Tonight, during her interview with Katie Couric, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) dodged repeated inquiries about Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) regulatory record. When pressed by Couric “to name a specific example, in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation,” Palin fumbled:

COURIC: I’m just going to ask you one more time – not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

PALIN: I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

Watch it:

Palin may be looking for the nonexistent. Despite calling for more regulation and oversight in the wake of the Wall Street’s collapse, throughout his long career in the Senate, McCain, and his top campaign advisers, dutifully championed deregulatory policies.

In fact, during an interview with CBS News just this Sunday, McCain said he did not “regret” championing the deregulation of Wall Street, arguing that “the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy.”

In 1999, McCain supported deregulatory legislation championed by Sen. Phil Gramm, a top McCain adviser and the “odds-on favorite to be the Treasury Secretary.” The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act “destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies” and ended any “significant regulation of the financial community.”

Calling the Bush-Paulson bailout proposal a “dead loser” and a “very, very bad idea,” Newt Gingrich is offering his own plan: eliminate the capital gains tax, suspend mark-to-market accounting, repeal Sarbanes-Oxley, and pass an “all-of-the-above” energy bill. The Wonk Room has discussed in detail how Gingrich’s energy agenda wouldn’t fix gas prices but would hasten a climate catastrophe. Yesterday, Michael Ettlinger, Vice President for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, explained why eliminating the capital gains tax “would in fact be a disaster for the market.”

Today, guest blogger Ed Paisley, Vice President for Editorial at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, explains why Gingrich’s “mark-to-market” proposal — embraced today by conservatives in Congress — would also be disastrous.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich the other day made the claim that mark-to-market accounting — the kind of free market-oriented accounting rule he and other conservatives should love — is at fault for the collapse of our financial institutions. In fact, it was a lack of government oversight — cheered on by conservatives like Gingrich — led us to this financial crisis. Now Gingrich wants us to compound the problem by removing market transparency.

Presumably, free marketeers would want commercial and investment banks to account for the value of their assets according to their value in the open market — what is known as “mark-to-market” accounting. Otherwise, how can we know what the true value of those assets are? And what better way than market-based accounting rules. That was the reasoning behind the decision last year by the Financial Accounting Standards Board to introduce mark-to-market accounting.

Gingrich – and now the conservative Republican Study Committee in Congress – want to end mark-to-market accounting for long-term assets as part of their alternative to the $700 billion financial rescue package proposed by Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson this past weekend. Gingrich and the RSC claim that no market exists for long-term assets such as mortgage-backed securities to be priced in.

That’s wrongheaded policy on two counts. First, as equity strategist Christopher Woods, an expert on the reasons behind Japan’s two-decade long economic funk, pointed out recently in the Wall Street Journal, pretending that the value of long-term assets are more valuable than the market says they are would result in financial institutions “warehousing bad debts, Japan-style.” Presumably, conservatives don’t want to engineer the non-recovery of our economy akin to what Japan has suffered since the collapse of its real estate markets in the late 1980s. Read more

Yesterday, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on the Bush administration’s proposed $700 billion bailout plan. During the hearing, Christopher Cox, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), testified that deregulation was a cause of the current financial crisis, including a “regulatory hole” in the credit swap market:

There is another similar regulatory hole that must be immediately addressed to avoid similar consequences. The $58 trillion national market in credit default swaps — double the amount outstanding in 2006 — is regulated by no one. Neither the SEC nor any regulator has authority over the CDS market, even to require minimal disclosure to the market.

It’s rather ironic that Cox is now calling for regulation of the credit swap market. After all, trading in the credit swap market was what sunk insurance giant AIG. Once AIG had “sold large quantities of credit-default swaps to financial institutions around the world,” it required an $85 billion federal bailout to keep its failure from affecting the wider financial system.

But its not just on credit swaps that Cox has come around. He also blamed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act – which was constructed by former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) in 1999 and deregulated the banking industry – for contributing to the financial meltdown. He said that “the failure of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to give regulatory authority over investment bank holding companies to any agency of government was, based on the experience of the last several months, a costly mistake.”

Just six months ago, however, the Bush administration found the credit crisis so manageable that it “unveiled a widely discussed blueprint for U.S. financial regulatory reform that called for less supervision of Wall Street by the Securities and Exchange Commission.” Cox has now realized that a lack of “regulatory authority” is a “mistake,” but only after seeing the result years of deregulation has had on the financial system.

Yesterday, the Senate passed, on a 93-2 vote, “major tax legislation” that, among other provisions, “lowers the refundable threshold for the child tax credit,” and “provides more than $17 billion in renewable energy tax incentives.” The House could take up consideration of the bill today.

The tax bill, called the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008, lowered the income floor for claiming a child tax credit from $10,000 to $8,500. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, “if [the bill] becomes law, nearly 3 million children will be newly eligible for the credit and 10.1 million will receive an increased monetary benefit.”

Last year, “an estimated 10.6 million children in low-income families were completely ineligible for the Child Tax Credit…and an additional 11 million low-income children received less than the full benefit amount—all while families making $75,000-$100,000 receive the greatest benefit.” Lowering the income threshold should help to address that problem, and “bring economic relief to working families, especially during this era of rising food and gas prices.”

Meanwhile, the renewable energy provisions in the bill allow taxpayers to “claim a credit of up to $7,500 for purchasing plug-in electric cars, and production credits are extended to wind, biomass and marine — waves and tide — facilities.” Also, the the investment tax credit for solar energy and the credit for residential solar property have both been extended to 2016.

The legislation also extends the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) patch, which prevents the AMT from affecting 20 million new people next year. According to the Associated Press, “the House plans to offer a competing version as early as Wednesday that raises more revenue by closing loopholes used by hedge fund managers and corporations doing business overseas.”

In July, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) successfully derailed the “the so-called Coburn omnibus,” a package of nearly 40 uncontroversial bills that extended funding for cancer research, paralysis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease and crime prevention.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) attempted to bring the measures to a vote piecemeal, only to be rebuffed by the senate’s “fly in the soup.” Watch it:

According to the Majority Leader’s office, Coburn had assured Reid that he would clear the measures, but once Reid reintroduced the bills, Coburn remained steadfast in his obstruction.

In this way, Coburn prevented the senate from voting on what the House passed with great margins: The Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act (S.1183), the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Registry Act (S. 1382/HR 2295), the Melanie Blocker – Stokes MOTHERS Postpartum Depression Act (HR 20), the Stroke Treatment and Ongoing Prevention Act of 2008 (S.999), the Drug Endangered Kids Act (HR 1199/S. 1210) and the Emmett Till Unsolved Crimes Bill.

As the Wonk Room has noted, Coburn consistently abuses the Senate’s hold privilege to prevent the Senate leadership from bringing matters to a vote that “he just doesn’t like.” Coburn objects to the aforementioned bills on fiscal grounds, but he is far from consistent in his principles. During the 109th Congress, Coburn did not object to over $1.3 trillion in non-offset authorizations. In fact, as late as July, Coburn failed to hold the Appalachian Regional Development Act Amendments of 2007, which provided $575 million in non-offset authorizations and were supported by half of the Republican caucus.

UPDATE: Coburn has dropped his hold of the Emmett Till Unsolved Crimes Bill.