Author: Mike Lillis

No real surprise this week when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) walked back his earlier support for a climate change bill, arguing that the  proposals currently under consideration are “not business-friendly enough.” Yesterday, some environmentalists offered a reminder that the House bill has already been diluted enormously, offering some of the nation’s biggest polluters billions of dollars in concessions

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, issued a statement calling the House bill “one of the biggest pieces of corporate welfare ever to be considered by Congress, with $170 billion in giveaways to polluting industries.”

Big oil, dirty coal, corporate agribusiness — they all got a piece of the pie. The notion that the bill was onerous on business is laughable. Some of the worst polluters helped write the blueprint the bill was based on.

Now these greedy corporations are angling for more, and Senator Graham is out to help them. This is special interest politics at its worst, and it is truly appalling. No wonder so many people are turned off by the ways of Washington.

And with corporations recently freed by the Supreme Court to spend endlessly on federal elections, you can pretty much kiss any meaningful climate change legislation goodbye.

The official line coming from the six GOP senators who sponsored, then voted against, the failed proposal to create a deficit commission was that they didn’t realize it would allow the panel to suggest tax hikes as a step toward balancing the federal budget.

A spokesman for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), for example, told Politico that the senator withdrew his support “over concerns that the commission will be able to raise taxes.” The offices of Sens. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) said exactly the same thing.

What’s fascinating about that argument is this: Sens. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and Kent Conrad (RD-N.D), the heads of the Budget Committee, have been pushing their task force idea for years, and a central element of the proposal has always been that everything would be on the table — tax hikes, benefit cuts and everything in between. Here’s their statement from 2007, which indicates that the commission “will analyze all potential solutions.” And here’s a summary of their more recent bill, which clearly states that “all options will be considered by the Task Force.” It’s a concept that practically defines the bill.

So either (1) the six Republican flip-floppers are lying and voted against the commission solely under pressure from GOP leaders to deny the Obama White House a legislative victory, or (2) they threw their support behind a proposal they knew nothing about. Neither explanation says great things about their leadership skills — and both are indications of why Americans think Washington is broken.

To what extent were Wall Street’s largest firms willing to sacrifice their own skin to fix the economy they helped topple? Well, not much of one.

During today’s House hearing on AIG’s bailout, a central focus was on why AIG’s counterparties — including giants like Goldman Sachs — were paid in full rather than being asked to take a pay cut, considering the degree of the taxpayer-funded intervention (particularly since no less an authority than Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has said that those payments were insignificant to the goal of rescuing the larger economy).

Today, Geithner said that officials at the New York Federal Reserve, which Geithner headed at the time, tried to negotiate with those counterparties in an attempt to have them accept less than 100 cents on the dollar.

“Relatively quickly, and not unexpectedly, we discovered that most firms would not, on any condition, provide such a concession,” Geithner said. “One said that it was willing, but only if everybody else would agree to equal concessions on their prices.”

Later in the hearing, Neil Barofsky, special inspector general of the Wall Street bailout, revealed that the one volunteer (of eight counterparties) was UBS, the Zurich-based financial giant. Asked by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) why UBS might have been willing to make that sacrifice, Barofsky speculated that the firm probably simply recognized that the American taxpayers “had taken the global economy on its back.”

The question is: Why didn’t the other seven firms recognize that as well?

The obvious thorn in the side of Republicans — who’ve made a habit of blasting the deficit spending of the Democratic majority under President Obama — is that the GOP majority under President George W. Bush never once balanced its annual budgets. As a result, the national debt jumped from $5.7 trillion in 2000, when Bush was elected, to $10 trillion eight years later. The GOP controlled both chambers of Congress for six years of that span, during which time they not only cut taxes in the middle of two wars, but also passed the largest Medicare expansion since the program’s founding — an unfunded prescription drug benefit that former comptroller general David Walker has called “the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s.”

Today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) was asked point-blank how Republicans, given their track record, can criticize others for over-spending.

“Republicans will accept our fair share of the blame,” Boehner said. “But over the course of the last several years, Republicans have stood up on fiscal responsibility issues each and every time.”

I think this is important, because we have to prove to the American people that we are who we say we are. And I think when all of us voted against the stimulus bill twice last year, when all of us voted against their trillion-dollar budgets for as far as the eye can see twice last year, we began the process of not just talking about fiscal responsibility, but showing the American people that we are who we say we are.

Writing in Forbes last November, Bruce Bartlett — former advisor to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) — had another take on Republicans who, as the minority, suddenly see themselves as budget hawks.

It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.

And yes, Boehner voted in favor of Part D.

Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), senior Republican on the Finance Committee, told reporters today that he will oppose Ben Bernanke’s bid for a second term atop the Federal Reserve, citing “concerns about inflation and the pattern of resistance to accountability.”

We need a chairman focused on a strong dollar and low inflation. The current chairman has been behind the scenes with a policy of easy money, inflating our way out of a stock market bubble to a housing bubble. Now we face the inevitable result, and it seems like we’re in a situation to repeat the mistakes of the past with the kind of hyperinflation we had in ‘79 and ‘80.

Bernanke’s first term expires at the end of January.

We postulated this morning that a bulk of voter anger is directed at Washington in general, not Obama or the Democrats in particular, leaving all incumbents vulnerable in November’s mid-term elections. Providing further evidence of that theory, a new poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal finds that 70 percent of Americans think that the federal government  is “unhealthy” or “stagnant,” while just 28 percent feel that it’s working “well” or “okay.” Here’s NBC’s Mark Murray:

What’s more, a whopping 93 percent believe there’s too much partisan infighting; 84 percent think the special interests have too much influence over legislation; nearly three-quarters say that not enough has been done to regulate Wall Street and the banking industry; and an equal 61 percent complain that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress aren’t willing to compromise….

“The message is a big one,” said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “The message is, ‘We hate what’s going in Washington.’”

That’s a message for the majority Democrats, certainly. But there’s also a warning in there for GOP leaders, who are spinning last week’s special Senate election in Massachusetts as an indictment of Democratic policies in general, and health care reform specifically. Those Republicans might be surprised to learn that, according to the NBC/WSJ poll, only 27 percent of respondents blame Obama for the country’s problems, and only 41 percent blame Democrats in Congress. Meanwhile, 48 percent blame congressional Republicans.

It was a tough morning for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, summoned to Capitol Hill to testify on the decision-making surrounding the federal bailout of American International Group, which ultimately received more than $180 billion in taxpayer cash.

The controversy in recent weeks has centered not on the money that went to AIG, but the money that went through AIG to some of the other Wall Street giants to which AIG owed cash. In the process, AIG paid those firms, including Goldman Sachs, 100 cents on the dollar — an arrangement that some Fed officials lobbied (unsuccessfully) to conceal from the public. Geithner on Wednesday reiterated his earlier statement that although he was head of the New York Fed at the time, he took no part in the decisions surrounding disclosure of those payments. He also defended the decision to allow AIG to pay back Goldman and the others on par, arguing that the only legal way to ask those firms to accept less would be to allow AIG to default — a scenario, he said, that would have devastated the financial sector and the economy as a whole.

The counterparties held insurance entitling them to full or par value of the contract. We could not credibly threaten not to pay. That meant putting AIG into bankruptcy. At the time, we were working desperately to rebuild confidence in the financial system. Any suggestion that we might let AIG fail would have worked against that vital aim. We could not risk a protracted negotiation.

Lawmakers, for their part, were having none of it. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) implied that finance officials put the interests of Goldman above those of taxpayers. Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) said “it stretches credibility” that Geithner, as head of the New York Fed, wouldn’t have been involved in the disclosure discussions. Rep. Stephan Lynch (D-Mass.) wondered why officials “scalped” the shareholders of Bear Stearns, but made sure to pay off Goldman in full. Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) simply asked Geithner to resign.

The hearing, called by Democrats, highlights the pickle facing the White House in a tough election year. In short, the Obama team chose Geithner because, as a friendly face to Wall Street, he could step into the Treasury spot without scaring the hell out of the banks. (Indeed, the markets soared when the country learned of Obama’s choice.) But he hardly fits the populist image that the administration is hoping to resurrect after the special Senate election in Massachusetts last week — a wake-up call to Democratic leaders who are scrambling to reframe their message before November.

Two questions for the White House: (1) Can you keep Geithner in place and still create the impression among disgruntled voters that you’re serious about taking on Wall Street? And (2) if you choose to replace Geithner, who could fill the office and be the face of populism without causing the markets to tank?

In the wake of Scott Brown’s astonishing Senate win in Massachusetts last week, GOP leaders took no time to spin the outcome as an indictment of Democratic leadership that can only help Republicans in November’s mid-term elections.

“There’s not a seat in America held by a Democrat that can’t be won,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told “Fox and Friends” Monday. “Massachusetts proves that. When Scott Brown wins Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, any seat’s in play.”

But while Republicans are hoping Brown’s victory foreshadows a GOP landslide, a number of political experts are warning that the country’s restless anxiety — as evidenced not only in Massachusetts, but in Virginia, New Jersey, and now Florida as well — is less a backlash against Democrats in particular than a rebuke of the business-as-usual politics of Capitol Hill in general. Even as unemployment soared and housing markets tanked, voters have watched lawmakers bicker endlessly over a stimulus bill that proved too small and a health reform proposal that remains unfinished. Meanwhile, the banks have bounced back on the wings of a taxpayer bailout, paying out billions of dollars in employee bonuses this month while the jobs crisis outside Wall Street only worsens. In such an environment, some experts caution, incumbents on both sides of the aisle could find themselves surprisingly vulnerable in November.

“The public is mad, and they’re prepared to take it out on the establishment,” said Tony Coelho, the former California congressman who served as campaign chairman for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential run. “That doesn’t just mean the party in power. That means everyone.”

David P. Redlawsk, a political scientist at Rutgers University and director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling, agreed. “The stock market has gone up, but that’s Wall Street, and many voters do not see how that benefits them,” Redlawsk wrote in an email. “There is real risk to incumbents on both sides of the aisle.”

Redlawsk said that the Democrats, because they control both Congress and the White House, have absorbed the brunt of the nation’s discontent. But for Republicans to interpret that as partisan anger, he added, would be a mistake.

“This is not a partisan backlash by voters as much as it is a backlash against the powers that be — who happen to be Democrats,” he wrote.

The evidence of voter discontent has been everywhere in recent months. An early signal came in Virginia and New Jersey last November, when the incumbent Democrats were swept out of the governor’s office by Republican challengers who wouldn’t have stood a chance a year earlier. More recently, the virtually unknown Brown overcame a 30-point deficit to steal the Senate seat vacated by the late Edward Kennedy in the liberal bastion of Massachusetts.

“The message coming out of the Massachusetts special election is clear: No Democrat is safe,” said Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “In the aftermath of Scott Brown’s victory this past week, it has become evident to Democrats that to run for reelection in this toxic political environment is to ensure defeat at the ballot box in November.”

Yet recent polls indicate that the voters aren’t exactly thrilled with Republicans either. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted earlier this month, for example, just 24 percent of respondents said they have either a “great deal” or “good amount” of confidence in Republicans to lead the country – down from 29 percent a year earlier. For Democrats, the number was 32 percent, down from 43 percent in January 2009.

Another survey, conducted this month by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, tells a similar story, revealing that just 30 percent of respondents have a positive feeling about the GOP, while 42 percent view the party negatively.

The message hasn’t been lost on some Republicans. Indeed, Brown packaged himself more as an independent outsider than a man of the Republican Party — a bow to the anti-establishment tea-party movement that mobilized so ardently behind him. Republican consultant Brad Todd told CQ recently that the mid-term elections will be governed by a “taint of incumbency.” Even Boehner conceded this week that voters “don’t trust either party.”

Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) might have summed it up best. “The American people have fallen out of love with the current direction, but they haven’t fallen in love with Republicans,” he said last week.

“It’s a pox on both your houses,” Coelho said of the country’s mood toward Democrats and Republicans alike. “That’s why the teabaggers have a voice. They’re saying, ‘The hell with both of you.’”

Supporting that theory, new polls Tuesday revealed that Marco Rubio, the upstart Republican contender fighting for Florida’s Senate seat, is leading GOP Gov. Charlie Crist by three points. The party scheme is different, but Rubio’s anti-establishment theme mirrors that of Brown’s message to Massachusetts voters.

“There is a deep and increasingly restive anger stirring in the country,” L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten wrote last week. “Its focal points at the moment may seem to be healthcare and ‘big government,’ but if there were a Republican in the White House, they might just as well be tax cuts and ‘limited government.’ The fact is that the president and both parties’ congressional delegations have approval ratings under 50 percent.”

The Massachusetts shakeup means that Democrats are without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and that has left party leaders scrambling to prevent a catastrophe in November. “Every state is now in play, absolutely,”‘ Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said last week. “You have to make the case that you’re the one that’s on the people’s side. And people have to get it.”‘

With that in mind, President Obama will address Congress tonight in hopes of relaying the thought that he feels the country’s pain. The real audience, though, will be an American people grown frustrated with lawmakers’ partisan hostility, and skeptical of their capacity to lead in times of duress. For Obama, Coelho said, it’s also an opportunity to reframe his approach to governing, recognizing that the 2008 elections were a cry from voters for real change in Washington.

“It was a revolt against the system,” Coelho said of those elections. “Obama interpreted that to be a victory for his policies. But what it was was a frustration with the system not working.

“His political operatives needed to read the tea leaves,” he added. “And they failed.”

Those reports about an $80 billion Senate jobs package? “Wrong,” a Senate Democratic aide told TWI. The staffer indicated this afternoon that Democrats are weighing a number of proposals to tackle the unemployment crisis but remain undecided about which route they’ll go. The $80 billion package, the aide said, was just one option that happened to leak to the press.

“Everything that was in that document has changed,” the aide said. “It is not at all where we are now.”

One detail from those reports, though, is probably accurate. The Democrats will likely push an extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits separately, the aide said.

Senate Democrats are piecing together another stimulus bill designed to tackle the ongoing unemployment crisis, but if the reports coming out of Capitol Hill today are any indication, the package is likely to be much smaller than the jobs bill passed by the House last month. Indeed, The Washington Post indicates that upper-chamber Democrats are eyeing a proposal in the $80-billion range — roughly half of the spending in the House version.

The Senate bill, the Post notes, “will be heavy on tax breaks designed to spur businesses to make new hires.”

Also of note: Unlike the House bill, the Senate proposal excludes an extension of unemployment benefits. Instead, the UI extension “may move” separately, the Post reports.

Earlier in the month, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) had some questions for the administration about just how it happened that a top AIG lawyer was given millions of dollars in severance after she quit the bailed-out company in lieu of accepting a pay cut.

Yesterday, Grassley was at it again, asking Kenneth Feinberg — executive pay czar for the Troubled Asset Relief Program — for details of yet another enormous AIG severance deal, this one to Suzanne Folsom, the company’s former chief compliance and regulatory officer. AIG announced last month that Folsom left “to pursue other opportunities.” She was reportedly given more than $1 million in the process.

Grassley wants the details surrounding Folsom’s windfall, including “copies of all severance plans or arrangements signed by Ms. Folsom.”

You can already hear the complaints from Wall Street: Who cares about $1 million in this universe of billion-dollar payouts and trillion-dollar leverage arrangements? But that, of course, is precisely the sentiment that led to the historic bank collapse.

Since last week’s Supreme Court decision freeing corporations to spend unlimited sums to influence elections, there’s been a great deal of debate about what Congress, short of amending the Constitution, could do to prevent the nation’s big businesses from buying even more influence in Washington than they’ve already got.

Today, Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres offer a solution. Writing in The Washington Post, the campaign finance reformers propose a new statute to keep the financing restrictions in place for any companies doing business with the federal government (i.e., most of the country’s biggest corporations). Using the drug lobby as an illustration, they explain:

Federal contractors already are not allowed to “directly or indirectly . . . make any contribution of money or other things of value” to “any political party, committee, or candidate.” This provision arguably bars Big Pharma from launching a media campaign in favor of a candidate who supports its special deals, thereby “indirectly providing” the candidate something “of value.” But it doesn’t cover the case in which contractors threaten to spend millions to oppose senators and representatives who refuse their excessive demands.

There is a need, then, for a new statutory initiative: The same anti-corruption rationale may prohibit contractors from spending millions in favor of candidates requires a statutory prohibition on a negative advertising blitz.

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine, for example, the drug industry going after Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who’s been pushing a proposal to empower states to negotiate pharmaceutical prices for their lowest-income seniors. (The prohibition on those negotiations has been a cash cow for the drug companies.)

Ackerman and Ayres predict that their proposal would withstand the scrutiny of even the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

The Roberts court is skeptical — to put it mildly — of campaign finance restrictions. But it is still highly unlikely that the justices would strike down a law targeting federal contractors. All nine recognize that Congress may restrict free speech when there is a significant risk of corruption. That risk is obvious when corporate speakers are simultaneously doing business with the government.

Of course, with just 10 months to go before November’s midterms, Congress would have to act quickly — not something it’s exactly known for.

Here are two coinciding stories that indicate just how far removed public opinion is from economic reality. (1) The Democrats’ $787 billion economic stimulus bill has saved or created 1.2 million jobs, USA Today reported today, a median figure based on a survey of 50 leading economists. And (2) 74 percent of Americans think that at least half of the stimulus money has been wasted, according to a new CNN poll.

To some degree the divide makes sense. While the stimulus has prevented unemployment rates from hitting 10.8 percent, the economists estimate, that means little to the 10 percent who are still without a job. And while economists agree that the stimulus prevented things from getting worse, even fans concede that the Democrats frittered some of the spending on provisions with no stimulative effects at all.

Still, 1.2 million jobs isn’t a trivial number, and Republicans — hoping to campaign this year on the bill’s allegedly failure — might want to keep that in mind.

Late last week, it seemed as if the tide of Democratic support was shifting away from Ben Bernanke’s bid to serve a second term atop the Federal Reserve. Just a few days later, he’s not looking so bad.

Over the weekend, Bernanke won the endorsement of Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who chairs the Banking Committee, and Judd Gregg (N.H.), senior Republican on the Budget Committee. That was on top of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) approval announced a few days earlier. And this morning, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who heads the Finance Committee, added his name to the list of supporters, arguing that, faced with the greatest economic turmoil in generations, Bernanke’s decision-making “brought us back from the brink of economic disaster.”

I have full faith he will continue to use his post as Chairman of the Federal Reserve to create jobs, help middle class families and continue to get our economy back on track.  These past two years have revealed flaws in our regulatory system that must be addressed with strong and comprehensive regulatory reform.   It is clear that we face many serious challenges moving forward which is why I will vote to confirm Chairman Bernanke for another term.

Bernanke’s term expires at the end of the month.

Mixed messages coming today from Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the House minority leader who is spinning last week’s GOP Senate win in Massachusetts as a repudiation of the Democratic majority, while at the same time conceding that voters don’t really trust anyone in Congress at the moment.

“I do think they’re angry,” Boehner said of voters on “Fox and Friends” this morning. “They’re angry about the economy and jobs. They don’t trust either party.”

Boehner went on to claim that Republicans have offered clear alternatives to the Democrats’ stimulus bill, health care reform and “all of their nonsense.” (Remember, for example, this little gem outlining the GOP’s plans for health reform.) Still, his concession that Americans are across-the-board angry is indication that Republican leaders, for all their gloating over the last week, are also worried that the voters in Massachusetts, Virginia and New Jersey were revolting, not merely against Democrats, but against incumbency.

Also, if the Republicans are to make real gains, they’ll have to come up with a better message than that uttered by Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) last week.

“The American people have fallen out of love with the current direction, but they haven’t fallen in love with Republicans,” Putnam told The Washington Post. ”Last year was about picking up ourselves and dusting ourselves off. Now we need a direction and vision.”

Which begs the question: If you don’t already have direction or vision, what are you doing on Capitol Hill?

When a preventive-health panel stirred a storm last November by scaling back its guidelines for breast cancer screening among 40-somethings, Congress was quick to intervene. Indeed, it took just 17 days before senators unanimously agreed to bar the government from using those recommendations to inform federal coverage policies — public or private.

The message was clear: More screenings, not fewer, are better for women’s health.

Yet as the dust settles and Washington’s attention shifts elsewhere, some prominent physicians are questioning the wisdom of the congressional decision to swoop in so quickly to dismiss the expert recommendations. Writing this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, these doctors are blasting Congress for politicizing an issue they say is better left to medical science.

It’s not a new argument. Preventive care specialists and some journalists were making it in November. Still, that a respected medical journal has returned to the issue now is a good indication that, even if the Democrats’ plans for health reform have hit a wall after last week’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, the thorny debate over preventive health care is far from dead.

“Screening is not simply about benefit, it also causes important harms,” Steven Woloshin and Lisa M. Schwartz, both physicians at Dartmouth Medical School, wrote in the Jan. 13 issue of JAMA. “To make good decisions about screening, patients should understand the trade-offs.”

In the case of routine mammograms, the authors contend, the benefits for women in their 40s are minimal. Without screenings, 3.5 of 1,000 40-somethings will die from breast cancer over the next decade, they note. With screenings, 3 of 1,000 will succumb to the disease — meaning that it requires 2,000 tests to save one life.

“For most women with cancer, screening generally does not change the ultimate outcome,” Woloshin and Schwartz argue.

On the flip side, they say, the harms can be considerable. In some cases, the test comes back mistakenly positive, subjecting the patient to the devastating, if temporary, thought that she’s got a life-threatening disease. In other instances, the test uncovers slow-growing cancers that, even if never found, pose no threat to the patient through her lifetime. The treatment of those latent cancers exposes women to the harms associated with surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation — as well as the constant fear of recurrence.

Steven H. Woolf, a physician at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, said those harms shouldn’t be taken lightly.

“Advocates of mammography and cancer survivors often belittle these harms, but a moral duty exists when subjecting millions of asymptomatic women to a procedure that benefits relatively few,” Woolf wrote in the same issue of JAMA. “Whether hundreds of women should endure the consequences of inaccurate mammograms to save one woman’s life is a legitimate ethical question.”

The controversy spins around new recommendations, crafted by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, suggesting that 40-something women should no longer get routine annual mammograms, but instead should talk first to their doctors about the potential harms associated with those tests. The task force also recommended that routine screenings for older women occur every two years, rather than annually.

[A clarifier is in order here: Routine mammograms refer, under current protocols, to the annual tests given to asymptomatic women aged 40 and up. Diagnostic screenings, on the other hand, occur after a lump or other abnormality is detected. The task force controversy surrounded only the former. Some insurers cover only the latter.]

Many lawmakers defended the guidelines. But others pounced, voicing concerns that private insurers in search of greater profits — or governments in search of leaner budgets — might point to the guidelines as reason to scale back coverage of routine tests. It didn’t help that the recommendations were unveiled in the middle of the most ferocious health reform battle in generations, and that the Democrats’ reform bills would rely on certain task-force guidelines to steer minimum coverage standards for private insurers.

“This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), warned at the time. “This is how rationing begins.”

The irony, of course, was that Blackburn was the bureaucrat accusing an independent panel of preventive-care experts of being bureaucrats — a dynamic which raised immediate questions about the capacity of Congress to weed out unnecessary procedures if lawmakers stand ready to riot each time medical science calls into question the entrenched habits of patients and providers.

“The politicalization of medical care is wrong,” Woloshin and Schwartz warn broadly. “Promoting screening irrespective of the evidence may garner votes but will not create healthier voters. It may do the opposite.”

No matter. Less than three weeks after the guidelines were published, the Senate stepped in with an amendment to the Democrats’ health reform bill prohibiting the government from using them to craft policy. Sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), it passed unanimously without a tallied vote.

A second amendment, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), bars insurance companies from denying coverage for a host of preventive-care services to be named later by the White House. Aside from mammograms, the provision is designed to cover screenings — at no cost to women — for other prominent diseases, such as diabetes, cervical cancer and heart disease. The Mikulski amendment passed 61 to 39.

“We don’t mandate that you have a mammogram at age 40,” Mikulski said on the Senate floor before the vote. “What we say is, discuss this with your doctor. But if your doctor says you need one, you are going to get one.”

Though mischaracterized in the press and misunderstood on Capitol Hill, that’s precisely what the panel had recommended.

“[T]he controversy was fueled by a chain of false premises,” wrote Woolf, a former member of the task force.

Still, there remains a great deal of disagreement within the medical community about the wisdom of the new guidelines. Wendie A. Berg, a Maryland-based radiologist specializing in breast cancer, said the panel’s conclusions are both “puzzling” and “problematic.”

“There are downsides associated with screening, but most women would not consider these harms,” Berg, also a consultant to Naviscan Inc., a manufacturer of imaging equipment, wrote in JAMA. “The overwhelming majority of women are willing to accept these downsides as part of the process of saving lives otherwise lost to breast cancer.”

The issue might go away for a while. In the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s Senate win in Massachusetts last week, the Democrats no longer have the 60 votes to usher a merged health reform bill through the upper chamber. The astonishing development has left party leaders at a loss for what to do next. Some are suggesting that they move on to other issues and return to health reform later in the year. Whenever they do, Woloshin and Schwartz have some advice.

“It is important for the public to remember that the goal of medicine is to help patients live healthier longer lives,” they wrote. “Sometimes more testing helps to reach the goal, but other times less testing does.

“Suggestions to do less may be as much in an individual’s interest as suggestions to do more.”

With unemployment still hovering in double digits and no real relief in sight, a group of 30 Senate Democrats today is urging party leaders to extend emergency unemployment benefits through the end of 2010 — 10 months longer than current law dictates.

In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the lawmakers argue that shorter extensions might be cheaper, but they leave state budgeters in a state of constant uncertainty.

Short term extensions, while still helpful to families, only add strain to state agencies that must constantly re-tool their computer systems, and at the same time, continue to assist the millions still searching for work. As our economy continues on a path to recovery, we need a robust extension of safety net programs that have provided a lifeline to families since the recession began.

Signing the letter were Democratic Sens. Tom Harkin (Iowa), Bob Casey (Pa.), Jack Reed (R.I.),
 Sherrod Brown (Ohio)
, Chris Dodd (Conn.),
 Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.),
 Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.),
 Al Franken (Minn.), Carl Levin (Mich.),
 Frank  Lautenberg (N.J.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), 
Roland Burris (Ill.), Arlen Specter (Pa.),
 John Kerry (Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.),
 Ron Wyden (Ore.), Edward Kaufman (Del.),
 Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.),
 Patrick Leahy (Vt.),
 Robert Menendez (N.J.),
 Herb Kohl (Wis.),
 Tom Udall (N.M.), Ben Cardin (Md.),
 Robert Byrd (W.Va.),
 Daniel Akaka (Hawaii),
 Jeff Merkley (Ore.),
 Barbara Mikulski (Md.),
 Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Michael Bennet (Colo.), as well as Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.).

Democratic leaders are working on legislation to tackle the continuing problems related to the economic downturn. The package is widely expected to include an extension of unemployment insurance, COBRA health benefits, food stamps and help for states faced with budget crises. They’d hoped to have health care reform out of the way first. Now, that’s looking unlikely.

That’s the warning coming today from the folks at the Center for Public Integrity, who caution that the recent High Court decision empowering corporations to spend unlimited sums on federal election ads could also have the unintended consequence of ending the ban on foreigners buying influence over U.S. elections. Some foreign companies, the authors write, are owned by foreign governments and also have U.S. subsidiaries. The result?

One prominent example is CITGO Petroleum Company — once the American-born Cities Services Company, but purchased in 1990 by the Venezuelan government-owned Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. The Citizens United ruling could conceivably allow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has sharply criticized both of the past two U.S. presidents, to spend government funds to defeat an American political candidate, just by having CITGO buy TV ads bashing his target.

And it’s not just CPI that’s concerned about that possibility.

In his dissent in Citizens United, Justice John Paul Stevens cautioned that the decision “would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans.”

And here we were worried that the biggest threats to American democracy, post-decision, were AT&T and Goldman Sachs.

So suggests Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who ushered the Democrats’ health reform bill through the Senate HELP Committee last summer. Party leaders have been scrambling for ways to pass some version of their sweeping reform proposals in the wake of Scott Brown’s astonishing Senate victory in Massachusetts Tuesday.

Today, Dodd told reporters that the best course might be to “take a breather [from health care] for a month, six weeks,” The Hill reports. That would allow Democrats to move on to legislation addressing double digit unemployment. But how it would help them to pass health reform remains to be seen. In fact, it would only allow critics more time to drum up further opposition among voters — a sport at which they’ve been pretty good up to now.