There doesn’t seem to be any point in my pretending not to be thrilled by the historic House vote that sent health care reform legislation to President Obama.   

The victory is even more astounding when you consider that just a few short weeks ago health care reform was being pronounced dead upon the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, an event that denied Democrats the magic 60 votes they needed to get anything done in the dysfunctional Senate.

Credit for this amazing revivification must go to President Obama for finally—finally!–making an all-out push to get his signature issue passed into law.  Part of the reason that this took more than a year of agonizing twists and turns is that the President was too reticent for far too long.  Yet in the end, he can take pride in the historic victory.

Credit must equally go, however, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who pulled off a feat that was deemed impossible—getting the House to ratify the Senate version of health care reform.

Despite the factionalization of Democrats in the House, Speaker Pelosi was able to make it happen.  Bravo, Madame Speaker.  Somehow your persuasiveness and doggedness did not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

It is also so refreshing and even inspiring to see that in the end demagoguery and malicious falsehoods did not triumph.  We shouldn’t expect that the braying from the GOP will stop any time soon, however.  They see political gold in disseminating smears about the bill, but time will tell.

What this shows is that the President and Democrats need to continue pressing their story and the benefits of this bill for millions and millions of Americans.

I find it interesting that while the President used the insurance companies as whipping boys in the last stretch of his campaign to get the bill passed, those same insurers didn’t say ‘To hell with it.’  They protested the ‘vilification,’ all right, but somehow were able to keep focused on the balm of millions of new customers amid the public lashings.

This is by no means the radical bill that the right would have you believe. This is no government takeover of health care. If it was, there would be no place for private insurers in it. A government takeover would be something like Medicare for all and this legislation doesn’t even come close to that.

This bill may not be perfect but it goes a long way toward eliminating the stain of having America be the only major democracy in the world whose citizens were not guaranteed health coverage.  And for that, we can hold our heads higher.

It’s obvious from the fight that’s going on in Congress over whether to even form a Consumer Protection Agency and where to put it that American consumers have a major problem: Namely, that collectively they don’t have even one pocket deep enough for Congress to fit in.

This is in stark contrast to the banking industry’s pockets, which in their depth rival the fabled Mindanao Deep in the Pacific Ocean.  Now those are pockets, buddy. Pockets that are certainly large enough and deep enough to accommodate any number of senators and representatives, not to mention candidates for those revered offices.

You would think from the so-called debate that is going on that consumers all over this country were not the ones who were grievously injured by banks run amok during the lead-up to the cataclysm now known as the Great Recession.  That these same consumers weren’t taken to the cleaners by mortgage bankers.  That they didn’t have their clocks cleaned by predatory credit card practices that show how truly innovative banks can be.  That they weren’t harmed—and are still not being harmed—by the lack of credit availability from banks that are getting funds supplied by the Fed at next to no cost, but are using those same funds to trade for their own advantage.

And even more ironic, within the context of the wholesale amnesia that has seemingly taken hold of Congress since the events of September 2008, it is now the banks that are making the case that they need protection from being over-regulated!

So, what is one “compromise” shaping up to protect consumers?  It is to put an agency with that responsibility within the precincts of the Federal Reserve Board. 

Yes, the Fed, that same agency whose myopia during the buildup of the housing bubble rivaled Mr. Magoo’s.  Yes, the Fed, which back in those days of high-flying financial recklessness seemed to have no clue about what kind of exotics those banks it was supposed to be regulating were using—and just how awfully much they were on the hook for.

As a consumer myself I find the idea of expecting the Fed to take my side against the banks more than faintly ludicrous.

So what’s going on here? Is it that since they did such a bad job the last time around we owe them one more shot to get it right?

I’m with Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who has nothing but scorn for the idea.  He told Politico recently, “It’s almost a bad joke.”

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be the first time that a bad joke ended up as law.  Think of the Bush tax legislation that let the estate tax disappear for the year 2010 only to be resurrected at 2001 rates in 2011.  Or think about the Medicare prescription drug bill with its notorious doughnut hole.  I could go on, but you get the point.

So, the bottom line as I see it is that no matter what Sen. Richard Shelby, the banking industry’s white knight, thinks, it is consumers who need protection and they need an independent agency to make sure it happens.  No joke.

By this time we all know how very very difficult it is to get anything done in the U.S. Senate, so it is not surprising that Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., was upset about President Obama’s proposals regarding banks—what businesses they can or cannot be in under certain conditions and how big they should be.

One can understand the annoyance of the soon to be retired senior senator from the Nutmeg state who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.  After all, members of his committee have been paired off for months working on different facets of financial reform so that the Senate can have a bipartisan solution to hold up to the world.

Never mind that by the time Dodd’s committee finally puts something out, whatever the plan is will have taken longer to gestate than an elephant.  And the similarity, friends, is not likely to end there. 

So much time will have gone by that we will almost have forgotten what the impetus for financial reform was—and maybe that’s the point.  After all, banks are minting money again (although still not lending it), bank bonuses are in the pre-meltdown range (if not higher) and money from bank lobbyists is gushing. 

It’s obviously ‘What, me worry?’ time again in the good old U.S.A.

So what does the president do when these months-long negotiations between Banking Committee members are reaching a critical point?  He comes along and crashes the party.

I guess he didn’t realize just how delicate these negotiations are, how their fragility could be shattered by wanting too much from the legislation.

The New York Times quoted Dodd as saying that the administration was “’getting precariously close’ to excessive ambition for the legislation.” 

Dodd added: “I don’t want to be in a position where we end up doing nothing because we tried to do too much.”

While I feel your pain, senator, I’m also thinking that maybe the president has seen how unrewarding it has been to pretty much hand over major initiatives on health care reform and financial services reform to Congress.  Maybe he has seen the error of his ways and decided to start flexing a bit of executive power.

Maybe he just wants to get something done.  And let’s face it, that hasn’t seemed to bother you or your fellow committee members very much.