Has Dodd Gone Dotty?

… Or maybe he’s always been dotty. In either case, it is well known by now that the Administration, Democratic leaders, and their followers on both sides of the aisle rushed through the “stimulus” bill so fast they didn’t have time to read it, and so were and are blissfully unaware of many of its provisions.

Just the other day, for example, CNN reported that during the rush to ram through the “stimulus”

[t]he Senate passed a bipartisan amendment proposed by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R- Maine, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, that would have taxed bonuses on any company getting federal bailout dollars, if the company didn’t pay back the bonus money to the government.

But the idea was stripped from the stimulus bill during hurried, closed-door negotiations with the White House and House of Representatives.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, who is now pursing a similar bonus tax idea in the wake of outrage over AIG, said it was a mistake to drop it from the stimulus bill. He made a stunning admission.

“Frankly it was such a rush — we’re talking about the stimulus bill now — to get it passed, I didn’t have time and other conferees didn’t have time to address many of the provisions that were modified significantly,” said Baucus.

“We shouldn’t be here. That should have passed, but it didn’t,” he said.

Even in this crowd, however, Sen. Dodd stands out. He may be the only member who not only did not know what was in the bill but who didn’t even know what he put into it. Dodd’s contribution to the “stimulus” bill,

now called “the Dodd Amendment” by the Obama Administration provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009.

At first Dodd denied writing that language.

“When the language went to the conference and came back, there was different language,” he said…. “I can tell you this much, when my language left the Senate, it did not include it. When it came back, it did.”

Then last Wednesday

Dodd told CNN … that he was responsible for language added to the stimulus bill to make sure that existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money were honored.

But by Friday he was still attempting to claim (same source as above) that he didn’t know the language he inserted at Treasury’s request had anything to do with bonuses.

At the Enfield event Friday, Dodd said that he was misled on the issue of bonuses for AIG executives. He said he would not have drafted key legislative changes allowing the bonuses to move forward if he knew the purpose of those changes.

Dodd said officials at the Treasury Department led him to believe that the changes, added to the $787 billion economic stimulus bill shortly before its passage last month, were merely “technical and innocuous” in nature.

“If anyone had mentioned AIG or any bonuses, I would have rejected it immediately, out of hand. But the argument was this was technical,” Dodd said.

So, what Dodd is saying is that he was unaware that the new, modified language that he added at Treasury’s bequest — that the new rules “shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009” — did not mention bonuses and was merely “technical and innocuous.”

I suspect it’s not so unusual for Senators and Representatives to vote on measures, even important ones, without having read or understood them, but I retain enough residual confidence in the Congress to think, or at least hope, that in being so uninformed about what he himself has inserted in a bill Dodd remains a special case.