On both sides of the Capitol, there was news on the committee that holds oversight responsibilities over Wall Street today. In addition to Elizabeth Warren getting her spot on the Senate Banking Committee, Maxine Waters assumed the spot of ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee.

The House Ethics Committee has cleared Maxine Waters of wrongdoing in a celebrated but thin case over whether she improperly set up a meeting between the Treasury Department and a troubled bank in which her husband had a stake. Her chief of staff (and grandson), Mikael Moore, still faces scrutiny. But Waters “went above and beyond what was required of her,” according to one Republican on the committee.

House Democrats have a chance to show Jamie Dimon that he isn’t the King of America. Let’s hope they don’t follow the example of the lapdog millionaires in the Senate.

A group of over 50 House Democrats are calling out the Obama Administration for their management of the HARP 2.0 program. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Ed DeMarco, the Democrats point to data showing that the new version of HARP, designed to steer more refinancing to underwater borrowers, simply isn’t meeting those goals.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who is in line to take over as the lead Democrat on the Committee, actually referenced the interview I did with Elizabeth Warren yesterday, in questioning of Robert Khuzami, who is both the head of enforcement at the SEC and a co-chair of the RMBS working group, the panel that is supposed to be investigating fraudulent actions in the securitization of mortgages. Waters used the fact that Warren expressed no confidence in the working group or any other measures from the regulatory and law enforcement communities to hold banks accountable to launch into a series of questions about the RMBS working group and its progress.

One of the items Eric Schneiderman has been using to push back on claims that the Residential Mortage Backed Securities (RMBS) working group is being slow-walked and made ineffectual is that they have a funding stream earmarked for it that testifies to the seriousness of effort with respect to resources. But yesterday, House GOP members refused to add these funds to their budget.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus met with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman today for a hearing on how to prevent a million foreclosures. Not much happened at the hearing. More interesting was a letter sent by members of the CPC authored by Maxine Waters to Eric Schneiderman asking him to hire Rep. Brad Miller to run the fraud task force.

Rep. Barney Frank plans to retire, which means by next year, both lead co-sponsors of Dodd-Frank will be out of Congress, having secured a legacy of sorts through attaching their names to that legislation. So who might replace Frank as ranking member or Chair of the House Financial Services Committee?

In case you missed it over the weekend, the president attended the Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner — and promptly told them to quit bitching.

Welcome to “under the bus,” environmentalists and eco-conscious Eaarth citizens. We gays have decorated it quite festively, and our Latino and other immigrant communities have added their own touches as well. We’ve all been thrown under here, sacrificed to the highest goal: Obama’s re-election.