Today in Washington D. C. - March 18, 2009

The Senate began executive session to consider the nomination of Ron Kirk to be U.S. Trade Representative for up to 90 minutes. At 2 PM, the Senate will vote on the Kirk nomination and three amendments to the lands bill from Coburn.

Following debate on the nomination, the Senate will return to legislative session and resume consideration H.R. 146, a vehicle for a public lands bill (S.22) that originally passed the Senate in January. A deal was reached yesterday between Democrat leaders and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), allowing him to offer six amendments to the bill.

Yesterday, the Senate passed by voice vote a bill to do away with automatic congressional pay increases (S. 620). Are they willing to give back their pay raises for this year?

In the House, a House Financial Services subcommittee will begin a hearing on AIG at 10 AM and will hear testimony from AIG chairman and CEO Edward Liddy. With anger building over bonuses paid out by AIG after receiving billions in tax, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress scrambled to shift blame for who allowed it to happen, and wil use the hearings to try to cover their trail. Much of the focus has been on Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT). Fox Business initially reported yesterday, “While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. The provision, now called ‘the Dodd Amendment’ by the Obama Administration provides an ‘exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009’ -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.”

But a Dodd spokesperson denied that his amendment allowed this, telling The Washington Times’ Amanda Carpenter that Dodd’s amendment was changed by the Treasury Department and stimulus bill conferees. And The New York Times adds today, “Mr. Dodd, in turn, responded Tuesday with a statement saying that the exemption actually had been inserted at the insistence of Treasury during Congress’s final legislative negotiations.” Yet at the daily press briefing yesterday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs repeatedly referred to “the Dodd compensation requirements as contained in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

CNN attempted to unravel the mess in a article by Dana Bash: “In an interview with CNN, Dodd denied inserting that exemption at the 11th hour, and insisted he doesn't know how it got there. ‘When I wrote the language there was no such language like that,’ Dodd told CNN Tuesday.” The CNN report continues, “Multiple Senate Democratic leadership sources also deny knowing how the exemption got into the bill. The mystery isn't just how what was effectively a protection for AIG was put into the stimulus bill -- it's also how a provision intended to prevent AIG from giving executive bonuses, was taken out.”

According to CNN, “The Senate passed a bipartisan amendment [to the stimulus bill] proposed by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R- Maine, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, that would have taxed bonuses on any company getting federal bailout dollars, if the company didn't pay back the bonus money to the government. But the idea was stripped from the stimulus bill during hurried, closed-door negotiations with the White House and House of Representatives.”

CNN asked Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT), one of the conferees on the stimulus bill about the Snowe-Wyden amendment and he “made a stunning admission.” Baucus said, “Frankly it was such a rush -- we're talking about the stimulus bill now -- to get it passed, I didn't have time and other conferees didn't have time to address many of the provisions that were modified significantly. We shouldn't be here. That should have passed, but it didn't.”

Meanwhile, at a press conference yesterday, Politico reports that “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) just tried to change the subject. Asked about Geithner’s role in failing to stop the bonuses, Reid said: ‘Let’s talk about what we have accomplished this Congress.’” So who exactly is responsible here? President Obama? Secretary Geithner? Chris Dodd? Harry Reid? Max Baucus? The American people would probably be better served by less finger-pointing and more answers. Obama is heading out to California, wasting tax maney and aircraft fuel, in an effort to do in get out of town and to try to sell his budget proposal -- doing the only successful thing he has done in his past - campaigning.

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