Muscatine

JOS/JOE:  Well, you just won't leave well enough alone will ya'?  Now you've gone and thrown ME into that old briar patch!

Here's your answer (again straight from the NY Times):  Please read it first, then you can bite me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/business/new-agency-proposed-to-oversee-freddie-mac-and-fannie-mae.html

Oh, hiroad. It's so cute how you try to justify the Bush administration's incompetence.

From the NYTIMES article:

The administration's proposal, which was endorsed in large part today by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, would not repeal the significant government subsidies granted to the two companies. And it does not alter the implicit guarantee that Washington will bail the companies out if they run into financial difficulty; that perception enables them to issue debt at significantly lower rates than their competitors. Nor would it remove the companies' exemptions from taxes and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws.

So in other words, it had no teeth. It was simply a gesture for political posturing.

And do you know what happened to this particular proposal, hiroad? NOTHING! It was introduced into the Senate as S.1508 on July 31, 2003, by Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) while the Republicans were in complete control of both houses of the legislature yet it received no action because despite the Republicans holding a majority of seats on the banking committee which reviewed the bill, they failed to muster a majority of votes to send it to the senate floor. (For the record, a Democratic version, S.1656, was introduced on September 25, 2003, but it was referred to committee.)

Awwwww... too bad, hiroad. Nice try, though. Feel free to bite yourself.

JOE?JOS:   Now, now.  Let's be "fair" on this one.  Haven't you forgot to mention Chris Dodd and "filibuster"????    You know that the Congress doesn't always automatically pass legislation dependent on the majority.

Here's something that will shiver your timbers (and it does contain elements of fairness and balance!!!!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSNm3aDlMeE

Get your choppers going!

Karl Rove? Bill O'Reilly? lol. That's funny. But even funnier is that you believe it. I'm afraid you've been snookered, hiroad. Karl Rove is playing with words and he knows it. There was no filibuster by Chris Dodd and Karl Rove is perfectly aware of that.

From Karl Rove's own Wall Street Journal Op-Ed via Sen. Richard Shelby's (R-AL) website:

When Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, pushed for comprehensive GSE reform in 2005, Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut successfully threatened a filibuster.

Did you get that? Threatened. It never happened. No actual filibuster. Karl's just foolin' with ol' Billyboy in that video clip and Billiyboy's not smart enough to know any better.

Now I've never denied that Democrats bear some responsibility for the situation, but my point during this entire thread has been that the Republicans and the Bush administration did nothing to change it. "But they introduced legislation," you may say. But they let it die in committee because of the threat of a filibuster. A committee in which they [Republicans] held ten out of nineteen seats and only needed a simple majority to pass, I might remind you.

If this were perceived as such a huge problem back then, as Karl Rove retrospectively wants to believe it to have been, why didn't Sen. Shelby call Dodd on his bluff and make him and the rest of the Democrats filibuster on the Senate floor? He could have put the Democrats on record as standing up in opposition to regulating Fannie and Freddie. But he didn't. Why weren't Republicans screaming from the capitol steps about this? Why didn't we see them all over the news exposing the Democrat's behavior? Better yet, why wasn't there a bill introduced in the Republican controlled House of Representatives where there is no option to (threaten) filibuster? Any of these actions could have put pressure on the Democrats to get on board. But they just let it die.

The fact of the matter, and this has been my position since the very beginning of this thread, is that the Republicans didn't do anything to change the policies in place. Regardless of what Karl Rove wants Fox viewers and WSJ readers to believe, his party did nothing. They let the standing policies continue. Whether they introduced legislation or not, they let it die and moved along to other business with nary a glance backwards until it all collapsed.

If all it takes to cow a Republican is the threat of a filibuster, I have to say again that it's little wonder they find themselves in the minority these days.

BTW - Your fetish with Joe (and the conservative fetish with the Davis clan in general) is quite amusing. I'm sure he's flattered that you still think enough about him to look for him in every post you disagree with. Unfortunately for you, I'm not him.