The STOCK Act was a media-driven bill that politicians felt they could not resist after 60 Minutes ran a (somewhat flawed) exposé on the insider trading activities of members of Congress. Once a must-pass bill like that gets into circulation, it’s going to become an attractive target for messaging amendments where members try to hitch a ride with their pet issues. And because Congress is held in low public esteem, the best of these amendments would deal with the same kind of ethics issues.

I’m of two minds about President Obama’s shout out for Senate rules reform in his State of the Union speech. I’m glad he brought attention to the need for reform, but mostly I’m very disappointed he proposed to eliminate the filibuster only for appointments and not everything else.

The White House announced its lawyers view the President’s power to make recess appointments to be unfettered by GOP pro forma efforts to keep the Senate in session merely to obstruct the power to make appointments. This means the President may soon make other recess appointments, including to the National Labor Relations Board, which currently cannot operate because it lacks of quorum.

The President will make a recess appointment today for Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, opening up the bureau to regulate non-bank financial institutions and giving the new agency its first leader. This is a bold move by the President, and to put it in context, it’s important to understand it follows massive obstruction by GOP Senators.

President Obama missed his chance yesterday to use the “Roosevelt precedent” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or make any recess appointment. But the Wall Street Journal reported that the President got legal clearance to basically ignore the pro forma sessions being held by Congress, enabling a recess appointment at any point in this holiday break.

A week or so ago I wrote a diary in response to Adam Nagourney’s puff piece in the NYT cautioning that Dems could lose a Senate seat in Hawaii, with the retirement of Democrat Daniel Akaka.

As frequently happens, those who commented on that diary brought insight and additional information — far beyond what I’d initially included. One commenter, “Paiagirl,” was especially good.

Ben Nelson, Nebraska’s Democratic senator, will retire from the Senate next year, despite benefiting from a million dollars in early-cycle advertising funded by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

I grew up regarding the New York Times as the “paper of record,” so it surprised me both as it slid into the sewer and as I discovered that, if it was covering a story I actually knew anything about, it was frequently, well, shall we say, “less than accurate.” The latest: a story by [...]

Republicans claim to support the concept of extending the payroll tax cut for 2012, but oppose the pay-for in this bill of a 1.9% surtax on millionaires. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon already thought he was paying twice that much, according to remarks from earlier today.

Republicans in the US Senate filibustered the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, despite her receiving majority support from the Senate on a cloture vote. The nomination failed to achieve cloture by a count of 54-45.