Clean bill my tushie

Heart over at Women’s Space linked to a great post by Lucinda Marshall about the bailout bill.  It begins:

Call me a lazy citizen, but it is 9 am and I have not yet finished reading the 451 page bailout bill that the Senate passed last night.  But then again, I’m guessing that none of the Senators read it either.

How else to explain that suddenly on page 115 there is a section titled “Energy Production Incentives” that goes on for well over a hundred pages.  My favorite provision in that particular section pertains to top-loading clothes washers (page 223).

Read the rest.  And read the bill itself here.

It’s funny that this happened, after House republicans said they would make sure it was a “clean bill”.  I suppose they can blame the democrats.  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell it is not possible to determine who lobbied Chris Dodd to get each one of those little extensions and revisions into this bill.  So I guess we can blame Dodd.

At first I was thinking he added all that to get the bill to pass, but the bill passed easily (263-171) so that doesn’t seem likely.  Although maybe those are provisions needed to get representatives to sign on.  That would make more sense, given it hasn’t yet passed in the house.  I never thought about that, but both houses of congress must need to worry not just about getting a bill to pass in their own house, but making it likely to pass in the other house.  Must be helpful to have friends in the other house.