010 financial reform law, which were exposed to the public last week when banking giant JPMorgan announced it had lost billions of dollars betting with customer funds.

But after the window closes, he admits, it'll be a very difficult to re-open; and he sees no political path forward for other popular measures to further regulate banks, limit their size, or break them up into smaller entities.

"We have felt like there's two of us against hundreds of Wall Street lawyers working on this all day, every day -- and that the public was disengaged from the issue," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told me during a Thursday interview in his Senate office. "Now the public is engaged. There's a chance here -- because the rules are supposed to go into effect in July -- there's a moment of possibility, we're trying to do all we can to press it forward, say 'seize this moment and get the rules right.' Because once they're put in place it's very hard to change them."

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid raised eyebrows a week ago when, in a moment of frustration on the Senate floor, he acknowledged that he was mistaken to quash his junior members' effort early last year to rein in abuse of the filibuster.

Many observers assumed that Reid -- a fierce protector of Senate traditions -- was either bluffing or exasperated and would quickly reverse course. But one of the leaders of the failed filibuster reform effort notes that Reid has publicly acknowledged his error multiple times in recent weeks, and believes Reid will stand by his efforts in January, when he and his colleagues have an opportunity to change the rules again.

"We got one of the five passed, and the other four all still make sense -- the motion to proceed, the protocol for amendments, the talking filibuster and the limitation of hours on nominations," said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), in an interview at his Capitol office.

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If the Supreme Court overturns part or all of President Obama's health care law, House Republicans will find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. They will be implicitly responsible not just for the demise of the individual insurance mandate and other unpopular parts of the Affordable Care Act, but also its popular provisions and the return of some of the insurance industry's harshest practices, like discriminating against people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Recent reporting by both the New York Times and Politico suggests the GOP congressional leadership might try to mitigate the political liabilities of HCR being overturned by introducing piecemeal legislation to reinstitute popular pieces of the law -- provisions banning discrimination, and allowing children to be covered by their parents' health benefits until they're 26. But that creates a host of new practical and political problems for the GOP.

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Nearly all Senate Republicans joined their House colleagues in risky territory Wednesday by voting in support of the controversial GOP budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) -- a blueprint for the country's future that has become a political lightning rod and a defining document for the 2012 elections.

Among its most contentious features, the plan would phase out the existing Medicare program and replace it with a subsidized private insurance system for seniors; dramatically slash Medicaid spending and hand the program over to the states; cut food and nutrition programs for poor people; and allow interest rates on student loans to double; all while dramatically reducing taxes, particularly on wealthy Americans.

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House GOP legislation to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act got an unexpected endorsement Tuesday -- one that Democrats couldn't be happier with.

In a letter to all members, provided to TPM by Democratic aides, the president of the National Coalition for Men, wrote to endorse the House GOP's VAWA bill over a Senate-passed counterpart that extends the laws protections to same-sex couples, immigrants, and native American women (you can read the full letter here):

"The House has the opportunity to pass H.R. 4970, a victim-centered VAWA reauthorization bill, endorsed by women and men. Those opposing H.R. 4970 loudly assert that VAWA serves all people, which is absurd on its face given the name of the Act. Opposing versions, by omission and lack of specificity, generally exclude men, particularly heterosexual men, regardless of specious arguments to the contrary."

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How's this for serendipity?

Just a couple weeks before Jamie Dimon announced publicly that his banking firm JPMorgan had lost a stunning $2 billion betting with depositor funds, he took to Fox News to criticize the Volcker Rule, meant to ban federally backstopped banks from engaging in proprietary trading.

Bill Moyers invited former Fed chairman Paul Volcker -- the architect of the rule -- to respond:

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Whether or not he can make it stick in any meaningful way, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) revealed on Tuesday that Republicans still have an appetite for debt limit brinksmanship -- even after the last round nearly crippled the economy, and left the GOP's congressional approval ratings in the sewer.

When Republicans went home for recess last August, after placing the country's AAA credit rating at risk, and narrowly avoiding a self-imposed default on the national debt, they caught such an earful from constituents that they spent several weeks toning down their rhetoric and avoiding big public spats with Democrats.

So what gives? Why would Republicans signal to voters that they want to put the country through the same fiasco again -- particularly when the outcome of the presidential election remains in doubt and Boehner's House Republicans are already expected to lose several seats?

There are several plausible, in some ways self-reinforcing, explanations. And they all reflect the degree to which the Republican Party has been radicalized and behaves as if it's in the midst of an insurgency. But they don't change the fact that selling the public -- and more to the point, voters in swing districts -- on the idea of a Christmas-time debt limit fight is going to be deadly politics.

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) wants to add a plot twist to the post-election lame-duck session of Congress that will be deliberating how to avoid automatic spending cuts and tax increases set to take effect in January 2013. The twist? He wants to use the debt limit as leverage to make sure tax increases aren't part of the equation. His message today to the White House: If you want my cooperation on raising the debt limit, don't even think about raising taxes.

But for Boehner's threat to be feasible, the government would have to run out of borrowing authority in November or December. That seems unlikely.

Treasury officials note -- and Secretary Timothy Geithner made clear Tuesday -- that the administration expects to be able to manage its accounts in such a way that the true deadline for raising the debt limit won't actually come until early next year -- after the fiscal cliff on January 1, and possibly after the new Congress is sworn in. Which means it's unclear if Boehner's threat has any teeth to it.

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In addition to teeing up another debt limit fight for the lame duck session of Congress later this year, by demanding dollar-for-dollar budget cuts in exchange for new borrowing authority, House Speaker John Boehner also insists that regardless of the election outcome, Republicans will reject higher taxes on wealthy Americans in that fight.

And to build leverage for the GOP position, he announced Tuesday that House Republicans will pass legislation before the election to extend the Bush tax cuts indefinitely.

"What also doesn't count as 'cuts and reforms' are tax increases," Boehner will say before the annual Pete Peterson Fiscal Summit in Washington, DC, according to prepared remarks. "Any sudden tax hike would hurt our economy, so this fall - before the election - the House of Representatives will vote to stop the largest tax increase in American history."

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Democrats are horrified, but not exactly shocked, that House Speaker John Boehner plans to tee up a new debt limit fight.

In his weekly press briefing with reporters, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer attributed the development to Boehner's weak grip on his party.

"Let me say that the dollar-for-dollar [requirement] led to the sequester which none of us like," Hoyer said. "So while it sounds good, the execution of that principle does not seem to be very disciplined. We need to have a big, bold, balanced deal. The Speaker, in my view, believes that as well. The Speaker's party does not believe in balance....We don't adopt their priorities."

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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants Congress to raise the debt limit again later this year "without drama, pain and damage."

House Speaker John Boehner has other ideas.

In remarks at the 2012 Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Boehner will erect the same requirements for raising the debt limit this coming winter that nearly led the country to default on its debt last August.

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The revelation that banking giant JP Morgan lost $2 billion making risky bets with depositor funds is only four days old, but early indications suggest that the financial industry's capture of American government successfully weathered the 2008 crisis, with nearly all the political and regulatory players invested in the consequences of this latest debacle treading lightly around the questions it raises.

It has, however, re-energized outside advocates of strengthening financial reform -- including a certain high-profile Senate candidate -- and left those who favor repealing the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law in an untenable position.

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A months-long fight in Congress over how to avoid automatic, across-the-board cuts to defense programs set to kick in next year is increasingly bleeding in to battleground districts home to significant numbers of military service members and contractors.

With the Jan. 1 deadline nearing, and the parties still at loggerheads over how to order national priorities within the budget, Republicans and Democrats are scrambling to avoid blame for the pending cuts, eager to finger members of the other party.

The GOP approach, which passed the House Thursday, would override the defense cuts with billions of dollars in cuts to food stamps and other social programs for the poor. A Democratic alternative would replace the automatic cuts with a mix of cuts to corporate subsidies and higher taxes on the wealthy, but the GOP denied that bill a vote on the House floor.

In the aftermath, a top Armed Services Committee Republican -- Rep. Randy Forbes -- is prepared to host a series of town hall meetings in defense-heavy Virginia to place the onus for replacing the cuts on Democrats. And a leading Maryland Democrat is hoping to spoil Forbes's effort to win the headline war.

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Mitt Romney will probably have a harder time defending his intent to repeal the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law in the wake of JP Morgan's stunning disclosure that it lost at least $2 billion betting on the economy.

But it also raises important substantive questions about the effectiveness of the new financial reforms themselves, particularly the one provision specifically intended to end just this sort of trading.

On a Friday conference call with reporters, Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) criticized regulators for writing a major loophole into the so-called Volcker Rule -- meant to prevent banks from betting with depositor funds -- at the behest of financial interests.

"It is inconsistent to create this kind of a major loophole," Levin said, noting that it goes against the intent of the reforms Congress passed.

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The Obama campaign is seizing on the news that financial giant JP Morgan lost billions of dollars trading derivatives with customer funds to attack Mitt Romney for wanting to repeal the 2010 law meant to curtail these kinds of risky bets.

"Rolling back Wall Street reform, as Mitt Romney proposes, would be reckless," says Obama camp spokeswoman Lis Smith in a statement to TPM. "The law promotes transparency, limits the types of risky investments that can be made with deposits insured by federal taxpayers, and prevents investment losses at one bank from threatening the whole financial system. Returning to the failed policy of letting Wall Street write their own rules would put all of us at greater risk of another financial crisis and leave us vulnerable to another taxpayer-funded bank bailout like the one shortly before President Obama took office."

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A surprising development on Wall Street Thursday could magnify a little-discussed but key difference between President Obama and Mitt Romney -- one with enormous consequences for public policy.

On a conference call with analysts, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon announced that his firm had lost $2 billion investing in the same species of derivative that exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis.

Dimon claims the company is prepared to absorb the loss, but it puts the reputation of one of the only big firms to weather the 2008 financial crisis directly on the line.

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At a public event in Albany, N.Y., Tuesday, President Obama went counterintuitive. Bloated government is a phenomenon of Republican leadership, he noted, and it's helped them weather economic downturns in a way he hasn't been able to.

"[A]fter there was a recession under Ronald Reagan, government employment went way up. It went up after the recessions under the first George Bush and the second George Bush," he said. "So each time there was a recession with a Republican president, compensated -- we compensated by making sure that government didn't see a drastic reduction in employment. The only time government employment has gone down during a recession has been under me. So I make that point just so you don't buy into this whole bloated government argument that you hear. And frankly, if Congress had said yes to helping states put teachers back to work and put the economy before our politics, then tens of thousands more teachers in New York would have a job right now. That is a fact. And that would mean not only a lower unemployment rate, but also more customers for business."

As we've noted before, the numbers back this up completely.

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As long as Mitt Romney publicly claims credit for the auto industry's recovery, he's going to put his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill in an awkward position. Nearly all of them have attacked the Obama administration's bailout in exceptionally harsh terms, despite the fact that the administration's actions are widely understood to have saved the industry.

In the Capitol on Tuesday, two Senate Republicans struggled to respond.

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Breaking Republicans' anti-tax absolutism is key to understanding just about everything Democrats have been doing for months now, both in Washington and on the campaign trail. It's the strategic underpinning of the Buffett Rule and the surtax on million-dollar earners; it's the purpose of the so-called "sequester" -- the deep cuts to defense and discretionary spending that will kick in next year if Congress doesn't pass a substantial deficit-reduction plan -- in the debt-limit deal, and it explains Democrats' reluctance to unwind the sequester until Republicans agree to significant new revenues.

So far it hasn't worked, and most elected officials don't expect any movement on the issue until after the election.

Even if President Obama wins re-election, though, what's to stop Republicans on Capitol Hill from linking arms and blocking any tax revenues?

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A Friday Washington Post analysis brought to light a staggering obstacle for the Obama campaign.

"The number of black and Hispanic registered voters has fallen sharply since 2008, posing a serious challenge to the Obama campaign in an election that could turn on the participation of minority voters," the article read. "Voter rolls typically shrink in non-presidential election years and registrations among whites fell at roughly the same rate, but this is the first time in nearly four decades that the number of registered Hispanics has dropped significantly. That figure fell 5 percent across the country, to about 11 million, according to the Census Bureau. But in some politically important swing states, the decline among Hispanics, who are considered critical in the 2012 presidential contest, is much higher: just over 28 percent in New Mexico, for example, and about 10 percent in Florida. For blacks, whose registration numbers are down 7 percent nationwide, and Hispanics, the large decrease is attributed to the ailing economy, which forced many Americans to move in search of work or because of other financial upheaval."

Alarming -- and darkly ironic. The economic and housing crises Obama inherited could potentially become the source of the disruption that sees him ousted from office after only one term. But is the problem real -- and if so, is it fixable?

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The outcome had been staring the world in the face for weeks, but Francois Hollande's weekend victory in the French elections nevertheless sent foreign markets plummeting, reflecting the fact that the Eurozone crisis is still a huge global concern, and that Nicholas Sarkozy's defeat adds an element of uncertainty to an already chaotic situation.

But the markets' visceral reaction to the election masks a more complicated reality. According to experts who've been watching the Eurozone mess unfold for years, the market panic doesn't suggest that the previous regime was on the right course, and fell victim to the impossible politics of austerity. Quite the opposite. Austerity was unpopular both because of the immediate burden it imposed on voters and because it was failing at its supposed purpose of restoring stability to the Eurozone. But pro-austerity forces remain strong both in Europe and around the world, and even a signal as clear as the elections in France or the collapse of the Dutch government last month might not convince them to reconsider, and that has potentially disastrous consequences for the global economy.

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Among the new employment figures the Labor Department released Friday morning is an obscure one that's ripe for politicking: the labor force participation rate. It measures the percentage of the population age 16 and above who are actually working. The labor force participation rate fell last month to 63.6 percent, its lowest level since 1981.

In the midst of an economic recovery -- albeit a slow one -- why would the labor participation rate continue to be hover near four-decade lows?

If you take a long view of the figures, something becomes abundantly clear: there's a lot more behind the country's slumping labor force participation rate than today's weak economy. The real reasons behind the fluctuations in the rate over the past several decades are fascinating, and they raise some of the biggest questions in the field of labor economics.

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The final months of 2011 and the first months of 2012 were marked by such positive economic news that economists, browbeaten by past false starts, started growing optimistic that a self-sustaining recovery was finally upon us. Then in recent weeks, the indicators went wobbly again, and optimism has given way to a renewed sense of dread that the earlier bursts of growth were misleading outliers.

Whatever's really going on in the actual labor market, the implications couldn't be more significant -- both for millions of unemployed Americans, and for all that's staked on the outcome of the 2012 election.

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Economic fairness is one of the persistent themes of the 2012 election, and in that spirit the liberal Economic Policy Institute is revisiting the plight of the U.S. worker over the last several decades.

Many of the institute's findings, which will be presented in greater detail in the forthcoming edition of "The State of Working America," will be familiar to economists who study income inequality. But they provide a stark illustration of the fact that the vast majority of workers have been closed out of the country's gains for nearly 40 years.

Particularly striking is the fact that for years leading up to the 1970s, productivity gains were broadly shared, as theory predicts. Then the linkage abruptly broke. What explains the shift?

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In the last weeks of winter and early weeks of spring the national political discourse has been whipsawed by a series of disjointed news stories, seemingly bereft of real meaning, let alone any connection to the country's immediate needs.

There was the contraception fight and its foil, the battle for religious liberty. There were slut wars and mommy wars. A skirmish between political flacks even turned into a semi-serious debate about whether Mitt Romney -- who once strapped a dog to the roof of his car for a long drive to Canada -- is a better friend to canines than President Obama -- who ate dog meat when he was a young child living in Indonesia.

On Capitol Hill last week, Republicans narrowly avoided a Democratic trap that nonetheless resulted in 31 male Republicans voting against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. Simultaneously the parties continued to skirmish over how to prevent an automatic spike in student loan interest rates, and who's at fault for putting young up-and-comers in financial jeopardy in the first place.

If you're a casual news consumer, the natural response to these schizophrenic politics is "WTF?!" Even political junkies have a hard time making sense of it. But there's a signal buried in all this noise -- several, in fact. And as clearly as any polling data, they're alerting us to the factional politics that will decide what's likely to be a very close election.

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Now that the GOP has dropped its politically untenable objection to extending low-interest student loans, the legislative battle has entered a familiar realm, just weeks ahead of a scheduled rate hike: How should Congress pay for keeping the loans cheap?

It's familiar terrain for observers of the payroll tax fight, which ended with both parties simply agreeing not to pay for the holiday at all. But before they reached that point, the parties bickered over various financing schemes, while pushing ideologically opposed offsets. Republicans wanted cuts to domestic support programs, Democrats wanted to raise income taxes on income over $1 million a year.

This time around, though, the Democrats' opening bid is different -- and they argue that it reflects their willingness to set politics aside and extend the loan rates, currently set to double at the end of June, without a fight, while Republicans try use the coming cliff to eat away at President Obama's health care law.

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In another indication that Republicans will have a hard time eating into the Democrats' advantage with Hispanic voters, House Speaker John Boehner subtly warned Republicans: There's no way we can pass a modified version of the DREAM Act now.

"There's always hope," Boehner said. "I did talk to Sen. Rubio about his idea, and he gave me some particulars about how this would work. I found it of interest. But the problem with this issue is that we're operating in a very hostile political environment and to deal with a very difficult issue like this I think it would be difficult at best."

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House Speaker John Boehner isn't taking a key Obama administration veto threat seriously. At least not yet.

In a letter delivered last week, the White House warned congressional appropriators that the president will not sign legislation to fund the federal government if the bill or bills cut overall spending below the level the parties agreed to during last summer's fight over raising the national debt limit.

In other words: It's those spending levels, or a government shutdown.

At a his weekly press conference, I asked Boehner to respond to that letter.

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In a reprise of the winter fight over the payroll tax cut, Republicans are now reluctantly agreeing to support something that just weeks ago they strongly opposed: preventing student loan interest rates from doubling later this year.

It's an issue Republicans fear will fire up the youth vote -- a key Democratic constituency -- and in an effort to keep that bloc from flocking back to President Obama in November they're attempting to bigfoot Democrats on their own issue.

But the Republicans' strategy threatens to tear at existing divisions within the party, and exposes them once again to political repercussions over their unwillingness to finance any popular policies by raising taxes on wealthy people.

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A renowned congressional analyst thinks there's a good chance that the country could fall off a fiscal cliff on Jan. 1, no matter who wins this November.

At an American Enterprise Institute event on the future of Medicare Tuesday, AEI scholar Norm Ornstein outlined a scenario in which Congress falls on its face this winter, and fails to address the expiring Bush tax cuts and payroll tax holiday, automatic sequestration spending cuts, lapse of federal borrowing authority and other spending and tax provisions set to contract the budget automatically at the end of the year.

"Most of the cognoscenti in Washington say, Of course they'll reach an agreement because they can't not reach an agreement,'" Ornstein said. "Get inside the belly of the beast and you realize these days they can not reach an agreement."

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If the Republican Party gets its way, it will repeal President Obama's health care law wholesale. Mitt Romney's committed to repealing it, as are the party's congressional leaders and rank-and-file members on Capitol Hill. That's the plan if they win big in November -- unless the Supreme Court beats them to the punch and overturns the entire law.

According to the Democratically-appointed public trustee of the Medicare program, that wouldn't just spell doom for "Obamacare," but for Medicare and the entirety of the country's ailing health care system.

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Likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney doesn't like to talk about the key details of his own plan for reforming the country's health care system -- the plan he'd push as a replacement to "Obamacare."

But if you string together what he has said publicly, you arrive at a plan that would be far more disruptive to the existing health care system than "Obamacare" would be if fully implemented.

That's what the Los Angeles Times did in a story that the White House missed and the Romney's campaign declined to discuss with TPM. What the Times arrived at is a plan broadly similar to the widely derided blueprint John McCain ran on in 2008.

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The Medicare and Social Security trustees presented mixed news for the country's two largest and most popular entitlement programs in annual reports released Monday. The analyses suggest that the 2008 economic crisis, and its lingering effects on the economy, have modestly weakened the programs' finances -- but that President Obama's health care law, if implemented as intended and matched with advancements in health care delivery, will extend the life of Medicare as expected.

The conclusions fuel an ongoing fight between the parties over the propriety of the programs, and the manner in which the federal government should act to provide sustainable retirement security for American workers. In particular, it puts the parties' vastly different views about Medicare back at the center of the 2012 election -- and will force Republicans to continue to defend their far-reaching plan to privatize that program.

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Updated at 2:05 p.m.

Sen. Joe Manchin's may think running for re-election as a Democrat while remaining uncommitted to President Obama will buy him cover with ... somebody. But it's not with Republicans.

"What a difference one Democratic Senator's upcoming re-election and three years of failed economic policies by the Democrats makes," emails Brian Walsh, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a statement. "But no amount of election-year rhetoric from Senator Manchin will cause voters in West Virginia to forget that three years ago he unabashedly supported President Obama, while predicting great things for West Virginia under his Administration. Instead of trying to put distance between he and the President, Senator Manchin should be more focused on a simple, three word message to his constituents - 'I am sorry.'"

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