The House GOP wants to be heard, which seems fair. But even with a weekend to mull it over it seems they have two major hurdles to pass. First, do they have an idea that is better and remotely workable?  Rich Lowry has serious doubts listing a few problems with their scheme: “it’ll be hard to price the insurance; the only real up-side for the taxpayers will be the fees; it doesn’t address the capitalization problem or anything about all the bad debt clogging the system (a lot of this stuff is already insured, but no one wants to buy it because of the panic gripping the market). ” Second, in the real world you have to get others to go along and I see no one — not the Treasury, the White House, the Senate GOP, or the Democrats in either the House or Senate — showing the slightest interest in a radical transformation of the plan from a bailout to a private insurance pool. 

As the CNN report just noted, Hank Paulson has already rejected a private insurance scheme so the point of this isn’t clear. Is that fair? Should others have listened sooner? Unkown and utterly irrlevent. It would seem that if they “want to be heard” the House GOP stalwarts should start saying things that are feasible, constructive and doable.

And as for Harry Reid, he has not covered himself in glory as it becomes obvious what political blame game he is playing. Unfortunately for Reid, too many people saw and knew what was going on to keep up the pretense. At some point when the Republicans come around to make a deal he’ll need a new excuse as to why McCain didn’t have something to do with that development.