The Aerie
As you know, the Democrats have committee controls, but don't have enough votes to overcome a filibuster. So if the Republicans don't like it, it won't happen, so it can't be "rammed through." And remember, even a good solution can get scuttled because it makes the Democrats look too sensible or intelligent to suit Republican tastes.
The Democrats are less organized that the Republicans, who have hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate-funded "think tanks" coordinating their efforts, and a corporate propaganda empire (Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC) for communications. Remember during the six years that the Republicans controlled Congress, the way any Democratic resistance was met with a propaganda blizzard about how every bill deserved an "up 'r down vote." The corporate propaganda machine shamed Democrats from exercising their filibuster powers. The Democrats have no similar propaganda machine with which to shame Republicans, because the same corporations that control the media and fund the think-tanks also control the Republicans. And a lot of the Democrats. So the filibuster, which they once decried as an anti-democratic anti-American tool of troop haters, is now such a central plank of Republican strategy that they don't have to use it: just the threat of the filibuster scuttles Democratic legislation.
Many leading Democrats, such as Pelosi, Reid, Hoyer, and of course non-Democrat, the independent Lieberman, are "Republican lite" Democrats. Much of the chaos in the Democratic party is due to actual progressives such as Dean, Feingold and Kucinich being sharply at odds with more conservative Democratic colleagues.
The Congress, particularly the Senate, is populated by the extraordinarily wealthy, meaning that they have a conflict of interest in this case, serving the public good versus serving their own financial interests. If the "best" answer were 'let the market collapse and self correct,' but that would slash half of Nancy Pelosi's personal wealth, would she push for that solution? Would anyone?
Congress is populated by Beltway Insiders, a ruling aristocracy that is far removed from the concerns of day-to-day citizenry, and does not identify with the citizenry. Therefore their interests are in protecting their own "tribe," (the wealthy and powerful) over serving the average citizen (who they see as rednecks or rabble). That means that not only is Pelosi watching her own bottom line, but those of all her friends and relatives, while paying scant attention to what you or I might be experiencing.
These are of course generalizations. The House has a greater spectrum of financial backgrounds and political philosophies, while the Senate is much more conservative and much more wealthy.
In this case, the average citizen is angry enough that they are actually having some small influence on Congress (unlike in the case of the FISA amendment, which went ahead despite substantial political outcry from the population whose rights were being disposed of). This isn't just some abstract right to privacy that's at risk, the retirement money for millions of aging Boomers is in peril, and Congressional phone lines are swamped.
The Democrats cannot come to a swift conclusion right now because repairing this artificially triggered crisis requires lengthy thoughtful analysis by experts, not some extravagant and expensive stunt. This expert analysis is required simply to protect the financial interests of the Congresspeople, to say nothing of the long-term interests of this nation. In seeking to protect their own pocketbooks, the Congress is taking more time than, say, when being asked whether to send working-class soldiers off to die overseas in a war based on neoconservative imperial fantasies and the president's Oedipal complex. The Congress does not want to risk taking hasty action and impacting their own personal wealth.
It's important to realize that we've been through all this before. Adjusted for inflation, this is hardly more expensive than the Savings and Loan collapse in the Eighties (you remember that, when John McCain was part of the Keating Five, who sought to shelter one of the worst abusers from justice in the S&L collapse).
I'm actually quite pleased that progress is slow. The longer this takes, the more of a chance that an actual solution will be developed, rather than some flashy slight of hand that once again dumps hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of the upper 1/10 of 1% of the wealthiest people in the world.
The real question I have is, why now? This crisis has been ready to go for months, yet it was set off in the heart of the final stretch towards the election. Unless it is meant to distract from foreign policy blunders (did you know we're nearly at war with Pakistan?) I cannot understand what advantage the White House was seeking in promoting this crisis now. Unless the Right has so given up on McCain's chances that they want to rob the Treasury now and leave Obama's administration completely impoverished.
Truly dedicated readers will remember that every couple of years on 9/11 I look back on the case of Sneha Philip. Out of the 2,750 other victims of 9/11, I happened to take a rain-draggled copy of HER "missing" poster as a memento of my visit to Manhattan on Sept. 16, 2001 (for a pre-scheduled training class).
The sad case of Sneha Philip has reached a final conclusion. Typically, my appearance-driven assumptions about who Philip was and how her destiny played out were wrong, too simple, and changed across time. From a beautiful young woman with an unlimited future who suffered a tragic fate she went through many transformations.
The first tale was the unknown: on the night of September 10th, Sneha did not return to her apartment, nor call her husband, Ron Liebermann. When shortly after daybreak the towers next to their apartment building were attacked and collapsed, Ron realized that the police were going to have no time to spare looking for a missing person.
So Sneha underwent her first transformation, from unknown disappearance, to 9/11 victim. Ron told police that witnesses had seen Sneha, a medical practicioner, rushing to help victims of the Twin Towers. However the story did not hold up, and a year later I discovered that her husband had made up the story.
Sneha was back to being a mysterious disappearance, but now with a sinister twist. Any student of crime or crime dramas knows that when someone is murdered their spouse is always a suspect. Why had LIeberman lied about his wife? Was it truly for the reasons stated? Why did he and the family hold to the lie for so long, even attending memorials for 9/11 victims until 2003? Given the tragedy I didn't want to compound it with speculation, but her husband's initial lie made that hard to maintain.
A police report in 2004 unearthed even more troubling tales, of alcoholism, promiscuity, and a staggering career. And her brother added to the confusion with stories of his own. The frosted side of me wants to see the lies of the bereaved as ways to deal with and glorify the victim, but my crunchy side wondered about payments out of the 9/11 victims funds, and insurance. At the peak of this uncertainty, a court ruled against the family, and Sneha Philip was removed from the list of 9/11 victims.
But the family persisted, and based on a lack of evidence to support any other demise, the court over turned Philip's removal from the list of victims. Based on a glare-filled security camera image from minutes before the first plane hit, and without compelling evidence to the contrary, the court ruled it most likely that Philip left her apartment building on the morning of 9/11 and was killed shortly thereafter in the attacks on 9/11.
Sneha Philip's final transformation was no less tragic, but more complex. From a cartoon hero perishing in an evil attack, Sneha Philip became a real woman with real problems. A marriage facing challenges, a career with both downs and ups, a loving family trying to deal with their grief. Most heroes are two dimensional, but the final Sneha, the Sneha who changed and who now sleeps, is one who crossed the street to the World Trade Center as a three dimensional woman, and as a three dimensional woman met her fate.
As grueling as it was, the seven year search for the real Sneha Philip helped define her death, and in some ways, also brought her to life.