What The Congress Is Doing Right (Yes, There Is Something)

I'm distressed by the lifting of the ban on offshore drilling, and the bailout bill is still fluid. But at the end of this session, the Congress is getting some good bills across the line.

After much wrangling from Senate hold king Tom Coburn, the Senate finally dislodged the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act and got it passed. This would set up a cold case unit to investigate crimes and injustices of the Civil Rights era.

The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity Act passed the House by overwhelming margins yesterday. This would prohibit insurance agencies from limiting benefits for mental health ailments. Right now only 1/3 of all Americans suffering from mental illness receive adequate treatment, and this bill would go a long way to altering that. More here.

In addition, the House passed a credit card holder's bill of rights, which would accomplish the following.

Ends unfair, arbitrary interest rate increases, by requiring ample notice before rate hikes and permitting lenders to raise rates on existing balances only if minimum payments are more than 30 days late (except for increases caused by changes in stated variable and introductory offers)

Ends penalties on cardholders who pay on time, like charging interest on already repaid debt

Protects consumers from due date gimmicks by requiring credit card companies to mail bills 25 days (instead of 14) before the due date

Ends the credit card practice of applying consumer payments to lower interest debt first

This also passed overwhelmingly.

I'll withhold judgment to see what they do with this piece of garbage bailout bill, but Congress is not entirely useless.

Some Holds Are Bigger Than Others

I don't know if you watch as much C-SPAN as I do. If you did, and you didn't know anything about the workings of Congress but just watched it like a TV show, you'd think the leader of the Senate was Tom Coburn (R-OK). He's always on the floor, making speeches, sometimes lasting an hour or longer, and he seems to have something to add to every bill that's up for consideration. Most of the time, he doesn't like them. He doesn't like them because they cost money, and Coburn considers deficit spending to be a bigger moral issue than abortion. Listening to his speeches, you'd think they were replays, except for the fact that he sports a salt-and-pepper beard these days. The speech is always about passing debt on to our children and grandchildren, and how this is a moral tragedy, and how Republicans have lost their way on the issue of federal spending, and that we should look to see what current programs are working before spending money on new ones.

These sound like fairly noble ideas on the surface, but in reality, Tom Coburn doesn't want the Senate to spend any money. He would never vote to increase revenues, and he would never vote for new programs. He just wants to drown the government in the bathtub. And so, Coburn has scrupulously put a Senatorial hold on practically every single spending initiative that the Senate has sought to pass.

Coburn, a physician who served in the House before he was elected in 2004, has rankled the collegiality of the Senate by putting roughly 80 holds on bills for new heritage areas. He even placed a hold on a bill designed to close a loophole that allowed Cho Seung-Hui to buy the gun he used in his deadly shooting spree at Virginia Tech this year.

Quizzed about his holds, Coburn reached into his pocket and brought out a card he carries with a printout displaying each of the bills on which he has a hold and its author.

Coburn is very proud of his holds, which according to another account number a hundred. He has a page on his website explaining the hold process and how he uses the unanimous consent rule to block consideration of anything he thinks includes "secret spending." He has put holds on bills like suicide prevention for veterans, naming a post office after Rachel Carson, and perhaps worst, investigating the murder of civli rights leaders like Emmett Till (UPDATE: Emmett Till was a teenage kid from Chicago who was murdered for looking at a white woman. It became a major civil rights cause, but he was not a leader. H/t Brian Pitts):

Legislation to beef up investigations into unsolved murders from the civil rights era looked like it would breeze through Congress.

The House passed it 422-2 last summer. Its Senate sponsors included some of the most senior Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

But the bill has stalled since the House vote in June. Its supporters acknowledge that prospects are slim this year with just days left on the legislative calendar. The breakdown offers a case study in how even the most popular legislation can get caught up in Washington gridlock.

The Senate sponsor of the "Emmett Till Act" is Chris Dodd. Unlike Sen. Coburn, he has placed holds only in those instances where he has considered it absolutely necessary. And unlike Sen. Coburn, his holds are ignored by the Democratic leadership.

Here's Harry Reid's spokesman crying crocodile tears about the Coburn hold:

"It's absolutely outrageous that one senator and one senator only appears to be blocking us from passing this piece of legislation," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Yes, but there's nothing you can do about it, right? I mean, if one Senator wants to block consideration of a bill, I guess he can just do it...

Unless that bill gives amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms.

Harry Reid has no problem respecting the one hundred holds from Tom Coburn on all sorts of legislation, but will ignore Chris Dodd's. That's the bottom line, and given that, you have to conclude that Harry Reid is the one doing the holding.

Chris Dodd is heroically calling for a filibuster, but the real issue here is the issue of ignoring the rules of the Senate. Harry Reid is picking and choosing which Senators he will listen to. The fact that Chris Dodd came within one vote of defeating him for Minority Leader back in 2004 wouldn't have anything to do with this, would it?

Harry Reid has set up two rules for the United States Senate; one under the normal standards of conduct that have held for 200-plus years, and one for bills that he really really has to pass or the President will get mad at him. Earlier this year, Reid ignored a hold placed by Sen. Ron Wyden and confirmed an assistant Secretary of the Interior that Wyden had issues with. Sen. Wyden dropped an important amendment into the flawed Intelligence Committee bill on FISA that the President opposes, which would force the government to get a warrant to spy on Americans overseas. I guess we'll see if Reid strips that amendment out of the bill, and if he holds the same respect for amendments that he does for holds.

The point is that Harry Reid has made Tom Coburn the most important member of the United States Senate. He's made Chris Dodd, a member of his own party, irrelevant. And he's made himself into a joke. We cannot go into 2008 with this laughingstock of a leader in the Senate.