Counting Chickens…

As a follow-up to my last post, it’s important to not get too far ahead of yourself in any field, but this is especially true when dealing with Congress. The Senate doesn’t have the votes to pass the conference report that was passed out of committee last week, and so it isn’t fully back to the drawing board, but the conference committee had to reopen the bill in order to make changes to the financing mechanism. It seems as though Sen. Scott Brown has emerged as a key player, and he’s gotten the conferees to change the funding mechanism from a tax on big banks to increased FDIC fees and useage of TARP money (ie general taxpayer funds.)

Now it looks like the Senate won’t be able to address the changed conference report until the week after the upcoming 4th of July recess. While it seems likely that this is the final issue to be addressed in the bill, legislators generally try to avoid leaving bills hanging around over a recess week because of the possibility that opponents will find something objectionable buried in the bill, or perhaps, something innocuous that can be spun as being objectionable. So while passage seems very likely during the week of July 12th, we’ve already learned a lesson about counting your chickens before they hatch…

Update: Mike Konczal has a very good post up about the nature of the altered finance mechanism here.