Silly Season, Part C
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
Silly season on Capitol Hill. It’s that special time of year when Congress nears the end of its scheduled session and decides to do all its work at once. Dozens of bills fly across the House floor with little debate.
They’re not all bad bills, but nothing prevented Congress from addressing them at a careful pace all through the winter, spring, and summer.
This year has been particularly silly, as Congress didn’t even try to follow its annual budgeting and spending process. It just passed a temporary measure on the fly, funding the government through the first half of the fiscal year in one big bill.
Then along came the financial services crisis. (Or is it a “crisis”? I’m less and less sure that it’s a crisis for anyone more than the investment bankers who overextended themselves.)
Smack dab at the end of the session, right when members want to go home and campaign, they have to think about a $700 bailout of the financial services industry. (Text of the proposal that failed Monday is here.)
Congress comes back Thursday - maybe to consider another bailout proposal. Don’t lose focus on that issue just yet!
But for the moment, let’s take a look at some of what the Congress did while we focused on everything else that Congress was doing. These are the bills that went to the floor of the House of Representatives on Saturday. The bills that were on the House floor last Thursday and Friday are here and here. Monday’s bills coming soon:
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I was flipping through the channels on a DirecTV setup yesterday when I spied a most interesting campaign put together by the satellite TV provider itself. On the unused channels, there was an important message aimed at subscribers.
Commenter Nezumi has done a little picking apart of the