During the rush of the election results last night, Brian Beutler, our reporter on the Hill, kept checking in with me on the machinations on financial reform going on in the Senate, which continued to do business through the evening even as one of their colleagues went down to defeat and another was forced into a runoff. I couldn’t help but think that as the most of the political world was focused on the election results that the real political power struggle was taking place on the Hill.
Wall Street and its Senate allies are desperately trying to beat back changes to the financial bill that would make it a whole lot stronger and thus less favorable to the vested business interests. The fact that their efforts were taking place against the backdrop of an electorate that was in the process up uprooting some of the vested political interests made the battle more striking. But that has been the backdrop to the financial reform debate for the past several weeks, albeit not as starkly, and it’s precisely why the bill continues to move more or less in a progressive direction (even as progressives decry it as weak and insufficient to prevent another financial crisis).
For all the election drama of last night, the financial reform debate is in many ways more dramatic and almost certainly more significant. Brian gets us up to speed this morning on where things stand and what to expect today.
