But what else is new? Their bid to overturn a new rule making it easier for unions to organize workers in the airline and railroad industries failed however.

Meanwhile, the House passed the small business bill and it goes to President Obama.

And it looks like Democrats won’t pass an extension of any of the tax cuts, even for the middle class, before the midterms. And we wonder why there’s an enthusiasm gap?

Congress passed new sanctions on Iran and the House of Representatives passed the DISCLOSE Act, which came in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision that severely weakened previous campaign finance laws. Unfortunately, groups like the NRA were exempted from having to disclose its top donors on its campaign ads but would still have to put its own name on any of its spots. The Senate still has to pass the bill, so potentially the bill can be strengthened. But despite the exemptions, this is still a big step in disclosure for campaign contributions.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans again killed a bill to extend unemployment benefits and prevent layoffs of state and local government workers though Congress delayed cuts to Medicare payments for six weeks while they work out the broader bill.

House and Senate negotiators have come to an agreement on financial reform legislation and hope to send it to President Obama by the July 4th recess. A bill has been introduced in Congress to crack down on puppy mills (you can ask your representatives to support the measure here). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to try and attach broader energy/climate change legislation to an oil industry regulation bill to get it fast tracked before the August recess. Speaker Pelosi is fighting for broader congressional oversight of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. And forgotten-Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings will begin Monday.

Congress passed a bill providing benefits to veterans’ caregivers that will go to President Obama. The Senate confirmed Judge Denny Chin to fill an opening on a New York-based appeals court.; he will be the only Asian-American currently serving on a U.S. Court of Appeals. However, there are 23 judicial nominations still pending on the Senate calendar. This is just some of the massive obstruction perpetrated by the GOP.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen has introduced the first in what could be a series of legislative attempts to undo some of the damage of the the Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling to campaign finance reform. The bill is picking up at least some Republican support. Also, Congressional Democrats have begun pushing legislation giving government regulators greater authority to block big increases in health insurance premiums, in what is sure to be one of many legislative improvements to health care reform over the next few years.

And thanks to Sen. Russ Feingold, Congress is likely to wisely deny themselves pay raises this year.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has filed for a cloture vote to take place on Monday for the financial regulatory reform bill. At least one Republican vote is needed, but with Republicans seemingly seeing that the momentum is against them on this issue, it’ll be a big test to see if they can hold firm in opposition. In any case, the bill is likely to pass soon and a conference version will likely be ahead of schedule, with the original thinking being that President Obama would sign this into law around September and the anniversary of Lehman Brothers, etc. Now that they will probably have more time to work on other legislation, a debate is now brewing on what the Democrats should tackle next.

The White House originally indicated their next priority was energy/climate change legislation, but Harry Reid (whom is facing a tough re-elected race in Nevada) and some Latino Democrats are pushing for immigration reform. While some fear taking up such a controversial issue in an election year, they argue that Democrats ought to show Latino voters they care about their issues and not take their votes for granted, especially in light of the draconian immigration law that encourages racial profiling that was passed in Arizona. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham have introduced a bill in the Senate, and Speak of the House Nancy Pelosi has said that if the Senate can get it done the House would follow.

My personal preference, however, is to go with the climate bill. A version already passed the House and Sens. John Kerry, Graham and Joe Lieberman are introducing “compromise” legislation in the Senate on Monday, so it’s already closer to getting done. Plus, I think immigration reform might actually be more moveable with a potential Republican Congress next year than climate change… But hey, why not shoot for both? The Democrats ought to get as much of their agenda passed as possible while they have the votes.

UPDATE: A bad sign for the energy bill,  but it doesn’t look good for immigration reform either. Reid says he’s committed to both and Kerry says the EPA is studying the climate bill.

UPDATE II: A compromise to move both along?

This op-ed by Linda Greenhouse in the NY Times is worth excerpting:

Taken as a whole, the campaign finance picture is beyond dreary. It is particularly confused and tense as the year winds down. The Supreme Court justices left this week for a monthlong recess without accomplishing the one thing that nearly everyone assumed they would have done by now: decide the major challenge to existing federal restrictions on political spending by corporations. The court heard the case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in a special sitting on Sept. 9, nearly a month before the term began.

[...]

This was an aggressive move by the court’s new deregulatory majority: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy. In their view, a robust First Amendment right to political speech, for corporations as well as individuals, trumps all or nearly all rationales for regulating money in politics — including those the Supreme Court accepted as recently as 2003, when it upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. That decision, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, is one of the rulings the court is now reconsidering, along with another from 1990.

I can only assume that the other justices, in whose view the First Amendment need not be interpreted to strangle Congress’s ability to regulate the flow of money into politics, see this exercise in self-help for what it is: a hijacking that has turned a minor case into an agenda-driven vehicle for undoing the status quo. A tenet of judicial minimalism is that at the very least, the court waits to be asked, rather than reaching out to decide the profound questions of the day.

I realize that uncertainty is an undesirable trait in an opinion columnist, but I have to confess to long-standing agnosticism on the campaign finance issue. I take the First Amendment arguments seriously, and I think that the provision of McCain-Feingold at issue in the original Citizens United case — banning corporate-paid “electioneering communications” from the airwaves during the weeks before an election — goes too far toward suppressing legitimate expression.

But I also believe that the First Amendment doesn’t require resigning ourselves to seeing democracy auctioned off to the highest bidder. It is, in other words, an exquisitely tough issue, made no simpler by decades of inconsistent Supreme Court decisions that have produced legal doctrine so muddled as to be “beyond incoherence,” in the words of Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Hasen is right, but I believe that incoherence is a result of the Court’s determination in the original campaign finance regulation case Buckley v. Valeo, in which they decided that money is the equivalent of speech and struck down limitations on how much candidates could spend on their own campaigns. This has meant that for over thirty years now the only limitation on campaign spending has been how much candidates could get their hands on, with their contributors doing their best to get around the system by “bundling” contributions, spending on behalf of candidates, “soft money” contributions to political parties, etc., etc.  So a system that was designed to protect the free speech of candidates for office, instead provides wealthy contributors, political insiders, corporations and other politically-interested organizations with more speech than little people like you or I. That fact, combined with the ever-increasing expense of campaigns is why, for example, perfectly legitimate reforms of the health care system can be stalled by a handful of House Representatives and Senators who just happen to be getting hundreds of thousands or millions in contributions from the insurance industry.

There are numerous possible alternatives to the present system, but no one has any incentive to try them so long as they can somehow get their hands on contributions under the present rules, rules that the Supreme Court is set only to loosen. Do you like living in a country where your democracy is for sale? You should get used to it. It’s only going to get worse.

1. Nicholas Kristof, on how Republican have been scare-mongering Americans into voting against their own interests for eighty years now. History has proven them wrong, every single time.

2. Perhaps you heard about the “Hand of Frog” that secured France a berth in the World Cup over poor Ireland. Ireland’s petition to FIFA for a replay has been denied, proving that FIFA is an organization mired in the past, both rejecting modern instant replay technology and favoring the world’s powerhouses (particularly the Western ones) over the rest of the world.

3. No one sitting on death row in Texas can expect any sort of clemency from Gov. Perry right now…the man has a primary to win!

4. Short-term lenders in Texas are getting what they pay for with their campaign contributions: zero regulation. As I have said before and will say again, our democracy will forever be corrupted by money until the Supreme Court wises up and decides that money is not the exact equivalent of speech, or political campaigns become publicly funded.

Glenn Greenwald highlights this episode of Bill Moyer’s Journal, where Rep. Marcy Kaptur and economist Simon Johnson tell us that the big banks on Wall Street “own” Congress. An excerpt:

BILL MOYERS: Let me show you an excerpt from the speech President Obama made on Wall Street last month, September. Here is the challenge he laid down to the bankers.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses. Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall.

BILL MOYERS: A reality check. Not one CEO of a Wall Street bank was there to hear the President. What do you make of that?

SIMON JOHNSON: Arrogance. Because they have no fear for the government anymore. They have no respect for the President, which I find absolutely extraordinary and shocking. All right? And I think they have no not an ounce of gratitude to the American people, who saved them, their jobs, and the way they run the world.

Why don’t they fear Obama? Because Obama’s top advisors are their own people, and they own Congress:

While the industry has scaled back its political spending in the wake of last year’s economic collapse, data from the Center for Responsive Politics show that it’s still investing heavily in the Senate, where it’s likely to have its best shot at stopping — or at least shaping — the crackdown on Wall Street that President Barack Obama has proposed.

And it’s clearly looking to Democrats to do it.

Of the $10.6 million the industry has given to sitting senators this year, more than $7.7 million has gone to Democrats.

The clue as to why our government struggles to deal with any substantial problem facing our country today is right there. So long as politicians must run massively expensive campaigns to get themselves elected, they will be in thrall to those who give them the most money. Between that and a media that’s incapable of either understanding or addressing the problems that face our nation, it’s hardly any wonder that some (myself included) find ourselves thinking that our nation is doomed.

Via Glenn Greenwald, Marc Ambinder has a pretty good explainer of the background to the Citizens United v. FEC campaign finance case that’s currently before the Supreme Court. Ambinder is right that campaign finance “reform” has largely resulted only in a confusing patchwork of regulations that fail to moderate the influence money has in politics. The problem of course is the underlying reasoning at work in Buckley v. Valeo, where the Supreme Court held that money is the equivalent of speech and thus entitled to First Amendment protections. It’s frankly impossible to overstate the corrosive influence this reasoning has had on politics in our country, but Ambinder is right that this precedent isn’t about to be overturned anytime soon. Things will have to get much, much worse before they get any better.

In March we touched on the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in the case of Caperton v. Massey, a case that explored the point at which judicial campaign funding can give rise to an appearance of bias when contributors appear before the judge whose campaign they’ve contributed too. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled for the plaintiff in the case, finding that excessive contributions by plaintiffs and defendants to a judge who is deciding their case can give rise to actual bias that violates plaintiffs’ and defendants’ due process rights under the Constitution. In March I wondered what sort of standard the Supreme Court would craft. Their answer:

There is a serious risk of actual bias when a person with a personal stake in a particular case had a significantand disproportionate influence in placing the judge on the case byraising funds or directing the judge’s election campaign when thecase was pending or imminent. The proper inquiry centers on the contribution’s relative size in comparison to the total amount con-tributed to the campaign, the total amount spent in the election, and the apparent effect of the contribution on the outcome.

They then find that the contributions in this case had a “significant and disproportionate” effect on the outcome of the case, and that the judge in the case should have recused himself. Of course this is a pretty squishy standard, a fact that Chief Justice Roberts makes clear in the dissent where he lists forty different questions (via Vince) about how the standard should be implemented. It’s clear though that the real divide is between those justices who are opposed in general to campaign finance limitations, and those who are not, with Justice Kennedy (in this case but not in others) siding with the majority. I think this case is an excellent example of the dangers of our present system of campaign finance (generally private) but as you can see, the circumstances must be fairly extreme (one-sided contributions in a judicial campaign where the contributor is before the judge) before the Supreme Court is going to reach out to the Constitution to permit limitations on financing. I applaud the fact that five out of nine of the justices think that there’s a point at which it’s just too much, but this is a pretty backhanded way of getting at campaign finance reform. Impartiality in judges is hardly a guarantee whatever manner in which they are placed on the bench, but this case should be a lesson to states that appointments, or at least state funded elections, are by far the most reliable way to avoid the appearance of (or actual) bias on the bench.

Adam Liptak at the NY Times writes that the Supreme Court appears to be gunning for parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that was passed in 2002. This should come as no surprise. Conservatives in general are opposed to serious efforts to constrain campaign finance spending, and Scalia and Thomas are on the record as opposing the holding of even Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 Supreme Court decision that got us in this mess in the first place by equating money to political speech and striking down any efforts to limit campaign spending. To some extent I sympathize with the Court; reading the quotes from oral argument, it’s plain to see that they struggle to define a working standard as to what is and is not an illegal campaign contribution. But that’s because the entire framework of campaign finance, as defined by Buckley, is incoherant and unworkable. Unfortunately Democrats also certainly have no impetus to limit campaign contributions, given the massive war chest that Barack Obama accumulated through the Presidential campaign. So long as Buckley stands, serious campaign finance reform in this country is impossible, and money will continue to serve as a proxy for political influence. 

Some local governments across the country are experiencing buyer’s remorse:

A decade after communities around the country adopted term limits to force entrenched politicians from office, at least two dozen local governments are suffering from a case of buyer’s remorse, with legislative bodies from New York City to Tacoma, Wash., trying to overturn or tweak the laws.

The campaigns against term limits, should they succeed, would drastically change the process by which millions of Americans elect a variety of their leaders — and how much power those leaders can amass once in office.

The elected leaders, some of whom supported term limits when they were imposed, argue that the limits severely hamper government and leave the officials little time to figure out the mechanics of their office. That forces them to gravitate toward small-bore projects that can be done quickly, rather than anything visionary that would take years to achieve.

In what could be called the second-term itch, they are pushing to revise the laws so they can serve another term (New York City and Rowlett, Tex.) or to repeal them so they can seek re-election indefinitely (State College, Pa., and Daytona Beach Shores, Fla.).

“It has been an unmitigated disaster for the city,” said Phil Hardberger, the departing mayor of San Antonio, who supports a November referendum to lengthen term limits to four two-year terms from two.

“The learning curve of how city government works and how to get things done is steep, but when you keep putting people in, and throwing them out, there is very little accountability,” he added. “We do a lot of churning here, but we don’t produce a lot of butter.”

Terms limits are popular politically in some areas because they seem to be a way to deal with the problems of entrenched, disconnected and corrupt politicians. And politicians like to run on term limits, or with promises not to be re-elected, because that gives them the appearance of being a man or woman of the people who’s not interested in their personal enrichment or success. What many people fail to realize is that being a public official (and not just a politician) is a job like any other, and those who are in that job longest are generally going to be more effective at what they do. This includes job duties like responding to the needs of constituents, or effectively running a large organization. And term limits are inherently un-democratic, as it removes a choice from voters that they might be willing to make, to re-elect someone they think has done a good job for them. Term limits are an inadequate solution regardless. Many politicians revoke their pledges once they’re in office, and their supporters let them get away with it. And now, as this article demonstrates, some supporters are beginning to wish they could keep the person they elected that they’ve found to be doing a good job. If producing public officials who are sympathetic and connected to their voters is the primary concern, then it makes a lot more sense to encourage ways by which citizens can run for and obtain public office, such as increasing salaries for political offices that are so ridiculously low as to preclude anyone who doesn’t already have their own money from running from for office. Or, increasing public financing for political campaigns, which will enable everyday people to run and enable everybody to run without selling out to various special interests to get their campaigns funded. Term limits are a simple and attractive solution, but they simply don’t work.