Last weekend, the Obama administration released its proposal for reauthorizing and revamping No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Bush-era education law. According to Time Magazine, reauthorizing NCLB “may be one of the few issues capable of drawing bipartisan support,” as the original law was crafted by both parties, and education reform issues tend to not break down cleanly along party lines.

However, in a hearing yesterday before the House Education and Labor Committee, Education Secretary Arne Duncan faced criticism from Republicans who charge that the administration’s NCLB vision includes too much “federal encroachment” and Washington control:

Representative Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, said local school officials told him they spend too much time and money complying with No Child Left Behind, the signature education legislation enacted under Republican President George W. Bush. “Now, you geniuses in Washington come up with a new approach for us,” Hoekstra said…Kline criticized the administration’s plan to link U.S. money to states that adopt common academic standards as a federal encroachment on the local authority to develop curriculum.

Kline previously expressed concern with many of the administration’s proposals, saying that that they “increase federal intrusion.”

Of course, it’s nothing new for Republicans to accuse the Obama administration of trying to craft some Washington takeover — just look at the debates over health care and student loan reform. But when it comes to NCLB, this is really an absurd assertion, as the administration’s entire plan revolves around encouraging common-sense standards for student achievement and then letting states and local school districts figure out the best way to achieve them.

In order to achieve its goals, the administration embraces a push by the National Governors Association to adopt common federal education standards. The plan does away with NCLB’s “yearly progress” evaluations, in favor of wider measurements, allowing schools to incorporate subjects other than reading and math (which NCLB is currently limited to). But it doesn’t spell out how schools should meet these standards and it gives states the ability to craft tougher standards, if they choose.

As CAP’s Cindy Brown noted, under the administration’s plan, only the very lowest achieving schools will have to take specific actions, while “those who are progressing at a steady, if not an ideal, pace will have greater flexibility and those who are most successful will be rewarded financially and identified publicly.” Former Bush Education Department official Mike Petrilli noted that the proposal would enact “dramatic change in the federal role in education — one that would be more targeted, less prescriptive, and use a lighter touch on the vast majority of America’s schools.”

In fact, Petrilli specifically calls out Kline for not understanding the proposal, saying that “with its call for common standards but its vast increase in flexibility over state accountability systems, it lives up to the ‘tight-loose’ premise.”

For the record, not all congressional Republicans had a nonsensical reaction to the administration’s proposal. “What we have learned is that a better balance is needed between prescriptive federal mandates and state and local flexibility,” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) said. “The blueprint seems to reflect this belief.”

Yesterday, speaking at the American Bankers Association governmental relations summit, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) told the gathered bankers to fight Congressional financial reform efforts. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you and stand up for yourselves,” Boehner said.

Today, White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers fired back at Boehner, saying that bankers certainly do not need any help in their effort to blunt regulatory reform:

“I do not think that those who want to address these issues are ‘little punk staffers’ who need to be stood up to,” Summers said in a speech at the National Press Club…“At a moment when there are four lobbyists per member of the House and Senate working on this issue, we in the Administration do not believe that the prominent issue is allowing bankers to stand up for themselves.”

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) also wrote a letter to Boehner, saying that “I am appalled that a Leader of the House, who must know what good work is done by our staffs, would take such an inaccurate cheap-shot at these people, for the purpose of ingratiating himself with bankers.” Frank called on Boehner to apologize for the remark.

As I noted yesterday, Boehner’s statement fits in with the wider Republican campaign to promote themselves as the defenders of big banks, and to cash in on the Democrats’ push to rein in Wall Street. Boehner has met with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to troll for campaign contributions, while Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, “said he visited New York about twice a month to try to tap into Wall Street’s ‘buyers remorse’” with Democrats.

Back in December, House Republicans huddled with more than 100 financial services lobbyists to come up with a strategy for killing financial reform. And this behavior continued today, as Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) told the ABA summit that “if there were 59 Senate Republicans ‘you wouldn’t have to worry‘ about a new consumer agency.”

But as Summers noted, it’s not as if the financial services industry and its allies need any help. The Chamber of Commerce has already pledged to spend $3 million fighting financial reform, and that’s chump change compared to what the banks themselves spend. All told, the financial services industry spent $500 million on lobbying in 2009. In their respective careers, Boehner has received $3.4 million from the financial services industry, while Shelby has received $5.2 million, which is $2.2 million more than he’s received from any other industry.

The American Bankers Association is currently in Washington, DC for its annual government relations summit, which coincides nicely with the lobbying blitz that bankers are launching against Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) financial regulatory reform bill. As Bloomberg noted, “about 800 bankers fanned out across Capitol Hill yesterday, pressing lawmakers to resist” many of the provisions in Dodd’s bill.

Already, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) made quite a splash at the summit, explicitly telling the bankers to fight against reform. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you and stand up for yourselves,” Boehner said. And yesterday, the bankers also received the unmitigated support of one of their current regulators, Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, who was “unusually forthright” in asserting that bank profits should trump consumer protection:

“In every case consumer protection has the edge and will trump safety and soundness [in Dodd's bill] and I think that is backwards,” said John Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, at an American Bankers Association conference.

Got that? It’s backwards to put consumer protection before bank profitability! According to Dugan (whose agency oversees nationally chartered banks), consumer protection is only worthwhile so long as it doesn’t hurt the banks’ bottom lines. Sadly, this response is indicative of the attitude of many regulators during the buildup to the financial crisis.

Dugan himself, though relatively unknown, played a large role in setting the stage for the financial crisis. The Nation called him the “master of disaster,” noting that he “crusaded to defang state regulators” in “a deliberate attempt to preserve the ability of the nation’s largest banks to earn short-term profits from predatory loans.”

This perfectly encapsulates the argument for creating an independent consumer financial protection agency, as bank regulators like Dugan clearly side with the banks when given the choice. This is one of the worries with placing Dodd’s Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection within the Federal Reserve. While Dodd’s clearly tried to isolate the Bureau from the Fed’s banking regulators, if the Fed culture permeates into the Bureau, consumers will lose what is supposed to be their sole voice.

This also comes back to an important point regarding the structure of Dodd’s bill. The legislation certainly empowers regulators with a lot more information about the financial system and where potential problems could arise. But it also gives them a lot of discretion in taking action, including letting them decide whether to pursue implementing the “Volcker rule,” which would ban banks from trading with federally insured dollars.

Paul Volcker himself addressed this yesterday, saying that “in my opinion, it’s very unlikely that the regulators and supervisors would evoke a strict prohibition until a crisis came and then it’s too late.” “Look, I’ve been a regulator for 20 years,” Volcker said. “So I know how they are.” Indeed, if Dugan is any example, we might want to think twice about letting regulators unilaterally decide when and how to rein in the banks.

Health insurance companies have always claimed that they support “affordable, high-quality health care for every American” and are supportive of health care reform efforts and not simply concerned with their profits. To try to project this image of compassion for the uninsured, WellPoint Inc. — which recently came under fire for planning double-digit rate hikes in at least eleven states — pledged three years ago to use its charitable foundation to spend $30 million to assist the uninsured receive care.

A new investigative report by the Los Angeles Times finds that WellPoint’s foundation has completely failed to meet its promise of spending $30 million to help the uninsured. Rather, the company spent $6.2 million — a paltry 11 percent of what the company promised:

WellPoint’s public records indicate that from 2007 to 2009 the foundation gave less than $6.2 million in grants targeted specifically at helping uninsured Americans get access to coverage and care — barely one-fifth of what was promised and just 11% of the charity’s total giving over the last three years.

“It was just not something that the company really wanted to do,” said one former executive, who, like others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified out of concern that discussing WellPoint could have adverse career consequences. “So it went by the wayside.”

The Times created a graph that charts WellPoint’s charitable giving since 2007 and showed how little of the insurers’ charitable spending actually went to helping the uninsured:

An investigation by Congress earlier this year found that WellPoint’s Chief Executive Angela F. Braly had a salary of $1.1 million last year and stock options valuing approximately $8.5 million, meaning that the company couldn’t spend anywhere near what it spends on just one of its own employees to help the uninsured it claims to care about.