Josh Marshall sums up the latest pronouncement from Susan Collins with a simple word: Lucy. Like Scott Brown, Collins had provisions in the bill, having gotten amendments in during the Senate floor process, and like Brown is now playing hard to get.
But she's worried about the politics back home since the teabaggers hijacked the Maine Republican Party, and now she is fretting that she might just not be able to vote to pass this bill. And for the "fiscally disciplined" Senator who just couldn't bring herself to vote for jobless benefits or state aid last week, her reason is typically hypocritical: fees on banks and hedge funds that were added in conference in order to bring the CBO score for the bill in line.
"It was not part of either the House or Senate bill and was added in the wee hours of the morning. So I'm taking a look at the specifics of that and other provisions as well," Collins told reporters this evening outside the Senate chamber.
If both she and Brown oppose financial reform over bank fees, it could stall or even kill the legislation.
With Feingold a definite no vote, Reid is going to have to get Snowe, Grassley, and Cantwell on board, should Collins come down definitively as opposed. It's a situation that the administration unwittingly had a part in creating, presumably on the assumption that they could count on Collins and Brown, when it sided with Brown over the Volcker Rule loopholes he was pressing.
"Treasury's official position went from opposed to [the loophole] to supportive," one aide says. "They may have [even] overshot Brown's desires by a bit."
The variant of the Volcker rule in the Wall Street reform bill, authored by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), is meant to limit the extent to which federally insured financial firms can make risky bets with their profits.
In siding with Brown, the administration tacitly accepted that Sens. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), who opposed the bill from the left, would continue to oppose it after the conference committee.
Cantwell has remained mum thus far on her intentions, as have Snowe and Grassley.