Quick hit: Congress approves housing bill

The U.S. Senate voted yesterday to pass the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which the House of Representatives had ok'd earlier in the week. Now the bill goes to the White House, where President Bush will almost certainly sign it. The bill will allow homeowners who are in danger of foreclosure to refinance (with the approval of their original lender), plus some other stuff that will hopefully keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - which underwrite something like half of the nation's mortgages - from going belly up.

Now, I'm a homeowner, and when I bought my house, I learned all about fixed rates vs. variable interest rates (which seemed like a really bad idea, even to someone as inexperienced as me). I was fortunate enough to have decent credit, so I qualified for a low fixed interest rate anyway. I didn't borrow more than I could afford. My mortgage is actually less than I would be paying for an apartment in my neighborhood. My home-buying process was one of the handful of sensible things I've done in my life.

All that said, I have zero problem bailing out the homeowners who weren't as thorough or just plain lucky as me. We're not talking about a few slackers here. We're talking about billions of dollars that have filtered through every layer of our country's finance system like that God-awful boxwood in my yard has sunk roots into the retaining wall. Loans, pensions, investment portfolios...all that money's rolled up together. Our economy's already teetering on the edge, and I really don't want to see what happens if our mortgage lenders fail.

But maybe I'm alone. In North Carolina, only one Republican representative voted to pass the bill (hint: it so completely was NOT Virginia Foxx), and both of our illustrious senators chickened out and didn't cast a vote at all. (I'm trying to come up with something snarky but I'm too pissed off about this next thing...) And do you know why? Apparently the Republicans who voted against the bill - heavily pushed by the Bush Administration - did so out of a sense of fiscal responsibility. That's right. After eight years of tossing out cash like my nephew in the Hot Wheels aisle, Congressional Republicans have suddenly rediscovered their Adam Smith. Let's get it from the horse's mouth:

Republican Sen. Jim DeMInt of South Carolina single-handedly blocked the bill last week, forcing Saturday's session.

"I know this is a lost cause that I'm not going to stop this bill but I'm disappointed, the American people are disappointed, and what we've done by keeping the Democrats and the republicans here today is maybe give Americans a little more time to see what this Congress is doing to their future," he said Saturday.

No one knows what the line of credit will end up costing taxpayers, if anything. Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison pointed to salaries in the tens of millions of dollars for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives. She said Congress should have implemented greater controls.

"We need checks on executive compensation on perks at Freddie Mae and Fannie Mae with this kind of infusion of taxpayer backing," she said.

Huh. It's interesting that certain Congressional Republicans are suddenly all concerned with long-term fiscal balance, oversight and all that good stuff. Here's a sampling of Rep. Hutchison's votes on key bills from which we can see that she ok'd $120 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but voted against an earlier version of the bill that included benchmarks for eventual troop withdrawal. In other words, tying funding to what Rep. Hutchison calls "oversight" is sometimes good and sometimes awful. It just depends.

Principle I can understand. It doesn't bother me that Rep. Howard Coble voted no, because Howard Coble will always vote no on anything that involves setting a precedent of federal spending. It's not out of malice, it's out of genuine belief that Congress writing a giant check should never be done lightly. I can disagree with him, but still respect his position.

But it's the hypocrisy that gets me - federal welfare is perfectly fine when we're talking about bailing out an airline or an investment bank, but not when it comes to funding school lunch programs. Subsidized tobacco industry = good, but subsidized health care = evil. Approving billions of dollars with no accountability attached is perfectly fine when the money's going to Halliburton and Blackwater, but not so much when it's going to my bank.

At least we won this one. I don't know about y'all, but I am so ready for November!