Check out the AP spin on the delay of the cramdown bill today. I've never seen anyone get things so backward.

To hear them tell it, the New Dems and Blue Dogs are the Friends of The Little Man, while mustache-twisting schemers like John Conyers are plotting to do Big Banking's business. Watch them take otherwise accurate quotes and put them in a context that gives the reader the impression that the positions entirely reversed here:

In the House, Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., the head of the business-minded New Democrat Coalition, raised concerns during the private session that the measure omitted help for homeowners who aren't staring at bankruptcy but are buckling under burdensome mortgage payments.

House leaders said they had postponed a vote until next week to give Democrats time to meet with Obama's housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, about how the measure fits with his housing plan.

"There's an equity question here," said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., another member of the coalition. "The discussion has got to be, what's the benefit to the guy next door who is struggling to pay the bills, is paying the bills and isn't filing for bankruptcy?"

Democratic skeptics are worried "that this could be too hard on the banks," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the Judiciary Committee chairman who sponsored the bill.

I'm sure those words were actually said by the people they're attributed to, but if you haven't been following the development of this bill, you'd be perfectly justified in coming away with the impression that Tauscher and Perlmutter wanted more financial protection from banks for more homeowners and supported this bill, while Conyers wanted less and opposed it.

But for one thing, Conyers quote is meant to be expressing the sentiments of "Democratic skeptics," of which he is not one. That'd actually be people like Tauscher and Perlmutter he's thinking of. For another, the comments attributed to Tauscher and Perlmutter aren't actually pleas for increased protections for a broader class of homeowners, but rather their argument for why no one really deserves any protection at all. It's not fair to bail out homeowners who fell behind and went into bankruptcy while their hard-working neighbors who managed to keep up get no help -- so let's not help either of them.

So what about the substance of the issue itself? Where does the bill stand? I'd say it's in some danger over the next few days of being watered down even further. Last night it looked set to make it out of the House relatively unscathed, largely protected by the Rules Committee from damaging amendments. But with the delay in place, opponents will doubtless make one last run at extracting more weakening concessions. As I said earlier, if your Member of Congress tends to run with the Blue Dogs and/or the New Democrats, you might want to give them a call and warn them off of aligning themselves too closely with mortgage lenders in this climate, and to back off from weakening H.R. 1106.

It appears the House will conduct general debate only on H.R. 1106, the mortgage restructuring bill, and save votes on amendments and final passage for next week. So just procedural votes today -- ordering the previous question, then passage of the rule.

We'll see if the procedural voting gives us any hints on how voting on the underlying bill will go down. I doubt it. Anomalous votes are probably largely just people looking for freebie votes in opposition to the leadership, though they may well also include people who could end up opposing the bill, since there's considerable overlap with the hard-core contrarian/reactionary Dems among those who take every opportunity to rack up the freebies.

    H RES 190    
    QUESTION: On Ordering the Previous Question
    Underlying bill: H.R. 1106, home mortgage restructuring

We'll see later on who those 11 were and guess at what they were up to. Probably not that much correlation between the reasons for voting no on this and views on the underlying bill. After all, these were procedural votes, the first one (ordering the previous question) really just a vote on whether or not debate should end and voting on the rule for the bill (that being the pending business, and thus the "previous question"), but tracking it will help us decide that for sure.

UPDATE: The 11 -- Altmire, Barrow, Berry, Childers, Donnelly (IN), Hill, Kaptur, Matheson, Ross, Taylor, and Teague.

    H RES 190    
    QUESTION: On Agreeing to the Resolution
    Underlying bill: H.R. 1106, home mortgage restructuring

A few more freebie seekers on the rule, though the rule vote, even though procedural, might be tied more closely to actual objections to the underlying bill. It wouldn't be out of the question to expect something in the neighborhood of 20 Democrats to balk at final passage next week, though I think they're crazy for doing so.

UPDATE: The 26 -- Altmire, Barrow, Berry, Boswell, Bright, Chandler, Childers, Donnelly (IN), Ellsworth, Giffords, Hill, Kaptur, Kirkpatrcik (AZ), Kosmas, Kratovil, Kucinich, Massa, Matheson, Michaud, Minnick, Peterson, Ross, Schrader, Shuler, Taylor, and Teague

UPDATE 2: Should we regard the delay in debate and votes on amendments and final passage as an indication that opponents of the bill are angling for one last chance to kill or mortally wound it?

That's the only real explanation for the slowdown, although the numbers on the rule voting don't give that indication. It's entirely possible, though, that the opponents are well-disciplined enough to abide by a deal allowing general debate to go forward in exchange for the promise of a few days' delay.

The Hill reports that:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan will address Democrats Monday night to explain how cram-downs and other aspects of the mortgage bill fit into a larger Democratic effort to deal with the mortgage and foreclosure crisis.

"We want to put it in it's full context, that's all," Pelosi said Thursday.

Hopefully opponents will have their concerns addressed there, and won't thereafter stand in the way of getting this bill out the door to the Senate, at which point they'll be free to ruin it instead of having it ruined on the House side.

It's good politics, though, for House opponents to get out of the way if they can. I'm doubtful about how much real constituent support there is for a bill that facilitates getting people who are in over their heads on their mortgages back onto a path where they can actually pay something to their banks, rather than simply throw the keys at them in disgust and create trouble (not to mention still more financial losses) for everyone.

Either way, the bill's fate should be regarded as a little more uncertain than it was last night, and if your Member of Congress tends to run with the Blue Dogs and/or the New Democrats, you might want to give them a call and warn them off of aligning themselves with mortgage lenders in this climate.

The possibility exists that if more concessions are extracted, new amendments could be made in order if the Rules Committee reports out a second rule for the second half of debate. So we may have seen a step backward today from where we were last night, with the amendment situation settled and no real weakening opportunity in the offing.

Brad Miller (D-NC-13):

It is remarkable after all that has happened in the American economy to still hear the talking points of the banking industry and the securities industry repeated verbatim, without criticism, simply parroted.

The banking industry is really all about helping folks. That's what caused the problem. They were trying too hard to help people. They loaned perhaps not wisely, but too well.

The reality is, this is not going to effect the availability of credit. We've got plenty to judge that by. There have been rafts of economic studies by real economists in peer-reviewed journals that show that when we can compare lending practices in one place and another at the same time, with different laws, there is very little if any difference.

Now, the minority has tried to tap into the American anger at banks by calling this a bailout. The reason that the banking industry is so virulently opposed to this is that this is the only proposal to deal with the foreclosure problem that does not give them tax money. We aren't begging them. We aren't bribing them to do the right thing. We will make them do the right thing. They will modify mortgages in the way they should have voluntarily, involuntarily in bankruptcy court, if they don't do it voluntarily.

Mr. Gohmert suggests that this is somehow going to be wild, arbitrary, the Wild West, no one knows what a bankruptcy court will do, what a bankruptcy judge will do. Mr. Speaker, there have been thousands of bankruptcy cases. The law is very clear. The procedure is very clear. The judges do this all the time. Everyone involved in bankruptcy knows exactly what will happen. And it will be a very predictable, orderly, logical modification of mortgages in bankruptcy, so that borrowers will come out with the mortgage they should have gotten -- if they should have gotten a mortgage at all -- and the lender will come out with the mortgage they should have made in the first place.

Do something the banks won't like to solve this problem. And that is this bill.

Well, alright then.

If you were wondering exactly what the Republican objection to cramdown was (besides generally being inclined toward the interests of lenders), Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA-03) has a good summary:

The suggestion has been made that it makes no sense to treat primary residences in the way that the current bankruptcy law does. Well in fact, Supreme Court Justice Stevens, in the case of Nobleman v. American Savings Bank explained why we have this, when he said that,"At first blush, it seems somewhat strange that the bankruptcy code could provide less protection to an individual's interest in retaining possession of his or her home than of other assets. The anomaly is, however, explained by the legislative history, indicating that favorable treatment of residential mortgages was intended to encourage the flow of capital into home lending markets." In other words, it is precisely because we want to promote homeownership that it is treated in this way.

Now, we in the Judiciary Committee believe we can do a lot of things. But one thing we have been unable to do, but we're trying to do it again, is suspend the laws of economics. This suggests that this change will have no impact whatsoever. The change will have this impact: It will include higher risk premiums on all mortgages in the future because of the uncertainty now involved with respect to home mortgages. That's what's going to happen.

That was an interesting and lucid explanation of what's supposed to be the Republican position here. But here's the problem: the effect of the bill is limited to mortgages entered into prior to enactment. That is, the bill's effects on cramdown are only retroactive and not prospective. So it's going to be rather difficult for it to force "higher risk premiums on all mortgages in the future."

It's probably also worth noting -- and as I was typing, I just heard Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) do it -- Justice Stevens certainly had a point when he wrote what he did. But apparently the problem has not been a lack of capital flowing into the home lending markets, but rather a little bit too much.