A Senate committee easily cleared legislation explicitly prohibiting members from profiting by trading on inside information, despite objections from some GOP lawmakers who called it unnecessary and politically motivated.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 7-2 Tuesday. GOP Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) dissented, calling the bill unnecessary and rife with potential unintended consequences. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also opposed the bill, but was absent from the vote.

Backers of the bill agreed that lawmakers are already subject to the same insider-trading laws everyone else must follow, but maintained that it was a worthwhile exercise to make it explicit in statute that such practices are prohibited. A November “60 Minutes” report suggested that several high-ranking members of Congress might have profited personally from information obtained in the halls of Congress.

“We need to send a strong message making absolutely clear that members of Congress and their staff are not exempt,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the committee’s ranking member. “The simpler and more direct we can be, the better.”

But Coburn contended that the rush to pass such a bill was driven by a need for political cover, not the need for clearer laws.

“We’re in a rush to prove to the American public that we’re not guilty,” he said. “We shouldn’t be in a super hurry to fix it because it solves a political problem for us.”

Read more here.

But Warren’s apparent disavowal of the tactics of OWS and like-minded community organizers may not be shared by Richard Cordray, President Obama’s nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Warren designed. Cordray has long supported ESOP, formerly known as the East Side Organizing Project, an Ohio housing advocacy group that has distinguished itself by storming into banks and launching plastic “shark attacks” on the lawns of private homes. ESOP’s leaders brag about what they call their “organized hits” on banks and other targets, which have included the home of the late Congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp.

As Ohio treasurer and attorney general, Cordray lobbied for state and federal funding for ESOP and publicly praised funders of the group as “the real heroes.” And in a highly unusual move for a nominee awaiting confirmation, Cordray returned to Ohio in October to be the keynote speaker at the group’s gala dinner.

Since his nomination in July to head the bureau created by the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, Republicans have held fast against confirmation. But largely, they haven’t made Cordray’s state record an issue. They have focused instead on structural defects in the agency’s design, such as the massive new powers the bureau will have to ban financial products it deems “abusive” and its lack of accountability to Congress.

These criticisms are valid, but they may not be enough to hold Senate Republicans together without criticism of the nominee’s merits. Just before Thanksgiving, Scott Brown (R-Mass.), facing a tough reelection challenge from Warren, became the first GOPer to commit to voting for Cordray. The Democrat-controlled Senate plans to hold a vote on his confirmation this week, possibly as early as Tuesday. Human Events‘ Neil McCabe reports that in addition to Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, other GOP targets for Cordray supporters include Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Tennessee’s Bob Corker, and Cordray’s home state Senator Rob Portman of Ohio (though Portman seemed to reaffirm his opposition in a statement to Human Events last week).

But Cordray’s support of ESOP needs further scrutiny, particularly since as head of the bureau, he will have the power to help funnel federal support to ESOP and like-minded community organizers with virtually no oversight by Congress. And a report by Bloomberg News suggests that Cordray specifically blessed ESOP’s “organized hits” on banks and homes.

As reported by Bloomberg upon Cordray’s nomination in July, “Mark Seifert recalls being impressed when Richard Cordray, then the Ohio state treasurer, walked into the offices of his Cleveland activist group one day in August 2007.” Seifert recalled warning Cordray: “We are not necessarily safe for the powers-that-be to hang around with. We do direct action. We throw plastic sharks at bankers.”

According to Bloomberg, “‘Far from being aghast, Cordrayapproved of the tactics [emphasis added] and said the small, Cleveland-focused group should expand,’ Seifert recalled.” Since that time, the community organizing group, which has changed the full name underlying its acronym to Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People, has expanded to more than 10 offices across the state and grown its staff from five to about 40.

ESOP’s growth is due in no small part to Cordray’s support. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as state treasurer and AG, Cordray “helped them find grants to expand.” With state and federal funding that Cordray helped secure, ESOP grew from a “little ACORN” — to borrow the phrasing of Subversion Inc. author and TAS contributor Matthew Vadum — into a powerful tree. But its core is still rotted by its tactics of threats and intimidation.

In fact, national Leftie pundits praise ESOP for taking militant “direct action” to whole new levels. As the Huffington Post recentlyput it, “ESOP takes a civil approach, but stops at nothing to get lenders to negotiate options for homeowners who face foreclosure.” In other words, the group is civil until it isn’t.

As the New York Times recently described ESOP’s actions in a glowing opinion profile, after demonstrating in front of a lender’s office, ESOP “would fill a bus with community members, drive out to the suburban house of a regional vice president and demonstrate there. ESOP’s signature tactic was to throw hundreds of two-inch plastic sharks on the lawn and circulate flyers saying, ‘Your neighbor is a loan shark.’”

Although ESOP may not do as many organized “hits” as it did in the past — their last major “hit” seemed to be a storming of JPMorganChase bank branches in 2009 with busloads yelling “Chase Bank Sucks” — group leaders make it clear that it’s a tactic in their arsenal. When negotiation “doesn’t work, that’s when we really start to have fun,” an ESOP employee told the Press, a Toledo, Ohio newspaper, in late 2010. “It’s an organized hit.” ESOP founder Inez Killingsworth stressed to the New York Times: “The word has gotten around. Now, most of the time we ask for a meeting, we get a meeting.”

Killingsworth, still active with ESOP as board president, first gained fame for a threatened “hit” in the ’90s on the home of Jack Kemp, then secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration. Killingsworth and other housing advocates visiting the Washington, D.C., area threatened to disrupt Kemp’s daughter’s wedding being held at the family home. “Then all of a sudden, he calls us to say he’ll meet us if we promise not to hit his daughter’s wedding,” Killingsworth recounted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1992. Kemp met with the “advocates” a few months later.

Cordray continued to embrace ESOP during his Ohio political career and even during his current nomination fight. At an Ohio housing summit in 2009, Cordray showered praise on the government agencies that funded ESOP. “A number of community groups working with homeowners, especially ESOP, got more funding and local agencies have been the real heroes,” Cordray said in a statement reported by the Gannett-owned Mansfield (Ohio)News Journal (story available here with a fee).

If confirmed as director of the consumer bureau, Cordray will have plenty of chance to be such a “hero” and to throw federal support ESOP’s way. In addition to its broad powers from Dodd-Frank to ban any financial product it deems “abusive,” the bureau has authority to hire “contractors” to help with consumer issues. And as most Republicans have pointed out in their objections to approving a director, the bureau gets a guaranteed independent stream of funding from the Federal Reserve, denying Congress the oversight through the appropriations process that it has with other agencies.

Cordray seemed very eager to address ESOP, returning to Ohio in October to address what the Cleveland Plain Dealer described as the group’s “annual gala and silent auction” at the Cleveland Marriott Downtown. Strangely, neither the Plain Dealer nor other media reported on the contents of Cordray’s speech, nor can one find it on ESOP or the consumer bureau’s website. So much for transparency!

ESOP, not surprisingly, is fighting hard for Cordray’s Senate confirmation. In a remarkable interview with Human Events‘ McCabe, ESOP executive director Mark Seifert pooh-poohed concerns about lack of congressional oversight. Conceding that “the CFPB will have a lot of power,” Seifert then exclaimed, “Congress sat silent for 10 years, now all of a sudden they want oversight? Go to hell, no!”

But it is not only Congress whose oversight would be curtailed if Cordray is confirmed, but the next presidential administration as well. Once confirmed, Cordray (with likely influence from ESOP) will be in power until late 2016. That would cover nearly the entire term of the next president, whoever he or she may be.

Under Dodd-Frank, McCabe explains: “The director would serve a five-year term that overlaps presidential terms. This means, an incoming president could not appoint his own director, nor does the director serve at the pleasure of the president.”

First published at The American Spectator.

[Ed Note: Hill sources confirm that Sen. Olympia Snowe is leaning towards supporting the radical Richard Cordray. Her office number is 202-224-5344]

Brown’s most recent capitulation is his support for a floor vote for President Obama’s nominee for the uber-regulatory agency known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Brown’s announcement undercuts not only his Republican colleagues who are fighting to limit the power of this new government agency but of the principles of limited government he professes to support.

Unfortunately, Brown may not be alone. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) is purportedly seeking a deal with the White House to get fellow Ohioan Cordray confirmed despite ethical questions about his behavior as the state’s Attorney General. Insiders are always concerned about the Maine Senators and Alaskan Lisa Murkowski. If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, Portman, Collins, Snowe and Murkowski need to buck up and support their colleagues.

The fight over Cordray and the CFPB is critical for the future of the economy. Republicans talk a good game about limiting new government but allowing Cordray to be confirmed will unleash a new rash of regulations on the economy.

The temporary head of the Bureau, Raj Date, is running the building but he cannot implement new regulations. Even so, he is laying the groundwork for an unprecedented assault on the marketplace. He recently released an 802-page report outlining new regulations and why they are needed.

Of course, the last thing the economy needs is more government, more red-tape and more job-killing regulations. It’s clear that the President and his supporters are responsible for the state of the economy and the imposition of new regulations are a key factor. Should Republicans capitulate and allow a CFPB Director to be confirmed, they too will share the blame. Not only is that stupid economically it is stupid politically. We can only hope the weakest links of the chain continue to hold.

Others fear that for all their trouble from organizing, holding rallies and knocking on doors, they will only replace the leftist Democrats with RINO Republicans who will squander the victory.  Will we get Speaker Boehner, or a fresh new conservative leader who will truly take a big stick to big government.   A closer look at the numbers should give conservatives reason to be really excited and also a cause for continued resolve.

If you want a conservative Congress, you have to ask yourself just what kind of conservative are you after.  Drew Kurlowski, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri who studies voting behavior and partisanship, referred me to a dataset popular with political science academics called DW-Nominate.  It is a tremendous resource that meticulously compiles the voting records of the Congress going back to the 1st Congress.  If you want to know who George Washington’s favorite conservative was, this is your site.  Moreover, they settled on a definition of “conservative” that is tremendously useful.  Move over “fiscal conservative” and “social conservative” and make room for (limited) “government intervention in the economy”.  Let’s call it L’GIE.  So who are the liggies?

That most potent army of political groupies has one more reason to crow about  Congressman Ron Paul.   He sets the bar as a champion of limited government.  No one is close.  For the rest of the nation, imagine what a force his son, Senate candidate Rand Paul will be in the Senate.  ”Senator Paul” is just the beginning.

By sorting the Senate in order of most conservative to least, it is no surprise that the fiscal champion, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma gets the award.  Conservative darling, Jim DeMint is close behind. Which one of them will run from President?  Hint:  I asked Coburn’s office already, someone needs to call DeMint.

Another trend is fun to see but stands as no great surprise.  The sisters from Maine, Senators Snowe and Collins compete for dead last among Republicans but still destroy every single Democrat.

Here is where it gets fun for conservatives.  There are five Republican House members making strong bids for the Senate.  None of them ranks lower than the Senator being challenged.   In Missouri, Roy Blunt is running extremely hard and looks almost a shoe-in to replace Kit Bond.  Bond ranks a surprisingly low 35 out of 40 on the conservative scale.  By contrast, Roy Blunt would join the Senate as the 6^th most conservative on the L’IGGE scale.    Illinoisans may finally be so fed up with infamous Chicago Democrat corruption that they will elect Republican Congressman Mark Kirk.  While the Illinois Tea Party activists preferred Patrick Hughes, it may be a nice consolation prize to hear that Mark Kirk at 23, is eight points to the right of Bond.  It is important to note, that Kirk is pro-choice while Bond is pro-life.  Also, because the House and Senate members do not take the identical votes, comparisons are imperfect yet illustrative.

This data will surprise a lot of patriotic Tea Party activists who are disappointed by Mssrs Blunt and Kirk for support for the high profile TARP and “cash for clunkers” votes.   High profile votes however, often overshadow the facts in balance.  According to Kurlowski, “I think it is a fair assessment to say that Blunt has compiled a more conservative record in the House, than Bond has in the Senate. The DW-Nominate scores show it, and ideological rankings from major interest groups on both sides of the aisle confirm the data.”   The same surprisingly, applies to Kirk.  So the Illinoisans who suffered under liberals Durbin (10^th), Burris (97^th) and Obama, for many years left casting an occasional jealous gaze across the Mighty Mississippi River upon Missourians who enjoyed 18 years of Kit Bond’s leadership, now have the opportunity to install a centrist technically  more conservative than Bond!  Happy Day!

All told, taking the House and vastly improving the Senate, conservatives have a lot to be excited about.  The next vote will be for a Republican Speaker, and quite possibly, Republican Senate Majority Leader.   The next task for patriots is to challenge their delegates to vote for conservative leadership.  You rose up and elected them, now tell them what you want.

Graham also said Kagan “meets the test” the Framers envisioned for a Supreme Court Justice.

“I am going to vote for Elena Kagan because I believe constitutionally she meets the test the Framers envisioned for someone to serve on the Court,” said Graham. “I don’t think the Framers ever envisioned Lindsey Graham from South Carolina voting no because President Obama picked someone who is clearly different than I would have chosen.”

Sen. Graham was one of only five Republicans to vote to confirm Kagan to the Supreme Court. The other four were Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. The Senate confirmed Kagan, 63-37, on Thursday, Aug. 5. Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the only Democrat who voted against the confirmation of Kagan.

By now, of course, most Americans have become skeptical of such claims. We were to told that the so-called “stimulus” bill would bring unemployment down, and we learned that its main function was to reward constituencies favoring the party in power. It increased dramatically the salaries of those within the federal civil service, it expanded that civil service massively, and it enabled the state governments and the localities to continue to pay those who worked within the public sector at those levels. Similar lies were told during the healthcare debate. We were told that no one would lose his coverage, that no one would be forced to acquire health insurance, that the cost curve would be bent downward. It is proper to ask whether we are being lied to now and whether Senators Brown, Collins, and Snowe have sold us down the river.

The answer depends – to a considerable degree – on what were the causes of the recent financial crisis. Was it caused by a market failure? If so, is it likely that governmental regulation will prevent such failures in the future? These are the claims advanced by Paul Krugman and the like; these are the claims put forward by President Obama, Senator Dodd, and Congressman Frank. And, on the face of it, they would appear to be true. There was, after all, a bubble in the real estate market. Goldman Sachs and the like marketed junk bonds, made up of mortgages, on a gigantic scale and managed to get for them a triple-A rating from S&P and from Moody’s, and insurance against default was purchased from outfits like AIG that had no idea of the risks involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve could and should have intervened.

But one must be cautious about calling what happened “a case of market failure,” for the real-estate market was not a free market. One could, of course, reply that no market is a genuinely free market. The “free market” is an ideal type. It does not exist in reality. The government interferes and gives shape to virtually every market through taxation, regulation, and laws detailing how contracts are to be enforced.

These objections are all too true. But they are not pertinent to this particular case – for, in the years leading up to the crisis, the real-estate market was structured and regulated by the federal government in a particularly dangerous way.

The mortgage market is not a great mystery. It has existed for a very long time, and by a process of trial and error bankers have learned to calculate the risks. Long ago, they figured out to whom they could safely make loans and under what conditions. If one is provided with the proper information, it is not hard to judge whether a prospective borrower proposes to pay substantially more than the property he intends to buy is worth and whether he is likely to be able to pay back what he is loaned and can be relied upon to do so. One can easily enough discover how much he makes, whether he is in a profession where he may soon lose his job, and whether he has in the past consistently paid off his loans. Where there are doubts, an interview by a canny loan officer can clear up a lot. Moreover, it makes good sense to require that a borrower put down on the house or condominium he proposes to buy at least 20% of the price. A borrower who has a substantial amount of skin the game is far less likely to default.

Why, then, did the mortgage market produce so great a crisis? For one simple reason: the banks were not allowed to do their job. Starting under the Clinton administration, when Andrew Cuomo was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, local banks were required to ignore what had been learned about the likelihood of default and to loan money to prospective borrowers who did not meet the standards previously maintained. As a consequence, prospective borrowers with insufficient income and bad credit were given loans they were most unlikely to be able to service, and they were not required to put down anything more than a nominal sum.

This practice – the issuing of what came to be called sub-prime loans – was justified on the grounds that, at one time, banks were cautious about making real-estate loans to people who lived in poorer parts of town. This was called red-lining. Its critics claim that the motives for red-lining were racist, and there may be something to the charge. But, before simply accepting the truth of this claim, we should consider whether loans made on real estate in such neighborhoods were not in ordinary circumstances exceedingly risky. The sub-prime loan scam was a species of what is euphemistically called “affirmative action.”

Why, one might ask, did the banks not cry wolf when Andrew Cuomo came knocking at their doors? Here the answer is that the Clinton administration offered them the means to offload these loans and all of the attendant risks onto others. This is where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac came in. The former was founded in 1938 and turned into a publicly-owned, government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) in 1968. The latter was founded as a GSE in 1970. Both were designed to expand the secondary market in mortgages, which they bought from banks and re-packaged as bonds to sell to investors. All of this was aimed at increasing the supply of funds available for mortgages and at reducing thereby the interest rate charged. In the Clinton years, at the insistence of Andrew Cuomo and others in the administration, these two entities began systematically buying up the sub-prime loans that the banks were forced to issue. These they repackaged along with other loans, and the bonds created in this fashion were sold to investment banks, which sold them in turn to individuals, pension funds, and the like. What began under the Clinton administration was expanded at the insistence of George W. Bush. What a fine thing it would be, thought he, if more and more Americans owned their homes?

Why, one might then ask, did the investment bankers, the individual investors, and the managers of pension funds not recognize the risks they were taking? Here the culprit is a man named Alan Greenspan, and one might mention Ben Bernanke as well. Greenspan chaired the Federal Reserve Board for nearly twenty years – from 1987 to 2006. That institution was created in 1913, in response to the financial panic of 1907, for the purpose of manipulating interest rates and advancing loans to banks in such a fashion as to head off financial crises. Its remit has been expanded and its focus readjusted at intervals since. Its creation and the expansion of its responsibilities are based, however, on the presumption that a small number of experts, located in Washington, DC, can more efficiently manage the money supply and the market for money than an unfettered market would.

From time to time, we have been reminded that this presumption is highly questionable. The financial crisis that descended upon us in 2008 was one such occasion. To put it bluntly, Alan Greenspan in the 1990s and in the first five years of the new millennium did what he could to keep interest rates low, duplicating the blunder made by the Federal Reserve Board in the 1920s. The result was what, at a speech delivered in my presence at a dinner put on by the American Enterprise Institute, he called “irrational exuberance” in the markets.

What Greenspan had in mind when he gave that talk was the dot-com bubble. What he failed to recognize was that he and his colleagues had produced that bubble. They had kept interest rates artificially low. It was unusually cheap to borrow money because the supply seemed endless, and people borrowed for the purpose of investment, bid up the price of stocks, and others jumped on the bandwagon. When that bubble burst, Greenspan kept interest rates low, and a real-estate bubble emerged in precisely the same fashion.

But this was not all. Interest rates were so low that the sub-prime market expanded on a grand scale at the same time, and the banks had no reason not to loosen standards further. After all, cheap loans are easier for borrowers to service – and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were prepared to buy these loans as well, and this meant lots of work and income for the rating agencies as long as they went with the flow and refrained from acknowledging that what was going on was a scam.

Was there corruption on Wall Street? You bet. Did the rating agencies engage in fraud? I fear as much. But, given the well-known propensity of human beings for excess and greed, this is what one would expect.  In the 1920s, the easy-money policy of the Fed produced irrational exuberance in the markets, and the same thing happened under Alan Greenspan.

How could it have been avoided? If Andrew Cuomo had not interfered in the mortgage market, there would have been no subprime mortgages. If Alan Greenspan had not kept interest rates artificially low, there would not have been so much cash sloshing about in search of high returns. Of course, if the folks at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehmann Brothers, S&P, and Moody’s had been paragons of virtue, caution, and thrift, we might also have avoided the worst. But can one expect this sort of virtue from moneymen? Or from anyone else? The temptation to make a quick killing is hard to resist – especially if your aim is to make a bundle from the outset.

I do not mean to argue that the market, if left unfettered, would never produce a bubble. On any given day, a lot of people will pay too much for a particular stock, the bonds of a particular institution, and for real estate, and sometimes dimwits will jump on the bandwagon. But, if the market is left relatively free, what goes up too high will quickly come down as others identify and capitalize on the blunders of those who have overpaid. What the government does, when it interferes unduly in markets, is to magnify those blunders. Andrew Cuomo thought that he was being clever; so did Robert Rubin (both when he was Secretary of the Treasury and when he bankrupted Citibank); and, alas, so did George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan. They all thought that they understood what no central administrator has or can have at hand the information needed for understanding. The financial crisis of 2008 was caused by an easily predictable failure on the part of those who pretend to be expert at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “rational administration.”

Does the financial reform address this failure? Not at all. It pretends to be the cure when it is, in fact, an aggravation of the disease. It presupposes that the antidote for a crisis caused by attempts on the part of the government to manipulate the mortgage market is more government interference in the financial markets.

This is, of course, what one would expect from Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. After all, when Alan Greenspan and the administration of George W. Bush finally became concerned about the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Dodd, Frank, and their fellow Democrats blocked the Bush administration’s attempt to rein in these GSEs.

In short, a number of the doctors most responsible for infecting us with the disease from which we now suffer have taken charge of supplying us with a cure.

And Senators Brown, Collins, and Snowe? Well, they have a lot to answer for.

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.