This week marks the end of the public comment period on the Volcker rule. The usual suspects have all delivered their comments. The small advocacy community in favor of the rule sent in their comment through the vehicle of Americans for Financial Reform. The much larger finance lobby delivered their mass of comments, in particular [...]

The House passed a watered-down version of the STOCK Act, the bill that would ban insider trading among members of Congress. Democrats supported it in order to get the bill to a conference committee, as it has already passed the Senate. So the final vote was 417-2. The two major changes to the bill made [...]

When the Senate passed the STOCK Act, the bill that bans insider trading on non-public information picked up in Congress (yes, that’s not against the law right now) along with some other ethics reforms, I thought that could be a vehicle that would move expeditiously through the House. However, even though Majority Leader Eric Cantor [...]

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and [...]

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the [...]

The oil industry, which has previously worked behind the scenes on urging a permit for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, is now openly threatening the President, who must decide by February 21 to accept or deny a permit for the project. The oil industry’s top lobbyist warned the Obama administration Wednesday to approve the [...]

Yes, of course Newt Gingrich was a lobbyist, because that’s the only reason political figures get paid millions of dollars by corporations. It’s not to give advice. They have large payrolls with all the strategists they’ll ever need. The only thing they don’t have are front men to make sure their strategies get put into [...]

Tomorrow’s previously scheduled markup for the Stop Online Piracy Act, which critics claim would institute Internet censorship in the name of policing copyrights and could have a deleterious effect on the Internet’s architecture, has been cancelled. The announcement was first leaked by Rep. Darrell Issa, an opponent of SOPA, on his Twitter feed. A note [...]

One of the elements of the House GOP’s year-end bill is the “doc fix,” which would avoid the current reimbursement schedule for Medicare doctors. If nothing happens, doctors would see a 27% cut in their reimbursement rates, which would undoubtedly cause many to stop seeing Medicare patients. To avoid this, the House GOP bill spends [...]

With the commencement of crackdowns on Occupy movement protest sites, the assumption was that the movement faced a fatal blow from which they would not recover. The physical occupation kept the protests at top of mind and in the news, the theory goes, and without the reclaiming of public space the movement would just fade [...]

If Elizabeth Warren were no threat to the established order, they wouldn’t get around to any effort to stop her ascension in the Massachusetts Senate race until much later in the cycle, if at all. But her surge over Scott Brown, and the possibility that she would have an even bigger perch from which to [...]