For a long time, Richard Burr (R-NC) has been viewed as the most endangered incumbent Republican Senator, and the news for him has just gotten worse. A new PPP poll has him statistically tied with likely Democratic challenger, North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall.

JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon sits on the board of the NY Federal Reserve. He knows what the Fed is doing. But Hagan says Congress can’t be trusted with that information because they would leak like a seive and the markets would crash. In the short span of a year, she has decided she doesn’t want anyone to tell her anything, and that we should just trust Jamie Dimon to do the right thing.

That’s. . . delightful.

A minor breakthrough–emphasis on minor.

Richard Burr and Claire McCaskill are signaling that they will flip-flop on Audit the Fed in order to protect Wall Street’s secret bailouts from scrutiny.

The real question is about the majority vote for amendments. Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) told blogger Mike Stark today that every amendment would need 60 votes. That would be a subversion of democracy; it’s exactly what was determined for health care, to protect the bill. There is no deal, bipartisan or otherwise, to protect on Wall Street reform, and the majority should be allowed to decide the components of the bill. That’s what Jeff Merkley told me yesterday, that a process without open, majority-vote amendments would be a “travesty for democracy.”

Here’s where we’re at on the Wall Street reform, with a vote on a motion to proceed expected Monday: we have positives on some fronts, negatives on others, and the Republicans still acting like spoiled children. Business as usual.

It’s simply amazing that Burr would gift-wrap this vote for his opponents in a year when he’s facing difficult re-election prospects.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress made their Big Lie into a bill Wednesday, when Republicans John DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.) introduced the so-called Secret Ballot Protection Act.

Before we go further, let’s clear up the bill’s false implication right now:

The Employee Free Choice Act would not—repeat after me—would not, take away the secret ballot National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process if workers seeking to form a union wanted to use it.