Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) is out with a new plan he says could help the nation avert the fiscal cliff and raise over a trillion dollars in new revenue by capping deductions, implementing “a chained consumer price index,” partially privatizing Medicare and raising the retirement age.

During an appearance on CBS This Morning, Corker indicated that he is flexible on raising marginal tax rates and joined a growing number of Republicans who have publicly broken from Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge:

CHARLIE ROSE (HOST): Are you prepared, as others are doing, to sort of say, ‘I’m going to forgo the pledge because it is outdated and the country’s problems are too big?’

CORKER: Well, I’m not obligated on the pledge. I made Tennesseans aware, I was just elected, that the only thing I’m honoring is the oath I take when I’m sworn in this January. [...]

NORAH O’DONNELL (HOST): Let me ask you. Would you be willing to also raise the capital gains rate?

CORKER: You know, I’m not — I’m not the negotiator sitting at the table. I’m open to solving this problem, and what I’ve done, Norah, in a 242-page bill is showboat the White House and Republican negotiators that this technically is very easy to do.

Watch it:

Over the weekend, Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) both backed away from Norquist’s pledge — which rejects any tax increase — joining long-term opponent Rep. Peter King (R-NY).

Norquist appeared on CNN’s Starting Point Monday morning and denied that any Republicans had defected from his pledge. “No Republican has voted for a tax increase,” he said. “We’ve got some people discussing impure thoughts on national television.”

When JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon dropped a bomb on the financial world two weeks ago by announcing that the bank had lost at least $2 billion on a series of trades that went bad on a London-based investment desk, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker (R) was among the first lawmakers to call for investigations and hearings into the trade. Today, Corker got his first chance to get some answers, as the top regulators from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission appeared before the Senate Banking Committee.

But it wasn’t JP Morgan’s losses that Corker seemed concerned with. Instead, with advocates for stronger financial rules (including President Obama himself) pushing for a re-examination of pending regulations instituted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, Corker was worried that the JP Morgan losses would bolster the case for a stronger Volcker Rule — the yet-to-be-finalized regulation that would ban federally-insured banks from engaging in certain types of risky trading:

CORKER: I fear that you’re under pressure, that a lot of calls are being made, that the administration is concerned that the American people are going to wake up and look at the last three years as a bad dream. … This big Dodd-Frank bill really doesn’t address real-time issues. And what you’re going to do is cause this Volcker Rule to become something that it was never intended to be.

Watch it:

Regulators are indeed facing pressure to strengthen the Volcker Rule, and as I wrote yesterday, that pressure is legitimate. Though it is unclear whether JP Morgan’s trade would have been subject to the rule, it is clear that the Volcker Rule as proposed was stronger than it is in its latest draft form. But JP Morgan and its cohorts on Wall Street played a major role in watering it down. That lobbying created a loophole that may have kept JP Morgan’s trade legal even under the rule.

Risky trades designed to make bank’s massive profits — known as proprietary trades — were at the center of the financial crisis that ultimately ended with taxpayers bailing out America’s biggest banks. Regulations like the Volcker Rule (and others included in Dodd-Frank) are aimed preventing taxpayers from having to foot the bill again in the future. The JP Morgan loss has given regulators and policymakers a golden opportunity to re-examine those rules and make sure they are sufficiently strong.

That may seem an inconvenience to lawmakers, like Corker, who opposed the regulations in the first place. To Americans who have to backstop this risky trading even when it goes drastically wrong, though, the chance to strengthen the rules should be a welcome one.

The Federal Reserve last week released a set of proposals for aiding the battered American housing market, including a series of ways to help homeowners who are buried under the weight of unsustainable mortgage payments or who now find themselves significantly underwater on their home (meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth). New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley added to the list a proposal for reducing mortgage principal (the outstanding amount on the loan) for underwater homeowners.

The Senate GOP, which had obstructed all manner of help for homeowners, reacted with outrage, saying that helping homeowners in such a way would be, in the words of Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), “completely egregious“:

Republican Senators Orrin Hatch of Utah and Bob Corker of Tennessee criticized the Federal Reserve for overstepping its role by making policy recommendations on how the U.S. government should try new ways to spur the housing market.

Hatch, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said the housing study sent by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to Congress last week, along with recent Fed speeches, “intrudes too far into fiscal policy advice and advocacy.” Corker said New York Fed President William C. Dudley’s suggestion last week that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reduce the principal of the loans they guarantee was “absolutely egregious.”

Reducing principal is one of the most effective ways to keep troubled borrowers — many of whom are underwater or behind on their mortgage payments through no fault of their own — out of foreclosure, and it would also boost the economy. A report from the The New Bottom Line — a coalition of community, faith-based and labor groups — found that “if banks wrote down all underwater mortgages to market value and refinanced the homeowners into 30-year, fixed-rate loans at current market interest rates, that would pump $71 billion into the national economy.”

The Senate GOP, instead, derides the idea, after filibustering an Obama administration nominee because he may have been sympathetic towards principal reductions. But, perhaps that’s not surprising from a party that thinks foreclosure prevention efforts simply “need to stop.”

Even though the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was signed more than a year and a half ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which that law created, is still without a director. Republicans have been filibustering President Obama’s nominee for the position, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, in an attempt to get Congress to gut the agency’s powers.

Cordray is extremely qualified for the position, yet the GOP is holding his nomination hostage because they disagree with the entire idea of the CFPB, preferring, as they said during the debate over Dodd-Frank, that bank profits take precedence over consumer protection. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has even said that the GOP won’t confirm any nominee, no matter who it is or what his/her qualifications are, until the Bureau’s structure is changed.

Despite all that, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) today charged the administration with playing “political games” when it comes to the nomination, adding that he thinks people across the nation want to see the consumer watchdog’s powers watered down:

I don’t know whether you’re enjoying being part of a political game that’s taking place regarding this, but I would just say that, look, some just basic balances, checks and balances, with [the CFPB] I think would cause the logjam that’s taking place on this to really be broken up. And I’m sort of surprised that y’all continue to be a part of this political game that’s taking place, but I do hope at some point in time we’ll be able to have a meeting of minds and just a simple kind of thing that most people in Tennessee and across our country would like to see, and that is some accountability.

Watch it here (starting at 1:37:40).

The gall of a Republican senator calling out the administration for playing political games when the GOP has been blocking the CFPB director’s nomination for months is quite stunning. That they’ve been blocking Cordray in order to gut the agency’s ability to do its job is even worse.

Fortunately, there seem to be some cracks forming in the GOP’s facade, as Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) has said that he will vote to confirm Cordray’s nomination when it hits the Senate floor this week. As ThinkProgress Justice editor Ian Millhiser noted today, if the GOP continues to block Cordray’s nomination, Obama can break out the Roosevelt precedent to let Cordray start doing his job.

Even as the GOP leadership is caving to the outrageous demands of Tea Party members, some Republicans are also becoming more amenable to Democrats’ insistence that there be a long-term debt ceiling increase that goes through the 2012 election. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reiterated today that the Democratic caucus is completely opposed to a short-term deal that would force Congress to raise the debt limit again in six months, when political divisions will be even more stark because of the upcoming election.

Republicans had initially insisted on a short-term increase, but today on MSNBC, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) conceded that it wouldn’t be “healthy” to have to go through this excruciating process again in six months — something the latest version of Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) plan still requires:

CORKER: I would love to see us go ahead and achieve all the savings that we can get right now…But I do agree with the fact that having these debates in the middle of the economic downturn that we’re having right now is not healthy. And there’s no question that business people…watch this and become uncertain. So in a perfect world, and I know we’re not in a perfect world, but if we can get worked out over the next several days something that actually achieves all those savings on the front end and also extends the debt limit beyond this next election, to me that would be the perfect solution, and I hope we can do that.

Watch it:

Corker’s position was echoed by a Senate GOP leadership aide who told CNBC’s John Harwood that the party would be comfortable extending the debt ceiling past the 2012 elections, “provided that they had some sort of guarantee that a second round of spending cuts and entitlement reforms would take place.”

The Huffington Post notes that “the softening of the Senate GOP’s position is a breakthrough of sorts in the debt ceiling debate.” Republicans have been arguing that they will only approve a short-term increase because Congress has traditionally voted for small incremental raises. But that’s not actually true: in May 2003, Congress passed the equivalent of an 18-month increase, putting the issue off past the 2004 elections. That extension was roughly the same length of time of the increase President Obama is requesting. Twenty GOP senators currently in Congress voted for that 2003 bill.

The Senate failed to move forward on a bill funding the Economic Development Administration (EDA) yesterday, voting against cloture 49 to 51. Created in 1965, the EDA exists “to generate jobs, help retain existing jobs, and stimulate industrial and commercial growth in economically distressed areas of the United States.” Every single Republican voted against cloture, spurring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to lambast Republicans this morning for caring “more about partisan politics than putting people back to work.” The “jobs deficit” is “just as critical as our budget deficit,” he said.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), however, scoffed at the idea that the EDA bill even came close to the importance of the budget deficit “calamity” on the Senate floor today. Corker implored senators to reveal a deficit reduction plan rather than waste time on the EDA reauthorization bill, which, to Corker, was simply political “filler” that amounted to “doing almost nothing of importance for this country”:

CORKER: I implore the folks that are meeting behind closed doors — I implore them to come forward and to outline the goals they’re trying to achieve and when they think they’re going to achieve it so that all of us that are sitting around here cooling our heels — doing nothing — doing almost nothing of importance for this country. I mean, the senator of Illinois talked about the EDA bill, we all knew it wasn’t going to pass. Everybody knew that.

Everybody knew that that bill was offered on the floor to kill time — to make it look like the United States Senate was doing something. That’s all it was for. Everybody knew that, everybody working up front knew that, the pages knew that. Everybody knew that. So for people to come down here and act like it’s a shock that cloture wasn’t achieved on EDA when we knew it was just here for filler is kind of surprising. We knew what it was about.

Watch it:

But two years ago, Corker was only too pleased to “kill time” praising the EDA’s work. In 2009, Corker and Tennessee colleague Sen. Lamar Alexander (R) celebrated an infrastructure grant from the EDA for their home state. Corker called the grant a great way to “protect jobs, and support economic growth in the region. In the midst of an economic crisis, projects like these are just the kinds of things that will renew confidence and reinvigorate private investment in the area.” Accurate praise, given that EDA investments has created about 1,000 jobs for Tennesseans in the last year alone. Since January of 2011, the EDA grants will create or save more than 4,700 jobs across the country.

Perhaps Corker should pass the time considering why the EDA’s job creation is worthy of praise in 2009 but is not worthy of the GOP’s supposed “jobs agenda” in 2011. Given that jobs are still Americans’ top priority, it’s hard to see how Corker and the Senate GOP’s dismissal of a jobs bill is anything but a miscarriage of responsibility and a general waste of time.