Who killed the amendment?

Arianna Huffington writes:

The mystery over who killed a provision in the stimulus package that would have curtailed bonuses at bailed out companies is a disturbing D.C. whodunit. But even more disturbing is what it reveals about how our government is run.

"It is the ultimate indictment of what Washington has become," Sen. Ron Wyden, co-sponsor of the eliminated provision, told me. "It's a place where, again and again, the public interest is deep-sixed behind closed doors and without any fingerprints."

Building on public outrage and presidential denunciations of executives at bailed out companies getting bonuses, Wyden and his Republican colleague, Sen. Olympia Snowe, crafted a provision in the stimulus bill that would have forced bailout recipients to cap their bonuses at $100,000 (any amount above that would be taxed at 35 percent).

According to Wyden, he "spent hours on the Senate floor," working to get the bipartisan amendment passed. He succeeded -- not a single Senator voted against the provision. "But," says Wyden, "it died in conference."

So who killed it? Wyden doesn't know.

Think about that for a second. We live in a country where one of the 100 most powerful people in government, the cosponsor of the amendment in question, has no clue how it got removed in the Senate-House conference committee -- or if it was taken out of the legislation even before it made it into conference.

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"I pulled out all the stops," Wyden told me, "to convince the president's economic team that this amendment was vital to the White House . . . But no one inside the president's economic team was in favor of it. As Wyden put it: "If the White House economic team had made it clear that this was important, this provision would never have been removed. I don't believe the president has been well-served on the bonus issue by his economic team."

So who asked for the amendment to be removed? Jason Furman? Peter Orzack? Tim Geithner? Larry Summers?

Such a move would certainly be consistent with the positions put forth by Summers who, as late as yesterday -- even contradicting the president -- continued to argue that attempting to stop the AIG bonuses would have "put the whole economy at risk."

Have you noticed how, whenever there is a serious effort to put an end to business-as-usual, we are warned by insiders like Paulson and Summers that the result will be the end of civilization?

"This lack of transparency -- and the lack of accountability that results -- is one of the most significant threats to our democracy," Wyden told me. "This is not at all how the civics books tell us the system is suppose to work. What we have here is a prime example of Washington deny, defer, delay."

He's right. We deserve better. Let's make this D.C. mystery the cause célèbre it deserves to be. Let's demand that the White House live up to its vows of transparency.

This is very disturbing and ups my growing concern about the Summers/Geithner team. They may be very smart, but they have Wall St. DNA and it affects their thinking and our policy.

And this whole debacle is a threat, not only to fixing the economy but to Obama's whole social agenda. It's bleeding away his political capital, and you can be sure the Republicans will exploit it to the nth degree.

Ralph