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.