In addition to some lawmakers calling for increased regulation, oversight and enforcement after revelations of continued robo-signing, others with the ability to call hearings into the matter have announced that they would do so. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio., chair of the Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, said the subcommittee will hold a hearing on [...]

Like many other things for me while I was in Minneapolis, this came and went last week, but I think it’s a pretty important story to watch. Democrats in the House of Representatives will try to get a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would crack down on Chinese currency manipulation. [...]

A group of Democratic Senators demanded that Republicans take their plan to end Medicare off the table in the debt limit negotiations led by Vice President Biden. But they did not go that far with respect to the proposal to block grant Medicaid, although Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) did say that Democrats were “just as [...]

We know about the toothless consent decree on mortgage servicing by OTS, OCC and the Fed. I believe this undermines the AG settlement, but I wasn’t particularly wedded to that settlement, which suffered from many of the same problems and already looked dead in the water. It’s possible that this could turn out very well [...]

The House will vote on a meaningless bill today to basically destroy the EPA as we know it. But the Senate has been puzzling over how to react to said meaningless bill for months. There are Democrats – led by Jay Rockefeller – who want a kinder, gentler version of EPA destruction, blocking its ability [...]

Time to mix in a good news story. A few weeks back, the Food and Drug Administration gave exclusive rights for a pregancy drug named Makena that prevented premature births to KV Pharmaceuticals. They promptly raised the price for Makena, which needs to be injected weekly between 16 and 36 weeks of pregnancy, from $10 [...]

House Speaker John Boehner has written a letter to President Obama detailing his concerns with the Libyan mission, and he’s getting plaudits for it from some unusual corners. Boehner says that he respects the authority of the President as commander in chief. However, he writes, “I and many other members of the House of Representatives [...]

The team at MichaelMoore.com is streaming live video all day long from protests in Lansing, the latest site to see a backlash to Republican-led efforts to weaken the rights of workers. Moore says that over 6,000 protesters occupied the Rotunda in the Capitol as of an hour ago. About a thousand stayed overnight last night. [...]

Yesterday at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, Sen. Sherrod Brown said, “As long as we continue to have more than one million foreclosures a year, the foreclosure crisis must be our priority.” I think this has more resonance in the upper levels of government than we believe, at least on the political side. A continuing [...]

Sherrod Brown has come out in support of the tax cut legislation which will get a final vote this afternoon. He was one of the only 15 to vote against cloture on the bill on Monday. Basically, you’re going to get a near-unanimous majority in the Senate when final passage comes later today. The House [...]

It’s not clear if Senators Reid and McConnell will allow much in the way of amendments to the tax cut deal, which should get a cloture vote shortly. But Senators are already filing those amendments, and one intriguing bipartisan one comes from Sen. Sherrod Brown’s office. U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Olympia J. Snowe [...]