Eighteen months later, with no confirmation vote in sight, Sullivan says he realized “it didn’t seem likely the impasse was going to be resolved, and a confirmation didn’t seem in the offing in the foreseeable future.”

The impasse Sullivan mentions is a reference to the hold that was placed by Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) on his nomination, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. McCain and Feingold weren’t so much opposed to Sullivan as they were frustrated that the Obama administration had not chosen to nominate good replacements for all the commissioners whose terms had expired. But, here, the plot grows even thicker:

Why hasn’t Obama done so? Traditionally, nominees to the FEC are presented as a pair, replacing one Democratic and one Republican commissioner whose terms have expired. The White House almost always defers to the other party’s Senate leader to select his party’s nominee. But, as Sullivan explains, there was little movement by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell toward giving President Obama a name to replace Commissioner Donald McGahn. Rather than breaking with that tradition and risking a major fight with the Senate GOP, Obama has refrained from nominating replacements for either.

Both McConnell’s intransigence and Obama’s lack of resolve could therefore be said to be guilty in perpetuating the ongoing regulatory breakdown on FEC, but so too is the horribly time-consuming structure of the Senate confirmation process itself, notes Sullivan:

“The problem with cloture,” he says, “is not the vote but the amount of floor time it takes in the Senate.” Sullivan says “it is an incredible distraction to occupy the Senate with a nomination like mine with so many other pressing matters on the floor.” Even if cloture is invoked with approval of at least 60 senators, Senate rules provide for 30 more hours of floor debate — precious time, especially given a full Senate docket that included health care, financial services, the budget, and two Supreme Court confirmations.

Indeed, if every presidential appointee requiring Senate confirmation had to be put to a cloture vote, the Senate would hardly have time for anything else. Faced with the prospect of fighting McConnell and wasting precious floor time in the Senate too, the Obama administration apparently chose to punt on the issue instead and let the FEC soldier on in its beleaguered state a little longer.

Immediately following the vote, Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a nonpartisan organization that works to reduce the influence of money in American politics, issued a statement that argued, “No one should be deluded by today’s vote into thinking this battle is over.” He vowed that efforts to pass the DISCLOSE Act would continue in September, at which point some of the objections raised by Republican Sens. Snowe and Collins of Maine and Sen. Brown of Massachusetts about the timing of the bill would no longer apply:

Senator Snowe, Collins and Brown all raised concerns about passing the DISCLOSE Act in a time frame that would allow the new law to be effective for the 2010 congressional elections.

That is no longer a practical possibility.

We again strongly urge Senators Snowe, Collins and Brown, and any other Republican Senator interested in government transparency, to work with Senate supporters of the DISCLOSE Act to reach an agreement that they can support and that will reflect the interests of the American people.

This is no time for any Senator who is serious about campaign finance disclosure laws and government transparency to abandon the effort to ensure that voters know who is spending money to influence their votes.

In other words, now that the bill will likely not be brought up for another vote until September, Democracy 21 is arguing that it will not become effective quickly enough to have a large impact on the 2010 congressional races. That said, the language in the bill currently states that the new disclosure requirements must go into effect 30 days after the law’s enactment, so a mid-September passage could have advertisers scrambling to comply during the last few weeks of the election cycle.

That leaves Senate Democrats where they’ve so often found themselves this past year — with 59 votes, one shy of breaking a Republican filibuster and opening debate.

That’s not to say Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) won’t try again, however. Democrats feel the political momentum is on their side and may very well keep raising the issue between now and midterm elections in order to press their advantage.

UPDATE: Fox News initially reported that Sen. Lieberman was attending a friend’s funeral. They have issued a correction that states it was actually a family member’s funeral. This blog post has been updated to reflect that change.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) reworked the DISCLOSE Act last week to address Republican concerns. (Bryan Smith/ZUMA Press)

On Monday afternoon, President Obama convened a press conference in the Rose Garden to promote legislation that would counteract the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which held that corporate spending on campaign ads can’t be restricted under the First Amendment. The DISCLOSE Act would require corporations, unions and nonprofit groups to disclose more details about their political advocacy and fundraising. According to Obama, it’s a no-brainer.

[Congress1] “You’d think that reducing corporate and even foreign influence over our elections would not be a partisan issue. But of course, this is Washington in 2010,” he joked. “On issue after issue, we are trying to move America forward, and they keep on trying to take us back.”

With the DISCLOSE Act, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) scheduled for a cloture vote Tuesday afternoon in the Senate, Obama and fellow Democrats finally feel confident that they’re on solid political ground. The populace might be divided on the merits of the stimulus package, health care reform and the financial regulatory overhaul, but polls show that 85 percent of Americans worry that corporations have captured too much influence in the political system today and 77 percent think Congress should support measures to limit the amount U.S. corporations can spend to influence elections.

As a result, Democrats are pushing forward with a vote on the bill despite every indication that they won’t reach the 60 votes necessary to break a Republican filibuster. But campaign finance reform groups are confident that even if the bill doesn’t pass, there will be political repercussions for Republican senators who choose to vote against it. And that just might encourage Democrats to keep bringing it to the floor until enough of their colleagues across the aisle change their minds.

After the DISCLOSE Act passed the House last month, good government groups immediately turned their attention to moderate Republicans in the Senate whose support would be necessary to beat a filibuster. They zeroed in on Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who promised in his Senate campaign to bring greater transparency to Washington, and Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, who have championed campaign finance legislation in the past.

Snowe and Collins, however, have refused to come out in favor of the bill, while Brown openly repudiated it. Collins and Brown, in particular, have argued the bill wasn’t written in good faith because it provided an unfair advantage to unions by exempting funds attributable to dues from the new disclosure rules.

Not to be deterred, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill’s original sponsor, released new language last Thursday to address the senators’ concerns. Speaking Monday on a call with reporters, he remained optimistic about getting 60 votes but also keenly aware of the optics of the vote before the August recess.

With the House disclosure exemptions for union dues removed, the bill is now “completely balanced,” Schumer argued. “It will be a true test of many of our Republican colleagues about whether they are in favor of a fair process.”

The senators from Maine, who both voted for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in 2002, are once again the targets of intense lobbying on the part of groups advocating for greater transparency in Washington.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a DISCLOSE Act co-sponsor who participated on the call, made a special effort to single out Collins for her previous support for “Stand By Your Ad,” campaign finance legislation she partnered with Wyden to sponsor as far back as 1996. And several advocacy groups banded together in Maine to call in and write letters to the two senators’ offices urging them to support the bill.

But democracy and campaign finance reform groups aren’t sure Reid’s rushed schedule will give them time to convince enough senators to vote for the bill — at least not before Tuesday’s vote.

“I don’t know if this time around the Republican offices will have time to digest it all,” said Meredith McGehee, policy directer for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that works primarily on campaign finance and elections. “Even if not, however, it will jump start the conversation because there’s a lot of misinformation out there.”

Indeed, despite claims from some Republicans that the DISCLOSE Act limits organizations’ First-Amendment right to free speech, Lisa Gilbert, democracy advocate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a network of state watchdog organizations, argued that disclosure requirements aren’t just constitutional — they’ve been backed by Republicans many times in the past.

“Republicans have always championed disclosure instead of campaign finance [limits],” she said. “It’s hard at this point to hear a real argument about why they’re opposed to disclosure.”

As a result, even if the DISCLOSE Act doesn’t muster 60 votes on Tuesday, both McGehee and Gilbert predict that Democrats will feel the political wind at their backs and raise the issue again before midterms, most likely in September. Despite the past support from some GOP members for disclosure laws, however, campaign rhetoric from both sides of the aisle is making the bill’s passage all the more divisive.

“I’ve spent a lot of time talking with offices trying to explain the provisions, and once you explain it they’re like, ‘Oh, OK,’” said McGehee. “It’s been that kind of process — hard to get people to focus on the details when there’s been so much focus on the politics and the optics of it all.”

The Senate is no longer taking any new amendments to the Dodd bill, but is allowing secondary amendments tacked on to other amendments. At the literal third-to-last minute yesterday, Dodd amended Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s (D-Ark.) controversial derivatives language, which would have forced banks to spin off their derivatives trading desks into separately financed entities. Brady Dennis at The Washington Post offers a good explanation of the derivatives compromise language and the trouble it has caused in the last 24 hours:

Dodd offered a clever Washington solution aimed to appease both friends and foes of the provision. His amendment preserves the tough language — but it postpones any action for two years so it can be studied. And it assigns that study to a new council of regulators, headed by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, whose members have serious reservations about such a dramatic measure and may very well kill it in the end.

Voila. Language saved, action averted. Move on.

Problem is, the idea didn’t sit so well with Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), chief advocate of the derivatives ban, who was in Arkansas on Tuesday fighting for her Senate seat in a primary election. (Her bid to secure the nomination fell short, setting up a June 8 runoff election.) When contacted about Dodd’s proposal, staff members seemed unaware of it. They later sent out a statement on Lincoln’s behalf. “I remain fully committed to my provision and will fight efforts to weaken it,” she said. “I’m proud of the support my provision has received both inside and outside the Senate and will defend it should there be a debate on the Senate floor.”

Nor did the banks cheer Dodd’s compromise. “It’s immediately going to have a chilling effect,” said one banking lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely. “Markets crave certainty. All this does is introduce a comic amount of uncertainty.”

But if the compromise brings Republicans over to vote for the bill, it will stay. Notably, the Dodd bill punts on a number of issues — including, for instance, the Volcker Rule banning proprietary trading at federally insured banks.

Here are the remaining amendments to the Dodd bill. Not all will receive a vote:

• Sen. Sam Brownback’s (R-Kans.) amendment to exclude automakers from from the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
• Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Mark Pryor’s (D-Ark.) amendment on small business fairness, which might exempt small businesses from CFPA rules.
• Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D-Pa.) amendment of section 20 of the Securities and Exchange Act, allowing private civil action against people that violate certain SEC laws.
• Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) amendment to restore the application of federal antitrust laws to health insurers.
• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) amendment to give states stronger authority to protect consumers from usurious lenders.
• Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) amendment to limit affiliations with certain member banks.
• Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Richard Lugar’s (R-Ind.) amendment to require the disclosure of payments by resource extraction issuers.
• Sen. Richard Shelby’s (R-Ala.) amendment to make the Consumer Financial Protection Agency funded by Congress, rather than the Federal Reserve.
• Sen. David Vitter’s (R-La.) amendment exempting manufacturers and entrepreneurs from some regulations.

• Sen. Judd Gregg’s (R-N.H.) amendment to prohibit taxpayer bailouts of fiscally irresponsible state and local governments was withdrawn.
• Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) amendment on the applicability of state laws to national banks failed, 43-55.
• Sen. Tom Carper’s (D-Del.) amendment on the applicability of state laws to national banks passed, 80-18.
• Sen. Byron Dorgan’s (D-N.D.) secondary amendment to ban naked credit default swaps was tabled, 57-38.

Dodd and Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have repeatedly slammed Republicans for blocking the start of formal debate on the bill, saying that they are keeping negotiations secret and that the two parties should hammer out their differences on the floor.

In truth, the two bills are not that dissimilar. One major change in the Republican proposal — the reform of Fannie and Freddie — is too complex to insert into the Dodd bill. But many other changes would be easy to sub in. Senate staffers say negotiations are centering on the Democrats’ adoption of the Republican version of resolution authority, which is virtually identical in the Republican proposal except that that any losses incurred by the government are recouped after the formal liquidation, rather than before (via the Obama bill’s $50 billion fund).

The Republicans viewed as most likely to switch continue to be Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio).

From The New York Times:

Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the newly elected Republican, was the first to join Democrats in backing the measure. He was then joined by Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, George Voinovich of Ohio and Christopher Bond of Missouri, who voted after it became obvious Democrats would prevail.