Make no mistake, not only did Sen. Wyden get this colloquy into the Senate record, but there appear to have been several threats hiding behind the Senate blather. DiFi has said she thinks the way to fix a secret law is to change it in a secret committee meeting. But Wyden et al have made it clear that if she doesn’t agree to fix it in her secret committee meeting, he will try to do so on the Senate floor.

The Senate will vote later today on a motion to proceed to S.1038 which would extend three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act for four years, with almost no debate.

UPDATE: The Senate passed cloture 74-8, so they’ll proceed to the bill. Final passage is expected Wednesday.

About a year ago, I appeared at Netroots Nation with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and Professor Elizabeth Warren on a panel called “The Forgotten Foreclosure Crisis.” Speaking with Merkley today, I remarked that we could hold the same panel again this year, without changing a word of it, and not be out of date in the slightest. Sen. Merkley agreed.

Let’s just say that the President’s energy security speech didn’t go over so well among the communities of interest.

I don’t know exactly what tomorrow’s meet-and-greet format will be, so I’m not sure how many chances I’ll get to ask questions of the Senator. But if you had a chance to ask a question tomorrow, what would you ask? I’ll try to get the answers and bring them back in a MyFDL post later this week.

Thanks, the floor is yours.

Paul Kane has a piece in Sunday’s Washington Post that seems to be the kind of take on the Senate rules reform fight you’d expect someone who hasn’t been following it at all and gets most of his information from lobbyists. He accepts the contributions of senior Senate aides that the effort led by some Democrats to change the Senate rules will fail because “party leaders want to protect the right of the Senate’s minority party to sometimes force a supermajority of 60 votes to approve legislation.” But of course, the rules changes on the table would still allow that right. This confusion may indeed sink the Merkley/Harkin/Udall effort, but it’s a willful confusion.

Among the few people in Washington willing to bring up the inconvenient and much ignored foreclosure crisis is Sen. Jeff Merkley. He unveiled an actual plan for fixing the mortgage market Tuesday, and today he writes a letter to the President, pleading with him to wake up and acknowledge the robo-signed, improperly-conveyed-to-the-trust elephant in the room. He wants the President to use the State of the Union to restart this conversation.

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.

At a press event in North Portland in front of the home of a family struggling to avoid foreclosure, Senator Jeff Merkley unveiled a six-part plan to fix the housing market and rebalance the relationship between borrower and lender. The plan includes what Merkley calls “lifeline bankruptcy,” which is basically the cramdown proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of primary residence loans.

A week from today, the Senate will reconvene, and the first item of business will be how to deal with the rules for the 112th Congress. Three Senators – Tom Udall, Jeff Merkley and Tom Harkin – will spearhead an effort to change the Senate rules that would attempt to achieve two goals – 1) make it faster to complete legislation and confirmations on which there is broad agreement, and 2) make it harder for obstructionists to carry out filibusters, or at least to make it opaque who is doing the filibustering and why.