Best To Chris Dodd

Sen. Dodd has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer. My dad had this, and my grandfather too. It's very common and eminently treatable in this day and age, and hopefully Dodd will be able to beat it as quickly and painlessly as possible. He still plans to run for re-election and be back at work after the August recess. Here's part of his letter to supporters:

I want to assure you that I'm feeling fine. As you know, we've been working hard to pass health care legislation and reform our nation's financial system to protect consumers, and that hard work will continue.

After the Senate adjourns at the end of next week, I'll have surgery to remove the cancer. After a week or two of recuperation, I expect to be right back to work.

After all, as a Member of Congress, I have great health insurance. I was able to get screened, seek the opinions of highly skilled doctors, consider all the available options, and choose the treatment that was right for me.

And I know you'll agree that every American deserves the same ability.

We have health care legislation to pass - and an election to win. And I can't thank you enough for your support.

I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Sen. Dodd when he ran for President last year. I found him smart, engaging and focused on the right issues. He's been hammered back home for being the fall guy in the AIG bonus scandal - falsely, I might add - and for this alleged sweetheart deal on his mortgage from Countrywide, which his hometown paper states in two editorials today were not at all sweetheart deals but widely available mortgage terms.

I hope he's back on his feet soon.

Chris Dodd Comes Around To Supporting Gay Marriage

Chris Dodd's running for Senate re-election in a state that has already legalized gay marriage, in legislation eventually signed by a popular Republican Governor. So him coming out in support of gay marriage probably has a political significance. But he frames it on the level of wanting to properly meet the call of history.

While I’ve long been for extending every benefit of marriage to same-sex couples, I have in the past drawn a distinction between a marriage-like status (“civil unions”) and full marriage rights.

The reason was simple: I was raised to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. And as many other Americans have realized as they’ve struggled to reconcile the principle of fairness with the lessons they learned early in life, that’s not an easy thing to overcome.

But the fact that I was raised a certain way just isn’t a good enough reason to stand in the way of fairness anymore.

The Connecticut Supreme Court, of course, has ruled that such a distinction holds no merit under the law. And the Court is right [...]

My young daughters are growing up in a different reality than I did. Our family knows many same-sex couples – our neighbors in Connecticut, members of my staff, parents of their schoolmates. Some are now married because the Connecticut Supreme Court and our state legislature have made same-sex marriage legal in our state.

But to my daughters, these couples are married simply because they love each other and want to build a life together. That’s what we’ve taught them. The things that make those families different from their own pale in comparison to the commitments that bind those couples together.

And, really, that’s what marriage should be. It’s about rights and responsibilities and, most of all, love.

Even with gay marriage a reality in Connecticut, among those in the middle who would decide his re-election, this stand probably doesn't help all that much, although I'm not sure it hurts either. Dodd's simply trying to get this right. So good for him; others in the Democratic Party who probably share his views are afraid to speak out this way. And the rest of those lagging behind Dodd ought to catch up.

Credit Card Reform Deal In Senate

Senate Banking Committee leaders have reached a compromise deal on credit card reform.

The House has passed a credit card reform measure that mirrors new rules passed by the Federal Reserve in December. The (Chris) Dodd bill offers stronger consumer protections than the House bill and the Federal Reserve rules. The Fed's regulations won't go into effect until July 2010. The Senate bill's protections would be enacted nine months after being signed into law.

Dodd had sought to ban all interest rate increases on existing balances. Under the compromise bill, card issuers would be allowed to retroactively bump up rates for any borrower whose payments are 60 days past due. However, if the borrower pays on time for six months, the card issuer would have to restore the original rate. The bill also prohibits card issuers from increasing rates during the first year a credit card account is opened and requires them to get customers' permission to set up accounts so that transactions over the limit can be processed. Another provision would require card issuers to post credit card agreements online.

"It's a meaningful compromise that will significantly improve the credit card marketplace and stop abusive practices," said Travis B. Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Federation of America.

Getting Richard Shelby's signoff early strongly improves the possibilities for the bill, even while the banksters lobby against it. Just by virtue of being more real for most Americans, it will be harder for the Congress to walk away from this. It's rare to see a stronger bill coming out of the Senate than the House, but that's the case here.

And let's not diminish the significance of the Chris Dodd credit card reform bill getting signed into law. He'll need help like this to win re-election.

The Curious Case Of Christopher Dodd

Chris Dodd has clearly become collateral damage to the economic crisis and in particular the AIG bonus scandal, and it's sad to see. The Administration basically hung him out to dry and he's paying the price.

Slipping below a 50 percent approval rating is often considered a red flag for incumbents. Quinnipiac Poll Director Douglas Schwartz said Dodd's 33 percent approval rating, a dip from 44 percent in a March 10 poll, is "especially devastating."

"A 33 percent job approval is unheard of for a 30-year incumbent, especially a Democrat in a blue state," Schwartz said.

The poll also found Dodd trails his two announced Republican challengers, former GOP Congressman Rob Simmons and Connecticut state Sen. Sam Caligiuri. Former ambassador Tom Foley, who has not announced whether he will run against Dodd, also would hold an edge over the veteran Democrat, according to the poll.

It shows Simmons defeating Dodd by a margin of 50 percent to 34 percent. Dodd also trails Caligiuri 41 percent to 37 percent, and Foley 43 percent to 35 percent.

Even more distressing is that Dodd has been one of the only ones in Congress trying to make the banksters really pay for their greed by setting limits on the credit card industry. A loanshark offers lower rates than the banks on some credit cards. You can't come up with a more real-world distress to regular working people. And as Tom Geoghegan notes, you can draw a straight line from the collapse of anti-usury laws in the 1970s and the bubble of capital that ended up going into the exotic financial products that helped cause this crisis. Dodd's bill isn't a full step away from that wild open marketplace, but it goes pretty far.

Today, the Senate Banking Committee passed the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act - legislation I wrote to stop abusive and deceptive credit card practices once and for all. Indeed, 2009 may well prove a watershed moment for credit card reform [...]

Universal default is one of countless abusive practices credit card companies regularly engage in today that my legislation would put to an end.

Here are a few other practices the Credit C.A.R.D Act ends:

"Any Time, Any Reason" interest rate hikes. Issuers often unilaterally change the terms of a credit card contract before the term is up. One issuer "voluntarily" eliminated these hikes after Congress exposed them. They even ran ads stating that "a deal is a deal." But there is nothing binding them to that commitment, and most issuers have already gone back to the practice - one a Pew Charitable Trusts survey found in 93% of 400 cards issued by the country's largest banks and issuers. This bill makes that practice illegal.

Penalty Rates With No End. Let's say you've been a customer in good standing, and you have a reasonable interest rate of 12%. You pay your bill three days late, and you get raised to a penalty interest rate of 29.9%. Once that penalty rate increase is triggered, there is no limit on how long it will last. From that point on, you continue to pay your bill on time, but despite that, you continue to pay the penalty rate for the life of that card. The amount and duration of the penalty rate is entirely determined by the card issuer. My bill says that after 6 months of on time payment, your rate has to go back down.

Double-Cycle Billing. Say a few months ago, you had a credit card debt of a thousand dollars - and that since then, you've paid off $900 of that debt. It's not uncommon for credit card companies to keep charging interest not on a hundred dollars but on the full $1,000 for another cycle or two. The Credit C.A.R.D Act prevents that practice.

Aggressive Marketing to Young People. Recently, my seven year-old daughter received a credit card solicitation in the mail. Jackie and I laughed it off, but it brings up a serious point: young people are faced with an onslaught of credit card offers. And just as we saw in the mortgage crisis with lenders and borrowers, too often, issuers offer cards to young people without verifying any ability to repay whatsoever. This is particularly true for students, who are flooded with offers the second they set foot onto a college campus - in fact, industry officials have testified to Congress that simply being a college student is considered a "positive factor" toward the ability to pay. This bill simply says that credit card companies must take into account a young person's ability to repay before allowing them to take on what is all too often a lifetime's worth of debt.

It should be stronger, but even this mild stuff barely cleared the Senate Banking Committee, which credit card-state Senator Tim Johnson voting against it. The point is that Dodd has been working to rein in credit card abuse for decades. Now some demagoguery has driven down his poll numbers and threatened his career. It's quite unfair.

Unfortunately, once the public mind is set, they resist changing it. At some point, Dodd may have to be asked to step aside. And the Obama Administration, which threw him over the side of the boat, had better make good for him.

Dodd Held Hostage

I really feel bad for Chris Dodd getting caught up in the populist fury over AIG, in a way that is truly unfair to him. He wrote an executive compensation amendment for the stimulus. He was hounded by Treasury officials and Administration leaders to water it down, and wanting to keep at least some of the provisions in the bill he did so. There was no indication that AIG executives stood to benefit when he made changes to the bill. In fact, language that is LAW TODAY would still allow the Treasury Department to claw back bonuses if they found compelling public interest (which, according to Dodd, is happening as we speak). Despite the media and conservative jabber he's been completely consistent on this issue, the facts of which have been well-known for over a month. The flip-flop from the conservative business press, which a month ago were calling Dodd's amendment too restrictive and are now calling it a giveaway, is astonishing.

Here he is at a press conference today. Sadly, I'm not sure it'll be enough. The right was already smearing Dodd for a sweetheart mortgage he apparently received through Countrywide, and this offered another opportunity to pile on. Instead of the greater lesson that executive compensation is a festering problem that we must deal with (good again on Ben Bernanke for addressing that today), commentators are pointing fingers and deciding on Dodd as the scapegoat. "He gets all that campaign money from AIG!" No shit, so the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee gets campaign contributions from financial services interests? They apparently swayed him so much that he only offered an amendment to take all their bonuses away!

The end of Dodd's statement is particularly good:

"Standing in a community of my state, this isn't about my job, it's about their jobs. It's about their future and their children. And I'm not in the business of getting re-elected to office, I'm in the business of doing my job that I got elected to do. And I'm going to do my job."

I think he understands the reality, and that this all may cost him re-election. Scapegoating is a very easy and familiar action, but it doesn't make it right. And anyway, plenty in government knew about these bonuses. Talk to them for a minute.