What is going on in Congress?

I’m re-writing this post to take into account the latest information (it turns out that I was looking at reporting that was a day old). Apparently the Democratic leadership is circulating a draft bill that incorporates more Congressional oversight, warrants of some sort, executive pay limitations, and the right for bankuptcy judges to modify mortgage terms. Substantively this looks a lot better than the Paulson plan, but it’s unclear both how much of this stuff will make it into the final bill and whether the Dem leadership will roll over when Bush threatens a veto as he certainly will if all this stuff in in there.

It now looks like Bush’s speech tonight was designed to revive a deal that looked close to done yesterday but foundered today.

The basic principle — that enacting enormously significant legislation without anything like a normal deliberative process or public debate is generally a terrible idea — remains the same. The notion that this bill has to be adopted in the next couple of days seems increasingly a product of psychological and political blackmail rather than economic reality.

Also, the idea that McCain gets to unilaterally cancel the first debate is preposterous and should be treated as such. Obama should insist on taking part no matter what McCain does.

Update: Ian Welsh isn’t optimistic about what’s going on, but OTOH things still seem to be genuinely up in the air. David Sirota asks some obvious but important questions about what role Obama adviser Warren Buffett — who bought a $5 billion stake in Goldman Sachs today — has in all this.