The Glade 4.0

It appears that our friendly Senators were in such a rush to get this bill through that they forgot to name it. Jim Harper noticed this when the bill showed up as the oddly named The XXXXXXAct ofXXXX on his always excellent WashingtonWatch site. Apparently, the Library of Congress' Thomas reporting system converted the underscores into X's. And, yes, even The Congressional Record (pdf) notes that "This Act may be cited as the "_______Act of______".

In the meantime, what is the bill? Well, it's actually been quite a moving target. It was originally about taxing executives who received TARP funds. Then it was changed entirely to have something to do with aviation, and now it's about an Education Jobs Fund. At one point, prior to its current non-name, it was called "The Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010," but that's got nothing to do with what it is now. If you look at WashingtonWatch's own summary of the bill, it still says the bill "would impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients," even though I don't believe that's in the bill any more. As Harper notes in a different blog post, since this bill (by number only) is listed on the White House's pending legislation page, anyone tracking that bill might think Obama is about to sign into a law a bill (which hasn't been approved by Congress) about taxing TARP bonuses... despite that not even being close to true.

Boehner on Monday offered 10 possible names for what he called the “union-boss bailout” bill:

-- Save Our ‘Stimulus’ (SOS) Act
-- ‘Recovery Summer’ Bailout Act (Cash for Flunkers)
-- Delivering Unions a Major Boost (DUMB) Act
-- Helping Election Expenditures, Hurting American Workers (HEEHAW) Act
-- Democracy is Strengthened by Clearly Leveraging and Optimizing Special-Interests’ Effectiveness (DISCLOSE) Act
-- Holding Union Bosses Over Until Card Check Act
-- Rescuing Incumbent Democrats Is Costly (RIDIC) Act
-- Summertime Cash for Union Bosses Instead of Spending Cuts for Taxpayers Act
-- Frivolous Act of Ineffective Largesse (FAIL) Act
-- Naming These Things Hasn’t Gotten Us Anywhere, So Why Bother? Act

What's wrong with that? They're running out of bill names. It was a tossup between xxxTheActxxx, BillNamingSux, or Jabober.