House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi released a statement that probably secures passage for a standalone, unfunded payroll tax cut. Meanwhile, the Senate in negotiating changes to unemployment insurance that may shorten it from 99 to 79 weeks or less or impose other restrictions.

When the Senate passed the STOCK Act, the bill that bans insider trading on non-public information picked up in Congress (yes, that’s not against the law right now) along with some other ethics reforms, I thought that could be a vehicle that would move expeditiously through the House. However, even though Majority Leader Eric Cantor made promises that the STOCK Act would get a vote this week, instead what has happened is a free-for-all, with lobbyists gutting the bill at Cantor’s behest.

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats pulled off a neat little trick yesterday. The two-month extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance really only allows for one month of negotiation in the conference committee, since Congress stands in recess until the end of January. But there’s no reason that the conference committee cannot begin its work beforehand. So Pelosi stood in Washington yesterday, with House Democratic conferees, and demanded to know why Republicans wouldn’t come back to Washington to finish the deal.

Bradford Wells and Anthony John Makk, whose story was first featured at Firedoglake here, have got a reprieve from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, organized and announced by their Congressional representative, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

This is the key point from Nancy Pelosi, that Democratic votes will be needed to pass anything, which gives her a voice in the process. A meeting last night in the House GOP caucus showed clearly that there is a major rift between the rank and file and the House leadership on the issue. Lots of Republicans just don’t want to do the tax cut at all. That gives Pelosi an opportunity.

So let’s break this down. To pay for a tax cut that will hopefully increase consumer demand and help increase hiring, Republicans would – 1) fire hundreds of thousands of people, 2) freeze their pay (the opposite effect of a payroll tax cut, which operates as a wage increase), 3) put no-strings, volunteer peer pressure on millionaires to pay additional taxes (I’m sure there will be a high takeup for that), 4) means test a number of programs to ghetto-ize them as welfare, including unemployment benefits, which is particularly cruel, because once federal benefits kick in and you’ve been out of work 6 months, it doesn’t matter what you earned before, you’re in trouble.

I found last night’s 60 Minutes story on insider trading in Congress to be uneven, partially underwhelming and at times outright misleading. That Congress has access to insider information and can trade on that information is true, but some of the examples CBS cited were weak or unconvincing.

Why 11 Democratic Senators and not 50 (all of them, less the three on the Super Committee) signed this effort spearheaded by Jeff Merkley is beyond me, but if more sign on it could be a crucial factor in actually pivoting away from deficit talk and toward jobs.

The biggest problem with the White House’s definitional strategy on the American Jobs Act was that Democrats didn’t really give it the full-throated support it needed to draw that contrast. By the end of last week, the White House was circling the wagons on that, and Democratic leaders stepped out to say that the jobs plan would have the support of the caucus. But those initial grumblings really hurt the unified message.

Are we on the way toward the same problem with the deficit reduction plan delivered today, similarly designed to draw contrast between taxes on millionaires or cuts to vital programs? So far, this looks a bit better.

Last night, it didn’t look as if the Senate would be able to get the clean extension of both the FAA authorization and the surface transportation authorization before a deadline of today. Tom Coburn was holding up the bill in a fruitless crusade against bike paths. It’s a long story.