richard durbin

As the Senate idles awaiting a procedural vote on unemployment legislation — a vote that’s held up activity on all other pending legislation and nominations — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) this morning offered a solution that might speed things up: “Maybe [Republicans] needed another ACORN amendment,” Reid said, with no lack of sarcasm. [...]

The Senate will hold a procedural vote tomorrow at 12:15 p.m. to limit debate on legislation extending unemployment benefits in all states, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) just announced on the chamber floor. Senate rules mandate that the final vote can’t come earlier than 30 hours after the cloture vote. To expedite final passage, however, Durbin [...]

A group of 10 Democratic senators today reintroduced legislation designed to end the sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine — a long-standing push that never quite seems to get enacted.
In a statement, the lawmakers cite the reasoning behind the proposal.
Under current law, possession of five grams of crack cocaine (roughly the weight of two [...]

Earlier today, the Treasury Department revealed that the administration’s anti-foreclosure program — which encourages banks to alter mortgages voluntarily — has enrolled roughly 360,000 struggling homeowners in trial modifications.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) is hardly impressed.
The upper-chamber’s second-ranking Democrat issued a statement just hours later pointing out that almost precisely the same number of [...]

In a full-page spread in Roll Call Wednesday Thursday, a long list of business executives are trumpeting their support for an unlikely proposal: Legislation that would rein in the influence of business over congressional lawmakers.
“We are on the receiving end of Senators’ and Representatives’ endless fund-raising calls,” the ad reads. “And trust us: we hate [...]

Perhaps emboldened by a rare victory over the gun lobby last week, a group of liberal senators introduced legislation Wednesday to prevent people convicted of felonies overseas from owning firearms.
The proposal attempts to close a loophole created by a 2005 Supreme Court decision, which found that the prohibition on gun ownership applies only to felons [...]

As Mike Lillis reported yesterday, a small group of Senate Democrats is pushing to revive the mortgage loan cramdown idea — a sure sign of frustration as foreclosures continue to pile up. The Senate in April defeated a cramdown proposal, which  involves allowing federal judges to modify, or cramdown, the terms of a mortgage for [...]

The latest word on the Justice Department’s Office Of Professional Responsibility review of the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted the so-called “torture memos” is that the report concludes that the the lawyers committed “serious lapses in judgment,” as The New York Times puts it in a front page story today, but they should [...]

That’s what Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who sponsored the bankruptcy reform bill that was slaughtered in the Senate Thursday, is saying. From The Hill:
“I don’t know what the next step will be,” said Durbin before the vote. “It’ll surely be the conference committee and hopefully the House can keep some aspect of bankruptcy reform in [...]

Last week, we laid out the congressional battle-lines in the looming fight over how to regulate payday lenders. Today, The New York Times weighs in with a biting suggestion: kill the industry and shed no tears.
Payday loans — advances that are to be repaid on payday — are so burdensome and so pernicious that in [...]