Very good news from the Senate: agreement that all amendments will have a simple majority vote--only 51 votes will be needed to pass all amendments.
That's good news on the good stuff, but also means that weakening amendments will have a better chance of passing as well. It's going to be a wild few weeks, with something like 166 amendments currently filed. Don't expect to see all of them, many will be withdrawn.
And when the Senate decides to move, they prove that they can actually do it. In short order, they approved the nominations of three judges, Nancy D. Freudenthal to be District Judge for Wyoming (96-1); Denzil Price Marshall Jr. to be District Judge for the Eastern District of Arkansas (voice vote); and Gloria M. Navarro to be District Judge for Nevada (98-0).
Then it was on to the first two amendments of Wall Street reform. The Boxer amendment that would force the government to liquidate large institutions that run into trouble, prohibiting the use of taxpayer funding to prevent the liquidation of those institutions. It passed 96-1.
The second amendment is the Shelby-Dodd agreement that drops the $50 billion liquidation fund for a system that could undermine the whole "no taxpayer bailouts" part of the bill and the Democrats' rhetoric. Banks won't be paying into an FDIC kind of fund, but will have to pay after the fact. And that after-the-fact paying will actually be done by the Treasury which plans to loan the money to cover liquidation to the FDIC, then settle up by selling off the bank's assets. So Treasury actually will be using taxpayer funding for that initial liquidation. The amendment also puts into question "the viability of a bank tax, which at the same time makes the need for a bank tax all the more pressing."
Nonetheless, this not so great deal broke the logjam with Republicans, and secured significant GOP support, passing 93-5.