Friday, February 27, 2009
AP turned a foreclosure story upside-down.
Someone at the Associated Press (AP) has an axe to grind. This is from http://dailykos.org -- Gus
AP turns the cramdown story upside-down
by David Waldman aka Kagro X
Thu Feb 26, 2009 at 06:00:05 PM PST
The so-called "cramdown" mortgage relief bill has been crammed into next week, as I reported over at Congress Matters earlier today. The House scrapped its original plan to vote on four amendments to the bill and move to final passage before adjournment today. Instead, they held an hour's worth of general debate only, putting off amendments and final passage.
You can probably regard the delay as an indication that opponents of the bill -- Democratic opponents -- are angling for one last chance to kill or mortally wound it.
(The complete article is in the first comment.)
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AP turns the cramdown story upside-down
ReplyDeleteby David Waldman aka Kagro X
Thu Feb 26, 2009 at 06:00:05 PM PST
The so-called "cramdown" mortgage relief bill has been crammed into next week, as I reported over at Congress Matters earlier today. The House scrapped its original plan to vote on four amendments to the bill and move to final passage before adjournment today. Instead, they held an hour's worth of general debate only, putting off amendments and final passage.
You can probably regard the delay as an indication that opponents of the bill -- Democratic opponents -- are angling for one last chance to kill or mortally wound it.
Who are these Democratic opponents, exactly? Well, they're not coming all the way out in the open just yet, but following the developments on the bill would give you a pretty good idea who they are. Look chiefly to the usual suspects, that is, the Blue Dogs and in this case, many members of the New Democrats Coalition. Individual Members are dropping hints, but they're not coming right out and saying they want to kill the bill.
But to hear the AP tell it, the New Dems and Blue Dogs are the Friends of The Little Man, while mustache-twisting schemers like John Conyers are plotting to do Big Banking's business. Watch them take otherwise accurate quotes and put them in a context that gives the reader the impression that the positions entirely reversed here:
In the House, Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., the head of the business-minded New Democrat Coalition, raised concerns during the private session that the measure omitted help for homeowners who aren't staring at bankruptcy but are buckling under burdensome mortgage payments.
House leaders said they had postponed a vote until next week to give Democrats time to meet with Obama's housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, about how the measure fits with his housing plan.
"There's an equity question here," said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., another member of the coalition. "The discussion has got to be, what's the benefit to the guy next door who is struggling to pay the bills, is paying the bills and isn't filing for bankruptcy?"
Democratic skeptics are worried "that this could be too hard on the banks," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the Judiciary Committee chairman who sponsored the bill.
I'm sure those words were actually said by the people they're attributed to, but if you haven't been following the development of this bill, you'd be perfectly justified in coming away with the impression that Tauscher and Perlmutter wanted more financial protection from banks for more homeowners and supported this bill, while Conyers wanted less and opposed it.
But for one thing, Conyers quote is meant to be expressing the sentiments of "Democratic skeptics," of which he is not one. That'd actually be people like Tauscher and Perlmutter he's thinking of. For another, the comments attributed to Tauscher and Perlmutter aren't actually pleas for increased protections for a broader class of homeowners, but rather their argument for why no one really deserves any protection at all. It's not fair to bail out homeowners who fell behind and went into bankruptcy while their hard-working neighbors who managed to keep up get no help -- so let's not help either of them.
So what about the substance of the issue itself? Where does the bill stand? I'd say it's in some danger over the next few days of being watered down even further. Last night it looked set to make it out of the House relatively unscathed, largely protected by the Rules Committee from damaging amendments. But with the delay in place, opponents will doubtless make one last run at extracting more weakening concessions. If your Member of Congress tends to run with the Blue Dogs and/or the New Democrats, you might want to give them a call and warn them off of aligning themselves too closely with mortgage lenders in this climate, and to back off from weakening H.R. 1106.