Republicans Laying Groundwork For Future Obstructionism?

Yesterday, Chris Bowers at Open Left noted:

The Senate Banking Committee just passed Chris Dodd’s financial reform bill 13-10, in an entirely party-line vote. The vote happened about 20 minutes after the mark-up began.

Pretty remarkable. Republicans have typically used a strategy of hundreds of weakening amendments to delay bills as long as possible at every stage of the process, including every committee hearing. In so doing, they have succeeded in getting hundreds of amendments adopted to these bills, and even in delaying bills by weeks or months (cough, Baucus, cough).

But not today. The bill just sailed through untouched. Bizarre.

My guess is that some number of Republicans privately felt a little silly saying that a Health Care Reform bill that they themselves wrote a lot of, is an extremist and utterly partisan document. So to avoid that, they decided to contribute nothing at all to the financial reform bill.

Of course, it doesn’t really matter much for the policy, because Dodd pre-compromised the bill. From what I’ve read, it’s not like the financial reforms are bad; they just don’t go one-tenth as far as they need to go.