American Idiots – White House version.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Just like poor Charlie Brown. The kid believes this time Lucy won’t yank the football away at the last second. Naturally she does and Charlie Brown ends up on his ass again. Some Republicans say to the Democrats, “make some concessions and we’ll play nice”, so they do and then the metaphoric football gets pulled away at the last second. That happened today after the all GOP Senators vowed to use the filibuster to stop the finance reform bill from even reaching the Senate floor.

Things are starting to heat up in the battle for financial reform. One of the bones of contention has been a tax on banks to create s $50 billion fund that will be used to wind down or split up ‘too big to fail’ financial behemoths. This would be funded by a tax on banks. The banks don’t like this and therefore neither do the Republicans.

As I wrote last week, the Republicans have dishonestly been claiming that the proposed bill will result in endless taxpayer funded bailouts and with that lie in hand all 41 GOP Senators signed a letter opposing the reform on Friday. To try and reach some common ground the White House and the Democrats floated the idea of taking the $50 billion tax idea off the table in the hope of enticing at least a few moderate Senators to work on a compromise.

The White House got their answer today when the Republicans suggested scrapping the bill and starting over again despite the compromise offer. Haven’t we heard that before? Oh yes, with health care reform.

We’ve seen this play out far too many times. If the White House and the Democrats had any balls they would have stuck to their guns. In the wake of the Goldman Sachs story and more to come from the Lehman and Washington Mutual debacles (both rife with fraud according to recently released reports) the Democrats should stand firm and dare the GOP to filibuster. Let the country see them being forced to actually filibuster which means holding the floor for countless hours doing nothing.

For being suckered one more time the White House and the Democrats deservedly get today’s American Idiot award.