UPDATE: Ted Kaufman and Sherrod Brown release an important bill that would set leverage and size caps on the big banks. The headline story in the Washington Post today states that Republicans, worried about being seen as too close to the big banks, especially in the wake of the Goldman Sachs scandal, are returning to [...]

John Kerry yesterday described this as “the moment” for a climate change bill that would for the first time but a cap on carbon. I know it’s 4/20, but he must have been smoking something really potent. The people invested in pushing a climate bill are simply living in an alternate reality, one where this [...]

Chris Dodd’s proposal to house a consumer protection agency inside the Federal Reserve, where it already exists, is not exactly getting rave reviews inside the Democratic caucus. At least four Democrats have attacked the idea already, and the plan is not even a day old. Byron Dorgan and Bernie Sanders told the Hill that the [...]

This is change I can believe in. The Army will deny millions of dollars in bonuses to KBR, a division of Halliburton, for contracting work in Iraq that led to deaths: Congress has denied millions of dollars in bonuses to KBR, the military contractor linked to the death of a local soldier in Iraq. Staff [...]

Last night, Byron Dorgan gave his first interview since announcing his retirement, and in that appearance with Ed Schultz, he made two policy vows. First, he said that he would pursue his bill to allow for the safe reimportation of prescription drugs from abroad, and that he would get it passed in 2010: DORGAN: Well, [...]

So what’s some of the fallout from the multiple retirements in the US Senate? • ND-Sen: Earl Pomeroy (D), the state’s only House member, will not try to move up and run for the Senate seat vacated by Byron Dorgan. The most speculation on the Democratic side has focused on former state Attorney General Heidi [...]

Four Democrats seeking gubernatorial and Senate seats, including three incumbents, decided against running in 2010, which will surely launch dozens of “Democrats in disarray” stories. But a cold political calculation suggests that Democrats are probably in exactly the same electoral position today that they were yesterday, although they lose quite a bit in institutional Senate [...]

This was unexpected. Byron Dorgan, the Democrat who served North Dakota in the US Senate for 30 years, will not seek re-election. Here’s the statement posted at his Senate site. “Representing North Dakota in the U.S. Congress for nearly 30 years has been one of the great privileges of my life. “The work I have [...]

After the White House helped scuttle a vote on drug reimportation in the Senate to comply with a backroom deal with the pharmaceutical industry, senior adviser to the President David Axelrod promised that they would take up reimportation at a later date. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” David Axelrod, Obama’s top political aide, [...]

Sen. Byron Dorgan is unhappy that his amendment to the Senate health care bill on reimportation, which at one point appeared to have the votes for passage, failed after a late intervention from the Democratic leadership to preserve a deal with the drug industry. But Dorgan goes much further in pointing fingers specifically at the [...]

Ryan Grim has a good tick-tock on the failure of the Dorgan amendment last night, delivering a huge victory for the pharmaceutical industry and a blow to consumers who could have saved over $100 billion in prescription drug costs. 30 Democrats and Joe Lieberman ended up voting against this amendment, preserving a backroom deal between [...]