I thought Mitch McConnell was just grousing about trade adjustment assistance being included in the three trade deals that the President sent to Congress. What I didn’t know is that the White House negotiated directly with House Republicans on the deal, and didn’t really consult the Senate minority. So they’re making mischief out of a real opposition, not to put on a show. This means that these trade deals may not go through at all.

The last time Congress voted on withdrawal from Afghanistan was on March 17, and withdrawal got 93 votes, including 8 from Republicans. Since then, Osama bin Laden has been killed in a counter-terrorism mission in Pakistan, taking some of the rationale for war away. Several members in both parties have since questioned the mission in Afghanistan and whether the pace of withdrawal could be accelerated.

he Assembly Democrats have presented an alternative budget proposal and are meeting with the head of the Department of Administration, Mike Huebsch. We’re trying to get a copy of the alternative proposal, but I’m not sure they’ll have any more success with that as they’ve had with their litany of amendments on the floor of the Assembly. All of them have been defeated. The most recent one were amendments that would have removed the collective bargaining limitations from the bill.

However, Huebsch is a member of Scott Walker’s cabinet. The fact of the meeting itself is pretty notable.

We should see a vote in the Senate on repealing the Affordable Care Act today, although a decision on how to approach it is still being worked out. Because of the lack of Senate rules reform, any amendment is subject to filibuster as well. However, my understanding is that the amendment on repeal violates the Budget Act because it increases the deficit, and waiving that needs 60 votes. So I don’t know why the filibuster is the obstacle. Democrats could also move to table the amendment, which would need an up or down vote.

In addition to repeal, Sen. Debbie Stabenow has introduced an amendment to eliminate the 1099 reporting requirement, which passed in the health care bill.

Sen. Jeff Merkley acknowledged that one component of the consensus plan on Senate rules reform put together by him, Tom Udall and Tom Harkin would probably get tweaked, and that the biggest concern for skittish Democratic lawmakers was changing the rules at all, lest they be changed on them when Republicans take over. Which is kind of an amazing commentary on the state of the Democratic Party, when you think about it.

After a few more amendments to the Wall Street reform bill this evening (and a defeat for the Whitehouse amendment to allow states to cap interest rates on credit cards), Harry Reid set up a vote for cloture for today. He expects Arlen Specter to be on hand, and to vote for cloture, so that brings him within one vote of getting to 60. But Russ Feingold and Maria Cantwell, the two Democrats who voted against invoking cloture, are digging in. They want changes to the bill that would strengthen it, particularly around derivatives. Will this day devolve again into “Lord of the Flies” on the Senate floor?

Senate Democrats are seriously unhappy with how Wall Street reform has unfolded. The unkempt nature of the amendments process virtually assured this. After a lot of twists and turns, it’s it’s chaos. It’s Lord of the Flies on the Senate floor right now. I don’t think anyone knows how this will turn out.

There’s word that the Merkley-Levin amendment — which would ban banks and bank holding companies from engaging in high-risk proprietary trading, force additional capital requirements on any nonbank financial institution which engages in such speculative trading, and prohibits any financial firm from packaging asset-backed securities to their clients and then take the opposite side of the deal — may also need 60 votes to pass.

The Senate Banking Committee basically passed the Dodd draft with almost no work done on it. So that meant that Senators would get a crack at it on the floor. And the biggest victory in this entire process has been the promise on the part of the Democratic leadership not to put in artificial 60-vote thresholds for every amendment. With a majority-vote standard, Senators knew they were getting a fair shake to shape the bill. And under the watchful eye of advocates who can easily paint any vote to the public as a case of putting the interests of banks over the people, Senators were forced to vote in the interests of their constituents. And that has been very beneficial.

The clerk has begun to call the roll on Bernie Sanders’ amendment calling for a one-time audit of the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending activities during the recent financial crisis.