Six weeks since Congress approved the financial services bailout legislation, the administration has committed $290 billion of the $700 billion Congress gave it to work with.

Originally intended for purchasing troubled mortgage assets, it has instead been used to purchase shares of troubled firms, and it may soon be used for automakers and heaven knows what else.

Now the Washington Post reports:

Yet for all this activity, no formal action has been taken to fill the independent oversight posts established by Congress when it approved the bailout to prevent corruption and government waste. Nor has the first monitoring report required by lawmakers been completed, though the initial deadline has passed.

“It’s a mess,” said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. “I don’t think anyone understands right now how we’re going to do proper oversight of this thing.”

We already know that the Treasury Department has been working to obscure what it’s doing.

Congress is asleep at the switch, and the “oversight” procedures put into the bailout bill have proved to be a paper tiger.

(Last bailout post for a while, I swear! Maybe.)

Of course, people are looking to see how their representatives voted, whether or not they changed their votes last week.

So like we did with the House vote Monday, in which the bailout failed, here’s the list of all House members and their votes on Friday, when the bailout passed:

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It was incomplete, our feature on Members of Congress whose change of mind on the financial services bailout allowed that legislation to pass. There is one more vote-switcher out there: Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington state.

But McDermott switched his vote the other way - from supporting the bailout on Monday to opposing it on Friday.

Interpret it as you will. Perhaps he’s a hero who saw the light after studying the issue for a week. Perhaps it was an opportunistic switch: Knowing that it had the votes to pass the second time, he wanted to appear as though he opposed the bailout even though he knew all along that it was the best thing for the country.

It’s all part of the complex game of interpreting votes.

. . . Or for those who preferred the “rescue package,” the Members of Congress listed below are a group who saw the light. Or they were strong-armed by their party leadership. Or they horse-traded their support for some benefit to themselves or their districts.

Each of these explanations may be true in one or another case. Americans will tend to prefer the story that fits the ideological and policy positions they already had, just like most people think that the winner of last Thursday’s debate was the vice presidential candidate they already liked.

But, with just a month to go before the election, the passage of the financial services bailout gives voters a chance to make clear their preferences in Washington’s policies, and in the behavior of their representatives.

Below, we’ve compiled the list of congressmembers who changed their votes between Monday and Friday last week. Collectively, they allowed the $700,000,000,000 financial services bailout bill to pass and become law. We’ve also listed their opponents in the upcoming election, who may gain or lose ground based on the incumbent’s treatment of this very important issue.

Click below to jump to your state and see if your representative, or someone that represents friends or family members, was one of the now infamous vote-switchers. And what are you going to do about it? Give them a piece of your mind? Donate to them or their opponents? Write a letter to your local paper? That’s up to you.

[Update: In collecting images and data for this posted, we originally treated Rep. Julia Carson as the representative from Indiana's 7th District. Her grandson Andre Carson took her place when she passed away, and his image and information has now taken the place of hers below. Embarrassing error.]

[Update II: A list of all votes in order of state and congressional districts is here.]

[Update III: A Web site for Vermont challenger Jerry Trudell has been added. Yes, a wee bit late.]

Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont.

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[Update: Check out the new post, "A Bailout Rogues Gallery . . ."]

The Members of Congress who changed their votes to pass financial services bailout legislation, which failed in the House on Monday, surely knew that they were taking a high-profile vote. So let’s give them that high profile!

If you support the bailout, you can contact them with your congratulations and send checks to their campaigns. If you don’t support the bailout, you can contact them with your nuanced criticisms and send checks to their opponents in the upcoming election.

The best thing you could do is contact your own representative. That’s the person who will actually pay attention to you. And of course: vote.

Here is the vote [pdf], broken out by Republicans and Democrats. I’ll be putting it into a more useful form (oh, and flying from Chicago to D.C.) over the next little while.

[Update: shown in bold are the Members of Congress who changed their votes from "nay" to "yea" and the one who didn't vote previously but voted "yea" this time. The one Member who changed his vote from "yea" to "nay" is in italics.]

(The Senate vote is here. The earlier House vote is here.)

Here’s the vote today by party, yea/nay vote, and alphabetical order:

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Representative Spencer Bachus (R-AL) is before the House Rules Committee arguing that the Treasury Department can’t even use all of the $700 billion that the bailout legislation would authorize. At most, it could move $50 billion per month.

Congress can allow Treasury some of the money, take a look later at a couple of months of the program, and see how well it’s being used.

His colleagues are beating him up for it, but it makes simple sense for Congress to do something piecemeal rather than write a blank (er, $700 billion) check.

(Looks like I’m liveblogging the financial services bailout or something . . .)

When Congress gets a head of steam with something like the financial services bailout proposals, its procedures can get really hard to follow. So here’s a quick look at what’s going on.

In the House last Sunday, the bailout language was copied into H.R. 3997, which used to be a bill dealing with tax relief for members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers.

In the Senate yesterday, the bailout language (and more) was copied into H.R. 1424, which used to be a bill dealing with whether mental health and substance-related disorder benefits would be covered under group health insurance plans.

These two bills have been updated in our database to reflect their new status as bailout proposals. (Summaries of the bills in their wiki articles still reflect their old content. These will be updated automaticaly when the Congressional Research Service issues new summaries, or when an intrepid wiki editor takes over.)

Now, as to cost: On Sunday, a cost estimate (of sorts) for the House bill came out of the Congressional Budget Office. It said:

Under the [Troubled Assets Relief Program], the Secretary would have the authority—if deemed necessary to promote stability in the financial markets—to purchase any financial asset at any price and to sell that asset for any price at any future date. That lack of specificity regarding how the authority would be implemented and even what types of assets would be purchased makes it impossible at this point to provide a meaningful estimate of the ultimate impact on the federal budget from enacting this legislation. Although it is not currently possible to quantify the net budget impact given the lack of details about how the program would be implemented, CBO has concluded that enacting the bill would likely entail some net budget cost—which would, however, be substantially smaller than $700 billion.

This is far from a precise estimate, obviously. I have assumed that it concludes that the plan will cost $350 billion - half the total spending authority - and that the costs will be incurred over the next two years. Based on other language in the estimate, I added $3 billion per year in administrative costs over ten years. This results in an estimate on both bills of a little over $3,700 per family, or about $1,200 per person.

[Update: There is now a CBO estimate for the Senate bailout bill. It lacks specificity like the estimate for the House bill, but the additional provisions added to the bill would generally lower revenues (taxes), so the estimate comes to about $2,800 per family, or $900 per person.]

This is quite a bit lower than my estimate of the cost, and I think it is more likely for costs to be higher, but the effort here is to faithfully report what the government estimates.

The House comes in at noon Eastern today - and the hijinx continue!

The Senate passed bailout legislation this evening by a vote of 74 to 25. Senators McCain and Obama both voted for it, as did Senator Biden. National Journal has a good story on the wheeling, dealing, and lobbying that pushed the Senate in favor.

It’s unclear whether the goodies added to the bill “sweeten” it in a way that will get it through the House, or if the backscratching represented by the bill coming out of the Senate will give more offense to the public and House members who opposed the bailout.

Without specific information about what is in the package passed in the Senate, it is impossible to estimate the cost of the overall bill. But it is large.

Below is the vote in the Senate. If you don’t know which Senators are yours, find the name of a U.S. state on the front of an envelope that has been delivered to your house, then find that state below . . . .

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Sources say the Senate will vote on a version of the financial services bailout legislation tonight (Wednesday).

Yesterday, the House declined to go forward with the $700 billion financial services bailout put together by House and Senate leaders working with the Administration. The vote was 205 in favor and 228 opposed.

This is not the end of the bailout idea. Though it appears to be widely unpopular among the American people, many leaders believe that it is necessary to avert a more serious financial crisis. Expect House and Senate leaders to come back with a revised proposal later this week, later this month, or sometime after the election, when the risk of voter retaliation is lower.

In the short “What Can You Do?” section of the WashingtonWatch.com email newsletter this week (subscribe here), I encouraged people to contact their representatives. I don’t care what people think (though I have my opinions): I just want people to get involved with an issue as important as this.

You still should contact your representative. The issue is going to come up again, and if you want to be heard, you’ll get in touch when the heat is off - like right now.

Call to tell your Member of Congress what you think of the way he or she voted, and that you will be following the issue in the future. (Then do that - here!)

The Capitol switchboard number is 202-225-3121. If you don’t know who your representative is, you can figure that out here. You can also contact him or her by email.

Now, be polite or chances are they will disregard what you have to say. Members of Congress and their staffs work for you, but they’re not all that obedient . . . .

Without further ado, here’s the vote on the bailout legislation. An “aye” vote favored the bailout. A “nay” vote opposed it.

(By the way, it was an amendment to H.R. 3997, the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2007. The old scoring of that bill of under a dollar does not reflect the bailout package.)

[Update: A list of representative who switched their votes is here. A list of all representatives' votes in that second vote is here.]

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