Coburn had been angling all day, employing all kinds of parliamentary trickery. The Republican leadership distracted the Democratic leadership by threatening to filibuster a fairly low-level interior appointee. Somehow, Coburn got this amendment on the docket through scheming and trickery. This amendment was designed to kill the bill in the Senate by forcing a filibuster on the amendment. Coburn only thought he had 40 votes, but not 60. He didn't think he had the votes to pass this amendment or he wouldn't have offered it.

And it just so happens that the amendment is actually good law if you're a second-amendment-respecting Democrat like nearly every federal elected official in the Mountain time zone. Unlike the Bush rule, the amendment doesn't preempt state gun laws. Instead, it causes state law to apply on federal land. So whatever law Colorado has regarding guns in state parks will apply to guns in national parks.

After Heller, it's likely that the Supreme Court would have declared the Federal ban unconstitutional. Of course it would have been better not to have this totally unrelated amendment attached to consumer protection legislation, but have it passed on its own or as part of a related bill. But I think as a matter of gun law this is a reasonable compromise between an unconstitutional total ban and Bush's unconstitutional free pass, and I think it was brilliant gamesmanship on the part of Senate Democrats to call Coburn's bluff by dispensing with it forthwith.

More brilliant would have been to prevent the introduction of the amendment in the first place, but we go to war with the leadership we have.

We'll see what happens to it in conference. I think Dodd's got a point, but frankly he didn't complain very much. If he thought this amendment was really going to jeopardize the bill in the House after the House passed it with 370 votes, he would have thrown a fit, and he didn't.

Much ado about nothing I think.

And you should correct the statement that the Senate Banking Committee further watered down anything. The Senate bill is stronger than the House bill. That almost never happens, and was the point of Mike Lillis's article, even if he buried the lead nearly a third of the way in where he wrote that the Senate bill “goes further than both the House bill and new Federal Reserve rules to help consumers manage their cards.”

While it's true that some provisions aren't as fine-pointed as the Dodd/Udall bill originally had, it's also the combination of three bills (one of which Udall wrote years ago in the House) that include a far broader range of consumer protections than the original House bill.

It's rare that I'm pleased with the Senate, but today I am. Let's see if they can get the bill across the finish line. My faith is weak, but somewhat buoyed by how far it has gotten already in spite of the banking industry's cries.