While the recent signs of modest economic improvement have resulted in President Obama’s job approval numbers ticking slightly upward, the modest economic improvement clearly hasn’t similarly benefited Congress’s job approval rating. This dynamic means that Obama’s strategy to try to run against the Republican Congress could pay some political dividends.

I do wonder how low Congress’ job approval rating needs to be and for how long before we, as a country, stop thinking the problem is just that some of the current members are bad and we begin talking about how the real problem is that the institution and our political system have become deeply broken. The political system has been allowed to become inherently corrupt and Congress’s continuing structure does not serve a 21st century country.

Bill killer? (photo: House Republican Conference)

That’s what happened on the STOCK Act debate in the Senate. The bill passed 96-3 yesterday but not before a series of amendments dealing with ethics were added. Far from a major reform effort, however, many of the measures that would actually be meaningful failed.

An amendment by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) forcing divestiture of stock holdings unless they are placed in a blind trust failed, 26-73. And an amendment by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) forcing divestiture by many federal officials failed 48-51.

But the Senate agreed to extend the bill’s broader stock transaction reporting requirements to executive branch officials subject to Senate confirmation, a key demand of Republican lawmakers.

A permanent ban on earmarks failed after Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) announced his panel would ban earmarks for another year.

And an amendment by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) requiring lobbyist disclosures for political intelligence activities was adopted 60-39. The amendment would require disclosure of political intelligence activities under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.

The Senate also adopted an amendment by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) tightening laws against public corruption, including a ban on gifts to public officials of more than $1,000 in value and restoring the “honest services fraud” statute that the Supreme Court restricted in 2010.

The big deal there is the restoration of “honest services fraud,” which the Supreme Court severely limited to the point of irrelevance in 2010. This harmed a lot of cases, including the case against Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. Other amendments that passed limited bonuses for Fannie and Freddie, and forced disclosure of the mortgage holdings of lawmakers (a response to the Countrywide “VIP” scandal).

Just because the Senate passed this bill, however, doesn’t mean that this host of ethics reforms will become law. It now moves to the House, and Eric Cantor stands ready to kill the bill with a neat legislator’s trick. He will open it up so broadly that nobody will want to vote for it.

[Cantor's] now trying to extend the STOCK Act “so it includes land deals and other types of transactions and not just stock trades.” Classic taking a good idea too far. The problem is insider trading in stocks, not insider trading in land deals. Cantor obviously hopes that including a vast array of economic activity within the bill, exposing members of Congress to disclosure obligations and other restrictions, as well as increasing their liability exposure, will make the bill sufficiently unpopular so as to prevent its passage.

Actually, there is a problem with insider trading in land deals – Dennis Hastert, anyone? – but that’s not Cantor’s concern. He wants to make it impossible for anyone to vote for it.

And there are concerns about the base bill from some circles related to prosecutorial discretion, though I’m not sure I agree with them.

The President wants the bill passed right away and Cantor said he would schedule a vote next week. We’ll see if his gambit pays off.

GOP House Committee deletes 1st Amendment free press (graphic: Mike Licht-Notions Capital)

Meet your government, ladies and gentlemen. Josh Fox, the Academy Award-nominated director of the fracking documentary Gasland, was arrested today on Capitol Hill for attempting to film a public hearing.

In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice [...]

Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland” was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing. The meeting of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had been taking place in room 2318 of the Rayburn building.

Approximately 16 officers entered the hearing room and handcuffed Fox amid audible discussions of “disorderly conduct” charges, according to Democratic sources present at the arrest.

In the initial Gasland documentary, there is a long sequence near the end documenting a House committee hearing. Now that Fox has critical acclaim and a wider audience, and when Republicans hold the gavel, they throw out cameras and detain filmmakers. Fox was charged with “unlawful entry” into the hearing. [cont'd.]

Fox applied for credentialing and never received it, but Democrats on the committee attest to the fact that journalists very rarely get thrown out of hearings in Congress.

The rules requiring pre-approval for film crews are designed to prevent hearings from being disrupted by hordes of camera operators. That was not the case for this hearing. Only two cameras requested entrance to the event, which was not crowded.

Subcommittee Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.) was unavailable for comment, but several Democrats on the committee voiced outrage with the GOP’s press blackout.

“I was chair of the Subcommittee for four years, and we frequently had people show up the day of a hearing to film,” Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) told HuffPost. “We asked for their name, but they were told if they would not disrupt the hearing, they were free to record. A couple of times staff said, ‘You’re getting in the way, don’t stand there,’ but other than that, I do not ever recall anything like this. We certainly never turned anyone away for not providing 24 hours’ notice.”

“It’s an outrageous violation of the First Amendment,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told HuffPost. “Here we’ve got an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and it’s an important subject and the subject that he did his prior film on for HBO. And they put him in handcuffs and hauled him out of there. This is stunning.”

The Republicans would not even let another crew film on Fox’ behalf at the hearing. C-SPAN did film the event, which concerned fracking.

I suppose the good news here is that Fox is making a sequel to Gasland, and seeing how autobiographical the first film was, he will probably use this arrest as part of the documentary.

The problem with Congress isn't just insider stock trading (photo: Kaledj777, Wikimedia)

We learned yesterday that it’s very, very difficult for members of Congress to vote to effectively legalize insider trading for themselves. If it wasn’t for that meddling 60 Minutes, this wouldn’t be an issue. But that highlighted the fact that members of Congress could freely trade on information gained during their official duties, even in stocks of the corporations that they directly oversee. And it’s somewhat difficult to vote to keep that going. So difficult, in fact, that the motion to proceed on the bill stopping the practice passed 93-2 yesterday.

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or Stock Act, easily passed a procedural vote 93 to 2, clearing the way for a debate and amendment process that insiders said they expected would lead to passage by week’s end.

The measure would require members of Congress and high-ranking staffers and federal employees to abide by insider trading rules that apply to everyone, and also would require members of Congress and top aides to report significant financial transactions within 30 days.

“The American people need to know that their elected leaders play by the exact same rules that they play by,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a lead sponsor. “They also deserve to know that their lawmakers’ only interest is what’s best for the country, not their own financial interest.”

“This is a measure the American people are clamoring for,” said Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), marking bipartisan support for the bill.

Eric Cantor actually blocked a similar bill from the House Financial Services Committee late last year, but he also had to promise that it would come up for a vote at some point in 2012. And the President has jumped on the legislation. In a statement from the Press Secretary, he said that “While there’s more work to be done to eliminate the corrosive influence of money in politics, this is an important step to repair the deficit of trust between Washington and the American people.”

Actually, this isn’t that important a step. Obviously, insider trading among members of Congress should be banned. You could go further and mandate that every member of Congress put their investments into blind trusts, which this legislation does not do. But this looks more like anti-corruption theater. Only a truly stupid individual would place massive stock trades on the companies they oversee, and expect to get away with it. The real corruption in Congress comes in the casual trading of political favors for campaign contributions, in the revolving door between K Street and Capitol Hill, in the “legislative subsidy” that comes from a dearth of information and expertise in Congress, forcing them to rely on partisan outside lobby shops. There are a host of issues with how Congress conducts its business, of which stock trading is only a small part.

And there’s quite a road to travel to even get this passed. The Senate will have an open amendment process on this bill, and like any popular piece of base legislation, expect a lot of message amendments and attempts to string favored bills onto it. In the House, Eric Cantor wants to expand the legislation to cover the White House. So there’s plenty of opportunity for even this legislation to get bogged down and falter, allowing for legalized insider trading to continue.

Congressman Pete Sessions (R. Texas) received Countrywide sweetheart loans

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has become the third House Republican discovered to have received a sweetheart loan as part of Countrywide’s “VIP” program. The program became notorious when conservatives jumped on the revelations that Democrats Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad received cheap loans through it. But it was always clear that influence peddling is a bipartisan sport in Washington, and it was inevitable that some Republicans would get found out.

Sessions’ spokeswoman, Torrie Miller, confirmed that the congressman was told that records show he received the discounts through Countrywide’s VIP program.

Sessions becomes the fourth House member — and third Republican — whose records were sent to the House Ethics Committee for further investigation. The ethics panel will likely investigate whether the lawmakers received improper gifts and whether they performed any favorable actions for the lender. The four were notified by the House Oversight Committee.

Two of the Republicans play prominent roles: Sessions, as the person responsible for Republican efforts to maintain their House majority in the November elections and Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon of California, who has major influence over the defense budget as chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Democrat Ed Towns’ name has also come up in the investigation as receiving special treatment on his loan.

House Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings is having some fun with this, by citing new documents showing that disgraced former Countrywide chairman Angelo Mozilo personally involved himself in the McKeon loan.

The letter from Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) said that Countrywide records obtained as part of a congressional investigation of its VIP loan program indicate that Mr. McKeon was given “a significant discount on his VIP loan as a direct result of personal intervention” by Mr. Mozilo, who ran the mortgage giant at the time [...]

The Cummings letter quoted an internal Countrywide e-mail regarding Mr. McKeon’s loan as saying: “Per Angelo—’take off 1 point, no garbage fees, approve the loan and make it a no doc.’ ” The e-mail appears to be referring to origination and other fees, as well as required supporting documentation, such as tax returns. Origination fees are normally cited in terms of points that are each equivalent to 1% of the loan amount.

The Cummings letter said company documents didn’t say whether Mr. McKeon knew about the supposedly preferential treatment. But the documents referred to at least three conversations Mr. McKeon had with company employees, according to the letter. Mr. Cummings quoted a Countrywide letter to Mr. McKeon thanking him “for allowing COUNTRYWIDE’S VIP TEAM to assist you with your financing needs.”

Everyone’s denying everything, of course. But this is just an example of how members of Congress play by different rules than you and me. If you scratch this itch, I don’t think there’s any question that you will find more sweetheart deals in both parties. And you’ll notice that Mozilo, incidentally, isn’t in jail right now for mortgage fraud.

About to get bogged down in arguments about "pay-fors" (photo: Dave Reid, flickr)

In its first day back, Congress held a quorum call and voted on a new Sergeant-at-Arms. That’s it. It’s going to be that kind of year.

Today, there’s a “resolution of disapproval” on the President’s request for another tranche of debt limit funds. You’ll recall that this is the request the Administration delayed so that the House could make this resolution of disapproval vote today. The vote, however, is nothing so much as grandstanding. Even if it passes the House, it won’t pass the Senate. We know that because the last resolution of disapproval on releasing debt limit funds didn’t pass the Senate. And if enough weak-kneed Democrats want to avoid a vote against the resolution of disapproval, even though EVERY ONE OF THEM ALREADY MADE IT last year, and the resolution passes, the President can veto it, and there are not 2/3 votes to override the veto.

So the first two days of the second session of the 112th Congress has consisted of a day of basically nothing, and a day with a meaningless resolution. And by the way, the House is leaving for the rest of the week. Congress, earning those 8% approval ratings every day.

As for legislation on the payroll tax cut, extended unemployment benefits and a doctor’s fix, which expire at the end of February, a think a lot will be made clear after the House Republican caucus’ issues conference that starts tomorrow. Jonathan Weisman writes that we could see a brisk agreement:

Senior Democratic aides say they are entering the tax negotiations in a strong position after House Republicans yielded to bipartisan political pressure and passed a two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax cut just before the winter break.

Republicans, eager to avoid another bruising fight, have signaled that they will drop the most controversial provisions in the version of the yearlong extension passed by the House earlier in December. Those include efforts to block environmental regulations on boilers and carbon emissions and to allow states to impose drug tests on recipients of unemployment benefits.

Democrats have retreated from their effort to raise taxes on incomes over $1 million to finance the extension of a tax cut for most working Americans, stave off a 27 percent cut in Medicare payments to doctors and extend expiring unemployment benefits. But they do not seem ready to give much more ground.

“We feel all the concessions going forward need to come from them,” said one senior Senate Democratic official, who requested anonymity to discuss negotiating strategy. “We won’t shy from using the political high ground.”

Read the whole thing. Basically, we’re down to finding acceptable pay-fors to cover the $170 billion remaining cost to extend these measures through 2012 (and possibly another $35 billion for other tax extenders which expired at the end of last year). The most acceptable pay-for would be to not pay for them at all. You can closely follow that with capping overseas contingency funds (read: war spending) and writing off the savings. It’s unlikely we’ll see either of those outcomes. But we could see some token measure, like rolling back the corporate jet loophole or some other subsidy, in addition to whatever else stays in the package.

There’s a sense that House Republicans want to get this done quickly. But they also have pressure from their Tea Party wing, which has constrained John Boehner every single time. And Democrats, finding themselves in a strong position, have no interest in moving off their demands, figuring they’ll win politically either way. I think this will become clear over the next 72 hours.

Some of the people doing a terrible job (photo: Speaker Boehner)

The House returns to session today, and you can forgive them for feeling a distinct sense of deja vu. When they left, they faced a deadline to pass a payroll tax cut, extended unemployment benefits and a doctor’s fix for Medicare reimbursement rates. Weeks later, they return to a deadline to pass a payroll tax cut, extended unemployment benefits and a doctor’s fix for Medicare reimbursement rates. Officially, this legislation heads to a conference committee, giving the leadership plausible deniability on how to proceed. Realistically, John Boehner controls how things will go.

The major differences between last month and today are that the election year has begun, and House Republicans remember too well the catastrophe that was their brief holdout on the two-month stopgap extension. Those two points will surely get made during the Republican retreat this week, where they will plot strategy.

“A lot of us who went into battle turned around and no one was behind us,” freshman Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., said last week, sounding like the fight was still fresh and insistent that leadership had abandoned them.

“A lot of us are still smarting,” he added [...]

Grievances are certain to be aired at a House GOP retreat in Baltimore later this week. The strategy and agenda session also will be a gripe session for some of the 242 House Republicans.

“It might be a little more spunky than normal,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.

I’ve heard some informed speculation that Boehner will, at long last, abandon the Tea Party caucus this time, passing whatever bill Democrats can sign onto, and quickly, before the State of the Union, robbing the President of a high-profile opportunity to run against Congress. I’m not so sure of that. Whether Boehner retains the House or not, presumably he wants to stay in that leadership position, and members already view him with a sense of betrayal. Ignoring the caucus entirely on the most – only? – consequential legislation of the second session of the 112th Congress is a ticket to lose that leadership position. And we know that the ambitious Eric Cantor waits in the wings. Boehner is stuck. And I don’t think past experience shows him having the fortitude to break with his party.

Anyway, it’s hard to even say with a straight face that “Congress returns.” They will spend even more time in their districts this year than they did last year. Rick Perry called for a part-time legislature in last night’s debate; I wonder what he thinks we have now. Most if not all of the important items on the agenda will only get dealt with in the lame duck session, as a number of measures expire or trigger at that time. Until then, expect a long slog with pretty much no progress. Congress has earned those record high disapproval ratings, and this year’s output aims to keep that disapproval right where it is.

We have important work to do with our conference on cutting payroll taxes to the middle class, with extending unemployment benefits for those who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and for ensuring that our seniors can see the doctor of their choice under Medicare.

Our conferees are here and present and ready to work. Our Ranking Member of the Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Levin, Xavier Becerra, Congressman Chris Van Hollen, Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz and Henry Waxman of California, they are here, ready to work. We wish the conference would get to work and not take us to a point of brinksmanship, pushing it to the last minute again, narrowing the choices, adding to the uncertainty for the American people. We have important work to do to do just that, extend those benefits and that tax cut, because they create jobs. They inject demand into the economy, create jobs.

That is what the American people need and want. They want jobs. They want us to work together. They want to know why we are not on the job now when they are so in need of jobs.

This is pure and simple grandstanding, but in a good way. Indeed, a rushed conference committee – and it’s not about the conferees so much as it is about John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and their staffs engaging in talks – will yield either a bad result and no result at all. The economy is getting decent growth under current fiscal policy; you would expect that growth to be stunted if measures like the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits expired in February.

The conferees took some questions, most of which they punted on. Chris Van Hollen said that “we should look at” the millionaire’s surtax as a pay-for in the conference committee, pretty much a non-answer. Sandy Levin was asked if House Democrats should “come off the 99 weeks” of unemployment benefits given the improvements in the job picture; he didn’t answer the question, and he certainly didn’t respond that, in the bill extending unemployment by two months, the look-back was not changed, so the Extended Benefits program providing an extra 20 weeks will pretty much run out in every state where it was administered, meaning that 99 weeks doesn’t functionally exist anymore. We’re basically topping out at 79 weeks now unless that look-back gets changed.

Levin also called for an open conference committee, which is how you know that the conference committee will have nothing to do with any actual negotiating.

I suppose this was a good media play. Republicans demanded the conference committee, spend a week holding out for one at the end of last year, and now haven’t started the discussions in it. But the substantive work will really happen among the leadership.

President Obama misses chance to make recess appointments

During the recess, the President has a number of opportunities to make recess appointments. He could simply determine that the pro forma sessions being used to keep Congress active were insufficient to prevent recess appointments. He could use his Constitutional power to adjourn Congress. But both of those would fly in the face of recent precedent (Presidents have generally respected the pro forma process, and no President has actually used the adjournment power.

The one option with Presidential precedent behind it was the “Roosevelt precedent.” Congress simply has to adjourn for a short period, a split second really, to shift from the first session of the 112th Congress to the second session. In that window, Theodore Roosevelt made hundreds of recess appointments previously. I was under the impression that the Roosevelt precedent wouldn’t get an opportunity until the Senate actually came back into session. But Brian Beutler reports that, no, today was actually the window for the Roosevelt precedent. And the President declined to use it.

Today was the day that legal experts and many aides in both parties thought President Obama would provide a recess appointment to Richard Cordray, his nominee to administer the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [...]

But a senior administration official who would not be quoted told reporters at a White House background briefing Tuesday that Obama will not take advantage of that opening.

The official declined to provide further explanation, but the decision implies one of three things: that Obama does not believe he’s encumbered by technical restrictions on his power to recess appoint nominees and can still act between now and late January when Senators return to town; that he will instead wait until a future recess when feels he has more running room and political capital to recess appoint Cordray and others; or that he has no intention of challenging Congressional Republicans by making further recess appointments between now and the end of this Congress.

I’m thinking the latter. The Roosevelt precedent would be the least aggressive of the possibilities here, because past Presidents at least took advantage of the option. Ignoring pro forma sessions or adjourning Congress would set new precedent, and I just don’t see this President having an interest in doing that.

So the CFPB nominee sits languishing, and the agency still cannot regulate non-bank financial institutions. And everyone waits for a President willing to fight obstructionist fire with fire.

In hours, the city will move in to evict Occupy Bellingham in Bellingham, Washington. The City of Bellingham’s Parks and Recreation Department handed the camp an eviction notice that says they must be gone by 9 am on Wednesday, December 28.

The group’s lawyer, Larry Hildes, finds the city is doing this now because they expect only a handful of people to be around, given that the country is still in the midst of the holiday season:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the City. Great!…They are doing this over the holidays, when no one is around to see. There is no reason to be doing this now, there is no reason to be doing this at all. Occupy Bellingham is not disrupting anything. This violates the First Amendment, and we will fight it legally. And we expect better from the City of Bellingham than this. And clearly, we will not be expecting respect for the First Amendment from the city of Bellingham in the future, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

According to the Bellingham Herald, Mayor Dan Pike aims to take the NIMBY approach. He says the decision to evict “was not an easy one to make” because “he agrees with some points that the protesters are trying to make, but he thinks it’s time for them to try to spread their message in a different way that doesn’t damage the parks or cost taxpayers money.”

He supports the movement so long as they are not “occupying” the property he is tasked with presiding over as mayor of Bellingham. So, his stance on the movement is really not in my backyard or NIMBY. Take the movement somewhere else.

“They’re using city property to try to gain attention to an issue that’s a much bigger issue, and it’s coming at the expense of the city,” declared Pike. Essentially, Bellingham is tired of putting up with Occupy Bellingham’s presence.

The encampment started on October 28 in Maritime Heritage Park. They were hit with a wind storm on Christmas but managed to survive. One occupier wrote in the aftermath:

We already have what other communities have lost, or were never able to get off the ground in the first place. A functioning, horizontally integrated camp that already is a place for gathering, the exchange of ideas, and fellowship among individuals from diverse ethnic, sexual orientation, and socio-economic backgrounds. The camp also serves as a place for visitors from other Occupy locations to stay while they are here.

The way the camp is described it sounds like the camp could serve as an example for other Occupy groups across the nation struggling to defuse tension among occupiers and make operations run more smoothly. It appears Bellingham occupiers have truly built a community that is a kind of democratic and utopian oasis in the middle of a city that is likely rife with problems that all cities in America are struggling to confront. It would seem the occupiers have bravely faced down some of the city’s biggest issues and succeeded up to this point but now the mayor is moving to destroy something the occupiers built from scratch. And, while the movement can live on, the loss of a permanent presence will be extremely detrimental to the movement in Bellingham, even making it difficult for them to “take the message somewhere else.”

Firedoglake’s premier live blog resumes now. The blog will bring you the latest on Occupy Bellingham, Occupy the Iowa Caucuses and all other major Occupy stories unfolding in the country as the year’s end approaches. All updates are EST. Email any news tips, questions and updates to kevin.gosztola@firedoglake.com [Live updates cont'd below]

10:36 AM There has been no shortage of marches, protests, rallies, strikes, etc, to cover in 2011. The Guardian has a video from John Domokos on filming the protests this year.

10:30 AM New Occupy encampment springs up in a vacant lot in Oakland

10:23 AM DC Park Police remove another structure from the Occupy DC camp in McPherson Square.