You’re gonna have to go back a long way to find bills that were killed because the Minority leader disliked them. Probably the 60s or 70s. And then it only worked because the Dems were schizo — Southern Conservatives and big-city Liberals do not a united coalition make.

The rest have been brought to the House floor, often with substantial amendments just hours before a vote, without the opposition being able to even read them. The Dems haven’t played nice, and the reason is that they have huge majorities. Not a single bill has failed to pass because the GOP has voted against it. They have failed to pass because the Dem leadership are so far to the left that even members of their own caucus vote against the bills.

Usually in this kind of case the party in power has the ability to pull in members of the other party who agree with some of the aims of the issue. But the Dems are too far left for most of the freshmen Dem Congressmen. This year, the Dems have to resort to massive pork spending, such as the new Louisiana Purchase for DEM Senator Mary Landrieu:

On the eve of Saturday’s showdown in the Senate over health-care reform, Democratic leaders still hadn’t secured the support of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 60 votes needed to keep the legislation alive. The wavering lawmaker was offered a sweetener: at least $100 million in extra federal money for her home state.

And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote — and to trumpet the financial “fix” she had arranged for Louisiana. “I am not going to be defensive,” she declared. “And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix.”

In the Senate they actually did get GOP votes. Not many, but some. Spectre left the party largely because the backlash from wihin the party was much stronger than he expected.

Baucus tried his damnedest to get GOP support on health reform. The “Gang of Six” that dominated Senate Finance Committee health deliberations for months included three Republicans (Enzi, Grassley, and Snowe).

Pelosi actually did get a Republican vote for her much more leftwing health bill: Joseph Cao.

And “infrastructure projects” are especially subject to “pork” … in fact, most pork IS hidden behind that phrase.

The Democrats have huge majorities in both houses and don’t need a single Republican vote to pass their initiatives. The lack of even trying to appear bi-partisan is proof of that. Not a single Republican voted for the stimulus bill in the House … not one. Three Republicans supported it in the Senate, and one of those has subsequently switched parties.

TARP had bi-partisan support because it was passed by a Democratic congress and a Republican President who recommended it. Bush was 1000% more bi-partisan than President Obama has been, mainly because he had to be. After the 2010 mid-terms, President Obama will make a big show of being more bi-partisan as the huge majorities in the House and Senate are trimmed.

Note particularly that BoA’s “repayment” will be the proceeds of issuing new stock and utilizing “excess liquidity” (unused TARP funds), not of actually “earning in” the money to pay the debt. They’re just swapping new equity and unspent TARP funds for the TARP debt, which means existing BoA shareholders will see their stock values diluted. Which has been the story with ALL the repayments to date.

Frank, the acquisition you’re thinking of was Merrill Lynch, which the feds essentially forced BoA to purchase … or else, for $50B. BoA shareholders lost well over $300B as the details of how bad off ML was became public. They’ve only managed to gain back about $100B of that as BoA stock has very slowly recovered.

But hey, the government made $2.5B in vig and got the nut back, so let’s all celebrate, eh? As long as you’re not a BoA stockholder.

WHen you look at the stimulus bill, 34 percent was tax relief. Of the entire bill, about $308 million can be called discretionary spending. $48 billion of that goes to infrastructure spending. So, we have a total of about $260 billion that can be considered “potential pork.”

How much of that was necessary to cajole the GOP votes needed to get it passed? (and how many GOP folks after stuffing their pockets then went home to decry tax and spend liberals?). I dunno. How much was need to keep the party faithful in line on the Dems side? Again, I dunno.

But I do know that with consumer spending going in the tank, the government needed to step into the void to keep the economy going. I absolutely love the right decrying this philosophy even when its biggest chamption (Reagain) has been deified by the GOP.

Were there better stimulus bills…oh yes. But it was the only bill that could get passed. Without, things would have been much worse.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/04/obama-jobs-speech-at-broo_n_380086.html

I think BofA was weakened by its acceptance of a government proposal to absorb another financial institution (I don’t remember the name of it offhand). And then the Countrywide acquisition hurt them. While the deal with Countrywide was in place already, BofA wasn’t going to finish the acquisition until Countrywide sold off all the sub-prime loans it held (BofA never carried any sub-prime mortgages). I think they accelerated the Countrywide deal to please the Fed.

Anyway, unlike the stimulus (an exercise best described as “pork-a-polooza” or welfare to irresponsible state governments) the TARP funds were loans that have to be paid back. Much like the Chrysler bailout in the 1980′s, it was sold as a scheme that could result in net gains for the Treasury.

Geithner should go (and Summers, and Bernanke) because they are all part of the same group of a few dozen who created the problem they are now trying to solve. Their answer has always been to just entrust them with more money to solve the problems they created by amassing so much money in the first place. But even a street walker looks like a financial genius on payday.

I don’t know if we will eventually turn out to have made money or not, but this argument is circular reasoning. Of course we’ve made money on TARP repayments so far. Those who won’t be able to pay obviously *haven’t paid it back yet*. Those who have paid it back are obviously among those that could pay, but that doesn’t mean that the rest will be able to. So I think it’s a little early to be calling for mea culpas. And if the commercial real-estate bubble has yet to burst, it may be too early to say that we averted a financial meltdown. I certainly hope we have, and I hope TARP ends up making money. I’m just saying it’s too early to gloat.

And in seems to me in poor taste to gloat anyway. Are you saying we shouldn’t have been nervous about lending hundreds of billions to private corporations on the verge of collapse? A little acknowledgment of the risk of that seems reasonable even if we manage to make it work in the end.