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Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Carry the News -- How Interesting is This?
The front page of today's WaPo has another Jeff Birnbaum job with "news" that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has privately told lobbyists he does not plan to bring a carried interest bill to the Senate floor this calendar year.
First of all, this qualifies as news, let alone front-page above-the-fold news? Reid has been saying repeatedly for three months that he did not intend to bring such a bill to the full Senate in 2007.
Second, consider this sentence from the Birbaum piece: "Rather than citing the lobbying push, Reid implied that the reason had to do with the lack of time on the jammed Senate schedule." Exactly, as Reid has been implying all along, if the Senate Finance Commmittee is talking about a stand-alone carried interest bill, that wasn't going to happen. It would be attached to something else like AMT as an offset, and that decision is up to Senator Baucus and the Finance Committee.
"News" to the contrary, Senate Finance Commmittee chair Max Baucus (D-MT) has said he is "very interested" in moving carried interest legislation this fall. Given the sorts of things it might be attached to (like an AMT patch, which everyone wants to do) there are plenty of reasons to think a lot of Senators would support it."
That's really the news on the carried interest front from over the summer. Now that it's fall, let's hope WaPo carries the real news.
Posted by Dana Chasin
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