As Congress returns from its April recess, one of the big items on its agenda is financial regulatory reform. The White House has said that it would like to see a bill signed into law by the end of May, so Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) is working to bring his legislation to the Senate floor by the end of the month.

Republicans, following a strategy outlined by pollster Frank Luntz, have taken to consistently characterizing the Democrats’ reform effort as linked to “the Big Bank Bailout,” even though the two aren’t remotely connected. In a letter to the Washington Post today, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, embraced this tactic, saying that Democratic legislation would lead to more bailouts like that of American International Group (AIG):

Instead of real reform, the Democrats’ proposals would write into law the ad hoc government response to the economic crisis that put taxpayers on the hook for bailouts, rewarded Wall Street’s failures and froze capital needed to create jobs. Remember the bailout of American International Group? This bill would make AIG-style bailouts permanent. The government would decide which politically connected creditors of failed non-banks to bail out, and details would be hidden from the public.

Bachus is no stranger to this sort of rhetoric. Back in October, he said that Rep. Barney Frank’s (D-MA) financial reform bill was simply “permanent bailout authority.”

But let’s unpack this a little bit. For starters, neither the financial reform bill passed by the House of Representatives last year nor the one moving through the Senate makes bailouts “permanent.” In fact, both include a resolution authority, aimed at unwinding systemically risky financial firms, and funded by assessments on the biggest firms themselves. It lays out a process for identifying whether a firm is too systemically entangled for traditional bankruptcy and, if so, putting it into an FDIC-style receivership. It is the opposite of the ad hoc approach to which the government was limited in 2008.

And when you look at the regulatory reform legislation that Bachus himself proposed last year, his critiques hold even less water. For instance, his plan for unwinding failing financial firms is to simply let them file for bankruptcy, even if they pose systemic risk. But as David Min pointed out, the “let them fail” crowd, as he calls it, “by refusing to acknowledge or remedy the problems that result in bailouts, would guarantee that future bailouts are the rule, rather than the exception.”

And Republicans have no interest, it seems, in remedying the problems that result in bailouts, particularly for unregulated non-banks like AIG. Dodd’s bill extends the full regulatory regimen to systemically risky non-banks, treating them for regulatory purposes as if they were a large bank. Bachus’ proposed legislation does no such thing.

And Bachus’ Senate counterpart, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the ranking member of the Banking Committee, crafted an amendment to Dodd’s bill explicitly preventing non-banks from being regulated. Under Shelby’s plan, even if the regulators felt that a big non-bank was threatening the financial system, they could do nothing.

There are legitimate questions about how effective the resolution authority in Dodd’s bill will be, but Bachus’ letter signals that he’s only interested in scoring political points, not in engaging with the bill on a substantive basis.

This week, Senate Democrats will try once again to pass the extension of unemployment benefits that was repeatedly blocked by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and the Senate Republicans last month. In addition to the more than 200,000 people who lose out on extended jobless benefits every week because of the GOP’s obstruction, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) also expired when the Senate failed to act, just as devastating floods hit large swaths of the Northeast.

And the NFIP’s expiration also had other consequences, as thousands of home closings have been delayed because buyers cannot obtain flood insurance:

As a result, thousands of home sale closings have been canceled or postponed in the past two weeks as cagey homebuyers feared buying homes without the insurance policy…The impact on the already fragile housing market is too early to be understood but experts say it is unlikely to be positive. The National Association of Realtors, at the request of Fox News, estimated that each day the program is dormant, 1,400 closings are adversely hit.

“When Congress returns we will be waiting on the steps for them,” said Lucien Savant, spokesman for the National Association of Realtors. Joe Ory, President of the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors, meanwhile, called the delay “an absolute catastrophe.”

Real estate closings across the country have been disrupted by the delay, which results in much more than a loss of time. As Ory pointed out, one homebuyer moving from Houston to New Orleans has to continue paying fees on the property she is purchasing, costing thousands of dollars, but can’t move. “It makes me crazy,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT). “The House acted on an extension and the Senate failed. It’s very serious. I’ve gotten all kinds of calls from realtors.”

Democrats plan to hold a cloture vote on an extension package today, but will need at least one Republican to support the effort if it’s going to move forward. However, the GOP doesn’t seem to be moved by the very real effects its obstruction is having. For instance, last week Coburn said that his blocking benefits was okay, because it only affects a “relatively small amount of people.”