In another move that surprised absolutely no one, the House of "Representatives" today voted down H.R. 6604, the House version of the energy speculation bill, by a vote of 276-151. Wait, you ask, how do you lose a vote with more people voting 'yea' than 'no'? Those sneaky foxes brought the bill to the floor under "suspension of the rules," which changes the requirements to now force a bill to have a 2/3 vote to pass.
Why use the suspension procedure for a bill that has 276 votes but not 290 (2/3 of a full House)? Ah, here's another part of the trick. Suspensions can't be amended and aren't subject to motions to recommit. The fear was that under regular order, Republicans would have offered a motion to recommit that would have lifted offshore drilling bans, and enough Democrats would have crossed over to support it that it would have passed.
So instead, the speculation bill in the House requires 2/3 to pass, and goes down, while over in the Senate, officially known as the "most out of touch and arrogant group of people on the planet" (which is where we found our two presidential candidates) their bill also went down, though it needed just 3/5 (the famed 60 votes) to get past the filibuster.
So, here's what happened, constituents wanted a bill addressing the obvious problem of oil speculation passed. Congress, seeing that it could actually pass and piss off their friends on Wall Street, conveniently changed the rules in order for it to fail. Not only that, but now the bill cannot be resubmitted.
Fingers will point, rhetoric will fly, and once again, nothing meaningful gets done. You'll continue to pay high gas, food and materials prices, and Congress will pound their chest about taking "meaningful action."
But you know the truth.
Angry yet?
http://www/crazymanseconomics.com 
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