Elizabeth Warren Hell-Raising On Senate Floor: 'Who Do You Work For?' (Citigroup, Duh)

Elizabeth Warren did a bit of outreach to Republicans today, urging them to remove from the omnibus budget bill that rollback of part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that we covered earlier today. If you really oppose government bailouts, she said, then why on earth would you vote for this measure that would allow FDIC insurance to bail out banks that lose money on derivatives trades -- those risky little gambles that crashed the world economy back in 2008? She notes that, on this one at least, she's in agreement with such radical commies as David Vitter and even Redstate, where a front page post today admitted,

So help me God, I have no way to refute the basic point that the Democrats are making about the CRomnibus fight right now. In fact, I might even go so far as to say they are right ... what possible good faith reason can the Republicans have for threatening to gum up the whole works over doing a favor to Wall Street? 

This is some prime Elizabeth Warren:

If big Wall Street banks want to gamble with their own money, so be it. Let them take their risks with their own money and let them live with the consequences of those risks. That's how markets are supposed to work. But they shouldn't get to gamble with government-insured money.

To make matters worse, Warren says the "fact sheet" describing the effect of the change isn't even remotely accurate: it's copied and pasted from a description of a completely different attempt to roll back a completely different financial reform -- a measure about the collateral needed for commodity loans. Warren says,

I don't know if Republican leaders in the House are deliberately trying to confuse their members into voting for a government bailout program, or whether they just can't keep straight all their efforts to gut financial reform.

Zing! Wonkette guest columnist offer guaranteed! And then the big summation:

Here's the bottom line: A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street. When the next bailout comes, a lot of people will look back to this vote to see who was responsible for putting the government back on the hook to bail out Wall Street.

Warren closed by asking Republican leaders, "Who do you work for? Wall Street, or the American people?"

We sure hope this thing gets killed. In fact -- dare we say it? -- stopping a government shutdown might not be worth allowing this poisonous fuckery to become law. And with a new Republican majority in the Senate, this may be the last chance to keep Wall Street from gambling with publicly insured deposits. Fine. Either do a short-term continuing resolution and come back with a better omnibus bill, or shut the bastard down.