House Republicans have made it clear that they intend to use their new majority to launch an assault on the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law. Of course, due to the Democratic Senate and President, outright repeal of the law is a pipe dream, but that won’t prevent the GOP from hassling regulators as they attempt to craft rules under Dodd-Frank.

Dodd-Frank delegates much of its rule authority to regulators, so Republicans have been targeting them in an attempt to politicize and delay their rule-making activities. To that end, Bloomberg is reporting that House Republicans plan to use the Congressional Review Act of 1996 to try and cow regulators into submission:

One procedure being considered by House Republicans is a little-used “resolution of disapproval,” through the 1996 Congressional Review Act, which can be deployed to target a specific regulation. “We are committed to conducting aggressive oversight to bring the Administration’s actions to light,” said Alabama Representative Spencer Bachus, the Republican in line to be chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. “The Congressional Review Act should be a tool for Congress to use to demand greater efficiency and accountability throughout the federal bureaucracy.”

Such a move doesn’t have much chance of success, as under the Congressional Review Act, a regulation is only blunted if both congressional chambers pass a resolution of disapproval, which the President then signs. But “a threatened resolution of disapproval might force the agencies to rethink what they are doing,” said Jeffrey Lubbers, an administrative law professor at American University. “Just the fact that it hasn’t been used all that much, people notice it.”

Earlier this year, Republicans in the Senate tried the same tactic — led by Sen. Johnny Iskason (R-GA) — when the National Mediation Board approved a rule they didn’t like. Isakson couldn’t drum up 51 votes in the Senate for his resolution, but its easy to see how a resolution disapproving of a Dodd-Frank rule would sail through a Republican-controlled House.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), the potential House Financial Services Chairman, as well as likely House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrel Issa (R-CA), have said that they will also “lean heavily on investigations and hearings to rein in parts of the new law they deem too restrictive on the banking industry.” So this is what regulators attempting to implement Dodd-Frank have to look forward to: resolutions of disapproval and constant hassling by House Republicans who, while powerless to actually change the law, can make life miserable for those trying to follow it.

Read more in yesterday’s Progress Report, “The Assault on Wall Street Reform.”

Yesterday, House Democrats finally decided that they will bring a bill to the House floor extending the Bush tax cuts for only those making less than $250,000 per year. “That is the plan,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told a reporter yesterday.

The situation in the Senate is significantly muddier, however. While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said he will hold a vote on just extending the middle-class tax cuts as well, the prospects for passage seem dim. This because Senate Republicans have made it quite clear that they intend to vote against a middle-class only extension, holding those cuts hostage until they get an extension of tax cuts for the rich as well. During an interview with Bloomberg News yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, confirmed that this is exactly what the Republicans intend to do:

Q: The President, Democrats here, they are insisting that extend only for the middle-income Americans, those households earning less than $250,000 a year. If they put a bill on the floor that only advances that, doesn’t extend for high-end earners, is Chuck Grassley going to vote in favor of that.

GRASSLEY: No, and I don’t think any other Republican will, and there’s quite a few Democrats now that won’t. There was at least five or six Democrats back in September said that that was the wrong policy and there were forty-some Democrats in the House that signed a bill saying that that was not good policy.

Watch it:

So this is the game that Republicans are ready and willing to play: either they get an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, at a cost of $830 billion over the next decade, or they let the tax code reset to where it was in 2001 and everyone’s taxes go up.

And they’re being aided by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who said yesterday that a full extension “would be OK,” and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), who said “it wasn’t a matter of who gets the tax cuts, but a matter of for how long everyone gets them for.”

When asked about the ongoing work of President Obama’s fiscal commission, Grassley warned of the current trajectory of the nation’s budget deficit, saying, “we can’t continue on that path or this generation, new generations, aren’t going to have an increase in the standard of living. He added that getting the deficit down was “the most important thing” the commission could do. Of course, one great way to get the deficit down is not spending $830 billion over the next decade to finance tax cuts for the rich.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives failed to pass a (far too short) three-month extension of unemployment benefits. If Congress does not act to extend benefits by the end of the month, 2.5 million Americans will lose their benefits, right in the midst of the holiday season.

At the same time, Congress is intensely debating whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, at a cost of $830 billion over the next decade. Earlier this week, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the rich, while deriding extending unemployment benefits as “some new massive spending.”

And in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, the incoming chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Rep. John Kline (R-MN), pronounced that extending benefits is not a priority for the incoming Republican Congress because “we can’t fund everything.” “We just don’t have the money,” Kline said:

KLINE: That’ll be a tougher lift in the 112th Congress. We’ve had unemployment benefits be extended for almost two years in some states, a little bit less in Minnesota. When you’re running a one and a half trillion dollar deficit per year, that’ll be part of the discussion as to whether that’s a priority for how we’re going to spend money. I would just reiterate what I said earlier, that the obligation for the Congress is to look at the entire budget and recognize that we’re borrowing over forty cents of every dollar that we spend, and say what are the priorities going to be. We can’t fund everything.

Q: But what do you tell those folks hanging on by a thread who really need those benefits?

KLINE: Well, they, heh, the best thing to do for them is to get the economy back on track and get businesses hiring so that they have a job that they can go to. We simply don’t have the money to keep extending unemployment benefits indefinitely. We just don’t have the money.

Listen here:

Kline also supports extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. So in his world, $830 billion to finance tax cuts for the wealthy is fine, but $12.5 billion to extend unemployment benefits for three months is too expensive.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) is also a part of this crowd, supporting a full extension of the Bush tax cuts, but saying today, “we’re facing a fiscal crisis. If we’re going to choose to extend unemployment, we’ve got to find a way to pay for it.” Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) added, “we can both provide this help and pay for it by cutting less effective stimulus spending. That’s what we should be debating today.”

In the last forty years, the U.S. has never allowed extended benefits to expire with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent, far below today’s rate of 9.6 percent. Plus, there are currently five unemployed persons for every job opening in the country. In fact, there are so few job openings, that even if every open position in the country were filled, four out of five unemployed workers would still be out of work. But for Kline and the other House Republicans, extending tax cuts for the rich is much higher on the priority list then ensuring that these households have an adequate safety net.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.