WASHINGTON (AP) – Senate Republicans have blocked President Barack Obama’s choice to head the consumer protection agency that was created after the 2008 financial meltdown.

His nominee, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, ran into near-solid opposition from Republicans.

As a result, Democrats couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed to move ahead on the nomination. Only one Republican joined Democrats in voting Cordray.

The president plans to make a statement about the vote later Thursday morning.

Republicans say Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has too much power and too little accountability.

The agency is designed to protect consumers from some of the lending and mortgages practices that led to the financial crisis.

GOP lawmakers have pledged to stall any nominee until the structure of the agency is changed.

Read more here.

The US Senate on Saturday blocked a White House-backed bill to offer a path to citizenship to young undocumented immigrants who attend college or enroll in the military.

Lawmakers voted 55-41, largely along party lines, to end debate on the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, falling short of the 60 needed to do so and effectively killing the legislation.

Some of President Barack Obama’s Democratic allies sided with most Republicans to defeat the measure, which opponents had charged amounted to amnesty.

Supporters of the bill, a top priority of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, said it was wrong to punish people brought to the United States by undocumented parents and emphasized that the legislation included safeguards and set high hurdles to citizenship.

Read the whole thing here.

But what the establishment media didn’t tell you – unless you waded through the details in a select few news articles or saw this fairly balanced short article in the Washington Post – is that Wednesday evening,  hours after the first cloture vote failed and hours after  I informed BigGovernment.com readers about an effort by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), to narrow the scope of what I have been calling the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s A Bank Bill, Democrats blinked and Vitter’s amendment passed without objection by voice vote.

Vitter’s amendment to the so-called “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” gives a precise meaning to the term “financial company” – changing the definition from Dodd’s original language of “substantially engaged in activities in the United States that are financial in nature” to that of the much stricter “predominantly engaged.” And his amendment precisely defines “predominantly engaged” as a business that makes no less than 85 percent of its revenue from financial activities.

As a result of Vitter’s measure that passed during the brief 24-hour period of most of the GOP standing together in opposition (along with Democrats Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold for their own reasons), a very important change was made.

There are still many horrors in this bill, but at least now a business will only fall under the new regime of the Federal Reserve for taxation, regulation, and nationalization if it is “predominantly engaged” in financial activities. Most retailers and manufacturers — although still hit by other parts of the bill such as the broad reach of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection – will not come under Fed supervision for “financial stability.”

Ironically, I concluded my article in BigGovernment.com, “There are many reasons for the GOP and truly moderate Democrats in the Senate not to grant cloture. Even if the bill was primarily concerned with Wall Street, it still does nothing about Fannie and Freddie, But making sure the Wall Street bill is actually about Wall Street – or at the very least about banks – should be a line in the sand. There should this firm message. ‘No Vitter amendment. No cloture.  No dice!’” The amazing thing is, though not necessarily as part of a conscious effort of all who voted “no,” this is pretty close to what happened.

The lesson from the fight for Vitter’s amendment – which was assisted by support from the measure by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and many businesses large and small, as well as a Center-Right coalition letter signed by CEI and other groups that specifically called out the bill’s broad definition of financial company– is clear. From health care to financial regulation, the progressives will paint the enemy as unpopular big business – from big insurers to big oil to big Wall Street firms.

But once the Center-Right forces them to debate, as the Vitter amendment did, how a particular bill would affect entrepreneurial Main Street businesses, they will duck and cover and sometimes retreat.. Despite opposition from the Huffington Post crowd and other progressives, the Obama administration and Senate Democrats made a significant concession likely because they did not want to be seen as going after the entrepreneurial firms that are rightly seen as the backbone of this country.

Main Street businesses do not have to be necessarily small, either. Just examples of the American dream that the public can relate too. Vitter made the excellent point that under the bill as written, Google could have been considered a bank. Google may be big, but it grew that way because it pleased its customers, and no one can rationally accuse Google of contributing to the financial crisis.

And despite what many in the establishment media say, this fight is not over, as even President Obama seemed to acknowledge in his speech yesterday when he talked about “lobbyists” trying to thwart a House-Senate conference. Reconciling the House and Senate bills is not going to be a cakewalk. There are many differing provisions.

The Senate bill lacks, for instance, the provisions in the House bill to comprehensively audit the activities of the Federal Reserve. The House bill, at the behest of “Blue Dog” Democrats, also limits on the jurisdiction Consumer Financial Protection Agency, so that it cannot have jurisdiction over orthodontists who spread out payments for braces or small stores with layaway plans.

Time magazine liberal columnist Michael Grunwald wrote this about the uncertain prospects for a final bill about a week ago: “Even if the Senate bill did attract 60 votes, it would have to be reconciled with the House bill, and then the House and Senate both would have to pass the reconciled bill — and all probably before the pre-election August recess, while dealing with a Supreme Court confirmation battle and jobs bills and whatever else comes down the pike. I’m not a Beltway insider anymore, but that sounds hard! “

And even White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has said it will likely be the Fourth of July before the House and Senate forge an agreement and the President Obama has a final bill on his desk.

There is a window to make known the impact of the many terrible things that remains in this bill – from a massive new consumer agency with the power to track virtually every financial transaction to share with other big agencies like the IRS, proxy access provisions that would federalize state incorporation laws and empower unions and other progressive shareholders to wage director campaigns at the company and other shareholders’ expense, and no attempted reform of the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the center of the financial mess.

To slightly alter a popular saying, it’s never over until the same bill passes both the House and Senate and is sent to the President’s desk. The Center-Right coalition should learn an important lesson from Vitter’s smart and principled fight and should not waste this window.

But a word to the wise:  DO NOT SNATCH DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY.

Republican leaders have been making noises about a compromise measure for a week.  Now is not the time to get weak.

The Democrats continue to deny the bill is a bailout.  But they are slowing losing that battle.

NPR said:

“A vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts,” Obama said in his speech in New York on Thursday.

I cannot find any experts — of any party — who are willing to agree with Obama on this one.

“We’re not seeing a very forceful step on the too-big-to-fail problem,” said Carmen Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “If there’s any doubt that the crisis may be systemic, we will bail out again.”

So, if a major bank says, “Hey, save us or the economy will go under,” the government’s going to save the bank. Full stop.

The New York Times said:

Unfortunately, the leading proposals would do little to cure the epidemic unleashed on American taxpayers by the lords of finance and their bailout partners. The central problem is that neither the Senate nor House bills would chop down big banks to a more manageable and less threatening size. The bills also don’t eliminate the prospect of future bailouts of interconnected and powerful companies.

Too big to fail is alive and well, alas. Indeed, several aspects of the legislative proposals sanction and codify the special status conferred on institutions that are seen as systemically important. Instead of reducing the number of behemoth firms assigned this special status, the bills would encourage smaller companies to grow large and dangerous so that they, too, could have a seat at the bailout buffet.

But even without any bailouts, this bill is a behemoth that creates new bureacracies and empowers the government right down to the level of monitoring individual consumer’s transactions. This is a fight worth having.  Republicans must hold the line.  Democrats need to hear the message: American’s have had enough of bailouts, handouts and takeovers.  The government is not the solution.

Let Dodd and Obama rattle the sabers.  Republicans achieved a great win yesterday.  Now, lets don’t win the war and lose the peace.

What Reid wants is for the Senate to vote to proceed on a bill that has not been seen, not read, not studied by the very Senators from whom he wants to force a vote. If this bill is so important, why isn’t it imperative that our Senators actually get to see the thing they are expected to vote on?

And that isn’t the worst of the unconscionable dirty tricks that Reid is playing with this “important” legislation. He’s also planning on a bait and switch tactic once he gets his vote to proceed.

News is that Reid wants to use a Senate procedure where a bill can be swapped out with another on the floor. He wants to bring an unassociated bill to the floor and once it gets there he wants to swap that bill out with the healthcare bill. In other words, he wants to bring a fake bill to the floor and pull a bait-and-switch act to suddenly plop before the Senate the heretofore unseen healthcare bill. Then he wants to force a quick vote.

Alarmingly, Reid is making an effort to eliminate any time for Senators to see what is in this economy killing, liberty slaying, big government leviathan before a vote is forced down their throats.

If this bill was a legitimate bill would all of these dirty tricks be necessary? Further, if this bill had such wide acceptance and agreement among Congress and the people alike, why are Democrats afraid to let everyone see the bill?

Reid isn’t a fool, though. He knows that once America gets to see what is in this mess it will become nearly impossible to pass this thing. Naturally, that is why he is trying to eliminate any possibility that anyone might get a glimpse of what is in the bill before it is passed.

The fact is, though, if Reid cannot get his 60-vote “motion to proceed” his sly maneuvers will be stymied for now. So, call your Senators and tell them where you stand on these underhanded tactics, won’t you? Tell them not to vote to proceed until they’ve at least gotten a chance to see this mysterious, invisible healthcare bill.

Lastly, one wonders why the most “transparent” president in history is allowing the Congress to continue day in and day out to press votes on legislation no one has ever seen on bills that haven’t been written? What ever happened to the hoary days of campaigning when Obama kept promising that we’d all get 5 days to see a bill before a vote?

How times change.

Note: As of today, the bill has been posted online so that we can see it. But Reid wants to vote on the motion to proceed tomorrow or Friday. This is hardly the 72 hours timeline that transparency advocates have pressed for, nor is it anywhere close to the five days that President Obama promised us all.

You can see the bill at http://www.scribd.com/doc/22734971/Senate-Democrats-Health-Care-Reform-Bill.