The Slow Slow Slog of Housing Rescue

ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf reports from Capitol Hill: Now would seem to be a good time for a housing rescue to address the housing crisis.

Foreclosures were up 50 percent in June and the Bush administration is mulling what to do should in the event, however unlikely, that the government sponsored private mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fail, according to the Wall Street Journal.

And if you are one of the more than 8,000 Americans entering foreclosure each day, the housing crisis, as Sen. Chris Dodd exhorted on the Senate floor today, is a hurricane, house fire and earthquake all rolled into one.

"Every one of these is a mother, a father…When you wake up in the morning and have a foreclosure. You have to face your children. have to face your spouse. 250,000 will do that in the month of June. and we’re still here debating this bill," he said, later adding, "We can’t wait any longer. we’ve gone weeks now going through the parliamentary rigmarole here in the senate."

But the housing rescue package that has been debated for months in Congress is mired in procedural muck laid by Republicans in the Senate. While it will get unstuck within the next day, the housing rescue bill is far from final passage.

It faces obstacles from fiscally minded "Blue Dog" Democrats when it goes back to the House later this week. They are concerned that not all the tax provisions in the bill are accounted for elsewhere in the budget. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services, who wants to change several of the GSE reform provisions. Democrats in both houses say backroom negotiations have presented a way forward to solve those differences.

The bill has broad, bipartisan support in the Senate, but several Republicans who oppose it have delayed the bill, insisting that all procedural time be used. Even though the most controversial portion — a voluntary program to enable sub prime borrowers at risk of foreclosure to refinance into government-backed private loans — passed two weeks ago, Senators have spent days in quorum calls, without little actual debate, just to run out the clock on the few Republicans who oppose the bill. No more than 16 Senators have voted against the procedural motions on the bill and none gave a speech opposing it. Only 12 Senators opposed the procedural motion on Thursday. 84 Senators voted in favor of dispensing with the bill.

Senators have to wait as long as 30 hours before finally dispensing with the bill and sending it back over to the House for some final tweaks.

But even if an agreement forms between Democrats in the house and Democrats in the Senate and they wait out whatever new procedural muck the few Republicans throw up, the housing rescue faces a veto threat from President Bush. And that is part of the reason for the slow going. At the end of the day, if Senators who support a housing rescue package want something enacted into law, they have to pass it with enough votes to override that veto.