Ezra Klein has an overview of the 2015 appropriations bill, also known as the “CRomnibus” bill, in Vox. (“CRomnibus” = “CR”, as in “continuing resolution”, plus “omnibus”. The CR element of the bill is that it only funds the Dept. of Homeland Security through February.) Klein’s lead paragraph:
House and Senate negotiators have crafted a $1.013 trillion deal to fund most of the government through 2015 (well, with one exception). The bill, which weighs in at more than 1,600 pages (full text here), will avert a government shutdown. But it’s also loaded down with non-funding “policy riders” — including one that has Sen. Elizabeth Warren very, very annoyed — and is the kind of giant, secretive, backroom deal that Republicans have railed against in recent years.
Klein provides an overview and ThinkProgress lists some of the lowlights here.
With that as background, Matt Taibbi defends Sen. Warren’s objection to the “Citigroup” provision, which will do away with the provision of Dodd-Frank designed to prevent future bailouts of companies like Citigroup. Unfortunately, her efforts are being undermined by people who should have her back:
[Sen.] Warren’s opposition to the Citi provision wasn’t a left-leaning move at all. It was very much a conservative position…. All the Dodd-Frank rule says is that if you’re a federally-insured depository institution – if you’re an FDIC-guaranteed bank, where real people have real bank accounts that are guaranteed by the federal government – you can’t also be gambling with swaps and other dangerous derivative instruments.
Think of it in terms of a workman’s compensation law. If you’re going to be insured against injury by the state, the state should get to demand that you don’t engage in fire-eating or base-jumping during work hours.
There’s no logical argument against the provision. The banks only want it because they want to use your bank accounts as a human shield to protect their dangerous gambling activities….
As Warren has cannily pointed out, veterans of Citigroup have dominated the Democratic Party establishment for quite a long time now, through figures like current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin.
If the Democrats actually stood for anything other than sounding as progressive as possible without offending their financial backers, then they would do what Republicans always do in these situations: force a shutdown to save their legislation. How many times did Republicans hold the budget hostage to rescue the Bush tax cuts?
But the Democrats won’t do that here… they’ll punt on this issue in the name of “maturity” or “bipartisanship,” Wall Street will get a nice win, and Hillary Clinton or whoever else is being set up as the [pro-Wall-Street candidate] on the Democratic side will receive an avalanche of Financial Services donations to stave off Warren (who will begin appearing in the press as an unhinged combination of Lev Trotsky and Spartacus). A neat little piece of business all around. I don’t know whether to applaud or throw up.