We’ve got the early reactions from senators to last night’s announcement of a tentative deal on a health care reform compromise.
Reading the tea leaves, it looks like a lot of senators, especially among the 10 who were conducting this latest round of negotiations, have reached that stage where more than anything else you want to get the deal done. At that point in negotiations, everyone has resigned themselves to the fact that they are not going to walk away with a big score. They know they are going to lose something, the issue is how much.
Last night, Sen. Jay Rockefeller told reporters, “You’re going to find nobody who’s happy with everything.”
Psychologically that’s a turning point.
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) went off on pharmaceutical company TV ads in a speech on the Senate floor last night that included what amounted to Dorgan giving a dramatic reading from the ad scripts. Watch.
Remember this phrase: “Honest Services Fraud.”
It’s under this theory and the underlying 1988 law that a lot of corrupt pols (and perhaps some not corrupt pols) have been sent to prison in recent years — Jefferson, Abramoff and a bunch of others. I’ve been hearing complaints about the law for a long time from defense lawyers. And you’d expect them to complain. But a lot of times I’ve felt like the arguments had at least some merits — even in some cases where the defendants in question were obviously corrupt (in layman’s if not legal terms).
And now it seems possible that a lot of those folks sitting in the slammer might get a chance to get out of prison — or at least get set up for some solid appeals — because of what happened yesterday in the Supreme Court.
Justin Elliott has more on the extent to which law enforcement is able to track Americans via their cell phones — and on how little protection is offered by the Fourth Amendment bar on unreasonable searches.
I think I may have felt better about the build-up in Afghanistan before I saw this DOD-commissioned chart that explains it.
(Click image to see full-size image and chart.)
Not sure I’d thought of this before. But yeah, the Dems 2000 and 2004 VP picks have not held up that well.
Reed Hundt introduces us to a new idea making the rounds in DC: the Green Bank. It got another hearing at the president’s recent jobs summit.
Bank of America today announced that it had paid off the entire $45 billion it borrowed from the Troubled Assets Relief Program during the height of the global financial crisis. That means it’s free and clear of its obligations to the government in terms of limits on executive compensation and the rest. Notably, it seems that it was the desire to get out of under those executive compensation limits that drove the decision. Read More
For a series of reasons — to a large degree trying to learn the lessons of 1994 — the administration has kept its distance from the legislative wrangling on Capitol Hill. At least publicly, that is. The White House has stuck to annunciating broad principles and letting the folks on the Hill come up with a bill. But that’s far from the whole story. The White House has a team of advisors — some you know, others you may not — attending meetings, monitoring, coaxing, massaging and yes, often, guiding what’s happening.
So who are they and who’s doing what?
Today we introduce you to the White House team.