Banking Law

After guaranteeing last week that he could invoke cloture to prevent Senate Republicans from putting the brakes on his rush to enact bankruptcy reform proposals, Senate Majority Leader "Dirty Harry" Reid ended up with not the 60 votes he said he had in his pocket, but a scant 48. I guess he's not as tough as he talks. We'll have to start calling him "Dusty Hank" or "The Slightly Soiled Solon."

Naturally, Reid spun his personal loss as both a victory for the Dark Side of the Force and a disaster for "the little guy."

"The people on Wall Street are high-fiving. They just won again," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said after the vote.

"The big banks just won again. The mortgage bankers won again. Oh, there are a few losers out there, like millions of consumers -- millions of people who are going into foreclosure or are about to go into foreclosure. They lost."

I was in New York City last Friday, and I did notice a plethora of lampshade wearing, feather-boa waving, inebriated briefcase-carriers waltzing down Wall Street, high-and-low-fiving like they'd invented the gesture. I simply assumed that there was a revival of La Cage Aux Folles in town, but I must have been wrong. It was unrestrained glee at Harry's failure to secure a cloture vote on cramdowns.

Dick Durban piled on, his voice dripping with the sarcasm he usually reserves for members of the U.S. Armed Forces who dare to insult the parentage of captured al-Qaeda operatives they're questioning.

But Durbin said the opposition came largely from mortgage bankers -- "Those same wonderful folks who brought us the subprime crisis."

And he compared Bush's handling of the mortgage crisis to President Herbert Hoover's hands-off response to the Great Depression.

"It didn't turn the economy around, and it ended up electing a new president named Franklin Roosevelt," Durbin said.

So the current economic situation is equivalent to the Great Depression, according to Dick. If so, I need to point to out to Dick that "a new president named Franklin Roosevelt didn't turn the economy around," either. It was World War II that "turned the economy around."

I'd confront Durbin with these facts, but I don't want him to break down in tears.

Last Friday, Reid vowed that the Republican fat cats wouldn't have long to purr, because come next January, the Democrats are going to have a bigger majority in the Senate.

With a 51-49 party split in the Senate, Reid deals from a weak hand, but he said he expects the Democrats to win more seats in November.

"Enjoy it while you can," Reid said. "Continue to block, because it won't be there very long."

Given his most recent predictions, we won't hold our breath waiting for this latest one to come true.

On the other hand, let's not take the word of the Senate Republicans at face value, either.

The chamber's Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he was open to debating the bill under a "fair process for consideration" and accused Democrats of forcing the vote "to create an issue."

"Now that the box has been checked on the other side, maybe we can get serious now about trying to do something that will actually make a difference," he said.

I'm not sure what "something that will actually make a difference" means. If the Republicans' track record is any guide, "doing something" in this area is likely to be "watching grass grow." After all, it's an election year.