this we don't strangle and suffocate a financial system that allows our nation to lead the world in financial services to produce the jobs, create the wealth, fulfill the aspirations and opportunities for many americans. so we've got to be careful on how we do this as we try and change these rules. i think we're going to get it done. >> you talk about this balancing act. in fact, just today the agricultural committee has produced a bill regulating derivatives. have they gone too far? some people say that it is too tough. in fact, the treasury and the white house wanted a somewhat weaker bill on derivatives. how is it going to be amended as it goes through your committee and gets merged with what you're producing? >> again, they'll have to offer an amendment to the bill as we move along. we've got jack reid and judd gregg on our kmid tee. the banking committee as a major, major responsibility in the derivatives area. 13 titles to our bill. one-half of those 13 titles is dealing with derivatives. >> is what they produced too tough? >> i haven't read it yet.

i haven't seen it yet. i've been talking to people on the committee. until i have an ability to look at it and respond to it, i can't answer your question is it too tough or not too tough. clearly we need a sense of balance about it. >> let me ask you this. you just said senator shelby, others are talking to you. at the same time the republican national committee has produced a web video still calling what you guys are working on a bailout bill because of that $50 billion fund that would be paid for by the banks. this is what the rnc has put up on the web today. >> journey through our mez mer rising mirror maze to reveal the truth. president obama's bill rewards wall street with a $50 billion permanent bailout fund. watch out for the trap door of taxpayer doom. under this bill, the debt of wall street banks is guaranteed. guaranteed to be paid by the american taxpayers. >> now, let's stipulate that

that is not accurate. but at the same time, are you willing to take it off the table? because there's been some give in some of your recent comments and some indications that that might be negotiable. the white house never supported that. the treasury never supported the $50 billion privately financed bailout fund in the first place. >> well, first of all, the idea came from the republicans. my bill that i offered in november never had that in it. so it was a republican idea to insulate against taxpayer exposure. that any taxpayer money would be used during a winddown of a failed company. it's a prepayment. much as we do with the federal deposit insurance corporation with assessments on banks, should the bank fail, those dollars and those resources that are collected are prepayments so that we can handle the wind down of those banks intelligently. so that's what this is all about. now, candidly, there are other ways of doing this other than a prepayment fund. and the point is,xd whatever we do, we should not expose the

taxpayer to the costs that they had to bear as a result of this economic failure. this is one way of doing this. bob corker who's worked on this more so than anyone else along with mark warner, the democrat and the republican on the committee, spent literally weeks crafting these two sections of the bill. they're the ones who came up with this idea so we would avoid taxpayer exposure. but, again, there are other ways of achieving that result. again, consider the source of this video you showed, this ad that are being run by the republican national committee. does anyone really believe for a single second that the republican national committee is not doing the bidding of the major wall street firms and the major financial institutions? they're the ones who would have to pay this amount up front. they're the ones that are opposed to this. it's the taxpayer who will have to pick up the cost if they don't. >> let's talk about that. democrats as well have been raising money forever on wall street, whether it's rahm emanuel, chuck schumer, you yourself. democrats and republicans have

both been raising money. not just mitch mcconnell going to wall street for the money. that's where the money is. a lot of people have so much anger right now at wall street. the gallup poll finds that when people talk about regulating banks, there's a marginal, you know, a narrow support for that. when they talk about regulating wall street, it jumps to 14 points. it's a toxic phrase now. it's been demonized by some people, fair point. but isn't there a revolving door that feeds this? let's talk about some of the lobbyists on this. our former leaders trent lott and gephardt, democrats, republicans, all sorts of people formerly in the house and senate in major roles are now lobbying right now on financial services. what does that tell the american public and do you think there's something wrong with this system? >> there's something wrong with the campaign funding system. as you know, andrea, i've been a long time supporter of public financing of federal elections.

we go to the presidential level, we ought to be doing it at the senatorial level and house level. this would eliminate a lot of these problem. you're right. as one who's been a candidate in the past, i've raised money to support my campaigns. i don't like doing it. i wish there were a better way of doing it. the lobbying goes on. that's been here. that doesn't change. the question isn't so much the lobbying, it's whether or not you succumb to the lobbying. mitch going to new york along with jon cornyn, i think coming back and being so outspoken, quoting from the frank luts memo he wrote long before i ever drafted a bill how to attack the bill that didn't exist, i think ought to give you some indication of the legitimacy of the complaints of all this. they don't want a bill. many of them don't. many do. let me quickly point out, i know more than a dozen republicans that want to be a part of the solution of writing this bill. they're not going to be led around by the nose on a political strategy or tactic to just say vote against this bill,

don't let it come up for a debate. i don't believe that's going to happy they want to see a good bill. i want to invite them to be a part of this. i'm confident they will be before we're done. >> what about the lobbying and the revolving door? >> that's a legitimate issue. it can be. correct me if i'm wrong. i think you have a two-year ban before you can actually come back and lobby the congress on these matters if you've been a former member of congress. so it's better than it was in the past. but could there maybe be steps to be taken to improve it, the sachuation, so you don't have an opportunity to have an insider kind of access and ability to influence the outcome of legislation. in the end, though, it depends upon the members here. if you're so silly as to just succumb because a former colleague of yours asked you to do so, you shouldn't be here in the first place. >> speaking of that, barney frank spoke out against the -- really rebuked -- maybe a two-year ban.

but it certainly hasn't prevented some staffers from doing that. this is, of course, your last term. you've decided not to seek re-election. would you commit to the -- to your constituents in connecticut and to the rest of the nation since you're leading the way on this that you will not yourself become part of this system and end up working for the big banks after you leave the senate? >> i'm not going to be lobbying, i can tell you that. i've got a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old. the only lobbying i'll be doing is with two children. i haven't decided what i'm going to do yet, andrea. i'm not going to worry about that at this point. >> you've got your hands full right now. chairman chris dodd, thank you very much for joining us today. on that point, the white house says that tomorrow in new york president obama will be talking about the bad actions that led to the financial crisis. and once again take on lobbyists. austan goolsbee is a member of the council on economic advisers

and joins us from the white house, obviously. good to see you. >> hello, anandrea. >> let's talk about the speech tomorrow. what we can expect to hear from the president. how tough is he going to be? >> tough but fair. the reason he's going back to cooper union, if you recall, it was more than two years ago the president went before lehman collapsed and began talking about the need for us to put in sensible oversight of financial markets. that it was important and when people lost public trust in financial institutions, they pull their money out and it can lead to terrible crises. and that message is nowhere more prevalent than today. and on wall street. and he's going to basically be talking about we're coming to -- it's the final chapter of this. we've been debating this thing for more than two years. and it's time to bring this to a close. you know, the president has outlined the key principles that he wants to see in the financial

reform bill. and i think we're going to get them. i think it's going to be bipartisan because regardless of what the leadership says, i think independent democrats and republicans, they're not paying attention to the leadership. they're going to look at the bill, they're going to say, i agree with that. i think we need to have better controls over derivatives, protecting consumers and ending too big to fail and bailouts. >> it's a derivatives bill that came out of the agricultural committee today too tough? there was a suggestion just now in my interview with chris dodd that balance needs to be achieved. you want to rein in wall street, do something about derivatives but not choke off any kind of economic activity, obviously, in the financial sector. >> i wouldn't use the words "too tough." that's not the sense. we want to make sure we get things right, that we don't lead to problems that don't need to be there. but we've got to fulfill what the president has called for on

derivatives, and that is for these massive, literally hundreds of trillions of dollars of dark pools of derivatives, they've got to be brought out into the open. they've got to be put under sensible regulatory oversight that prevents them from threatening to blow up the entire financial system the way they did with aig. so, you know, we can work through the details to achieve whatever balance senator dodd is describing, but we're not going to compromise. if the republicans are trying to get loopholes written back into the law that say we don't need to bring these derivatives out into the open, the president's not going to tolerate that. >> what about the $50 billion fund? is that basically up for grabs now? this is an issue that's going to be compromised away? >> you know, i'm just a policy guy. i'm not a legislative strategist. i do know that the $50 billion prepayment fund as senator dodd said, was a republican idea.

it wasn't in the president's original regulatory blueprint. the principle that the american people will not pay for any of the messes, that the banks themselves should pay, the president will not compromise on. and i think everybody who looks at this bill admits that the republican talking point that they got from a consultant is completely wrong. this forbids bailouts. it doesn't enable taxpayer bailouts. anybody that comes to failure must be liquidated or broken into pieces and sold off. the management must be fired and the shareholders must be wiped out. so there can be no doubt this ends bailouts and puts the fees on banks. all the details about that, whether it's prepayment funds for the funeral expenses or whether you raise it when crises occur, all of that strikes me as not central to the theme. >> yet the president and the democrats, chris dodd still

looking for one good republican to stand up to even get it to the floor. susan collins joined the others. 41 republicans lock stepped against it right now. they are back in negotiations. when senat-- they're not going t scott brown. who are you going to pick up? >> well, you know, i wasn't on that call. i don't know what he said. i do know that this letter that the 41 senators signed was not the massive opposition to financial reform that, perhaps, senator mcconnell has portrayed it to be. they clearly seem to leave the door open that they wanted to see what ways the bill advanced. as i say, i am pretty confident this is going to be bipartisan. it's not going to just be one lone republican that comes over. i think a lot of republicans are going to read the bill and say that they agree with it. that we ought to be holding wall street firms accountable for the damage that they do. that we ought to be getting

derivatives out in the open and that we ought to be protecting consumers. i don't think this is in the end going to be that controversial. >> in the speech tomorrow is the president going to steer clear of the goldman issue or is he going to mention it? >> i don't know the answer to that. as you know, it's an independent regulatory agency that's doing the investigation. it's clearly not appropriate for the -- we didn't have anything to do with the declaring of the investigation. and it wouldn't be appropriate to comment on, you know, whether we think it's valid or anything like that. >> austan goolsbee from the white house, thank you very much. >> great to see you. coming up, the president's search for the next supreme court nominee. and which political party is the big spender? find me on twitter at mitchell reports. myth number 22. nothing's better after a long day than a giant plate of lettuce. c'mon. you know what is? lean cuisine's new apple cranberry chicken... with sweet cranberries... farm-picked veggies...

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this morning the president met with senate leaders from both parties, discussing, of course, the supreme court vacancy and gauging how contentious the confirmation process might be. the new quinnipiac poll today shows 29% of americans think the court is too liberal, 19% too conservative, 40% say just right. with me now, savannah guthrie, nbc news white house correspondent and cohost of the "the daily rundown." thank you very much. good to see you both. first of to, savannah, you've just come out of the white house briefing and of course the meeting the president had today, what is your takeaway from the president's focus and also what you heard from robert gibbs. >> reporter: look, i think we've got a short list that's still around ten. one official says it's not getting any bigger at this point

but not contracting either. this is the process where the president is starting to look into the writings of these potential candidates. one interesting little tidbit, the president has begun to have some personal conversations with potential candidates, including at least one in person here at the white house. this was described to me as not a formal interview, but rather kind of a meet and greet. look, the president personally knows several of the people he's looking at like elena kagan, diane woods. other persons he's never met. at least one person was here at the white house, meeting with the president in an informal way just to say hello and get to know each other a little bit. so the process moves forward. but they have sort of given themselves a deadline informally of the end of may to have a nominee named. it's not a date that they pulled out of thin air. it was, in fact, may 26th of last year that the president announced sotomayor was his pick

for the supreme court. they think if they nominate someone then, they're on track to have somebody confirmed by the august recess. they'll probably like to speed it up even more if they could. >> sharon, are you surprised a quinnipiac poll would find more americans think that the court is too liberal than too conservative? well, i think that the key figure in that poll is that 40% that's in the xdmiddle. and i think it's very much reflective of the fact that for average americans, this fight over the supreme court largely feels irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. and so what they'd like to see is to see a confirmation process that moves forward, that doesn't eat their whole summer as last year's did. this wasn't fun for americans last year who were worried about staying in their homes, worried about foreclosure and their jobs, to watch this vicious partisan battle fight itself out during the entire last summer over the sotomayor nomination. i think host americans are

anxious to avoid that. if you look at the cnn poll from yesterday, you'll see that the numbers remain virtually unchanged since 2005 when george w. bush was president. and that is that most americans want a moderate appointed to the supreme court. now, all these polls, of course, are interesting, because they don't define the terms. one person's liberal is another person's moderate. >> exactly. >> one person's moderate is another person's conservative. it's really hard to get true meaning out of what these polls are telling us. >> i was very interested, both of you, in what arlen specter had to say on the daily rundown earlier with savannah and chuck todd, about how he misread from the process, the confirmation process, misread what kind of justice john roberts would be. let's watch. >> i think we've got to find a better way to evaluate nominees and what they say, even though it's under oath. perhaps i should have paid more attention to roberts' early

record when he worked in the department of justice or white house council where he showed ti signs at that time of being far to the right. i still think we ought to do a better job in identifying ideology. >> to both of you, is there any way in these hearings the senators can ask questions and not just get boilerplate responses that really are not predictive of what kind of justice they'll be? because what senator specter said to savannah and chuck is that he has really been surprised at at least two mayor rulings from roberts, that he's been much more conservative than he indicated he would be. conservative and also not following, at least as far as senator spector is concerned, not following precedent. >> the confirmation process really in many ways is broken. i'm writing a book about race and the confirmation process.

i've been reading every confirmation hearing since 1955, the year after brown versus board of education was decided. what you see is a striking similarity not only in the questions but in the answers. it's now become a form of theater. and i think that the committee, the judiciary committee, has to try and find a way to be more responsive to the american public. also to the trust that they have, to find out really where these candidates stand. and i think the best way to do that is to go through these candidates' decisions that they've made in their careers. it doesn't mean that they have to have been a judge. it's not only the decisions they've made on the bench. but their professional decisions and their professional experiences. and to ask questions that are not just about affirmative action and about abortion, but to ask the candidates questions that will really get at whether these candidates are capable of being independent and whether these candidates have demonstrated in the past their willingness to go against the grain when it's required by the rule of law. those are the kinds of questions

i think we want to hear the committee asking so that we can get more creative contemporaneous answers from the nominees rather than answers that have been rehearsed as part of the confirmation process. >> exactly. and, savannah guthrie, when you said that there was a meeting, interesting reporting that there was a get to know you or meet and greet meeting, that would suggest that it was not someone he works with all the time like elena kagan. it could be someone like judge garland. >> yeah. that was my guess. first of all, the senior official wouldn't tell me if there'd been more than one of these meetings. as was explained to me, the president does know several of the folks on the short list. personally elena kagan being one. judge woods being another example. some he's never met. merrick garland fits into that and is local.

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the irs is now looking into the tax records of florida senate hopeful marco rubio to see whether the candidate used a republican party credit card for

personal expenses. how damaging will that federal inquiry be? other republicans in florida may also be involved. at least in the investigation. politico joins us now. josh, let's talk about this. the whole focus on florida, now we've got marco rubio is going to have to defend himself in the irs case which could also as they look at party spending indicate that charlie crist could be involved as well. we don't know yet where it's going. what is the impact so far on the race? >> it affects both florida republicans. charlie crist hand picked chairman jim greer is the one at the head of the investigation. that he overpent hundr marco rubio has been portrayed as the consummate outsider, candidate, golden boy. we've already heard the

revelations he's spent money on his own personal gain and used a state party credit card for personal expenses. this looks like with the irs investigating and possibly having him in the cross hairs this could certainly tarnish his image as he tries to campaign for the republican nomination. >> of course, the deadline is april 30th for charlie crist to decide what he's going to do. every indication is that he's not going to end up running against rubio because he's so far outdistanced. this was what happened when eric cantor on morning joe today was asked about his decision to support marco rubio ahead of charlie crist. >> when you look at what happened last week with his veto of the education bill, i think that strikes the core of really what our party is about, trying to put kids first and straighten out the schools. >> so you couldn't support charlie under these circumstances? >> no. i think he has really i think made his bed. and he'll have to live with it. >> do you think charlie crist is going to end up running as an independent? what's the future, political

future for charlie crist who himself was the golden boy of florida republican politics for quite some time, a potential presidential nominee that was talked about for vice president at one point? what is his future in the republican party? >> he has no future if the poll numbers stay as they are. he's trailing rubio by 30 points. took him for granted throughout much of 2009. now rubio has this brand as the conservative candidate. the only thing with this investigation and the scandal, perhaps, surrounding the state party, charlie crist may want to reconsider. he only has about ten days. but he may want to reconsider whether he wants to leave the republican party. because if rubio finds ethical problems facing him, he may -- krist may have a chance for a comeback. >> only ten days and counting. we'll have to see what they can figure out about this irs thing and the impact of that in the next ten days. thank you very much, josh. coming up, the skies over europe are clearing. open for business again. the nightmare, though, isn't

over for all the travelers stranded by volcanic ash. plus, the national party committee is accused of lavish spending. both committees with limited accountability. ♪ take things as they come? ♪ i've got an idea. or improvise? ♪ maxwell house custom-roasts each bean... for a full-flavored cup of coffee. so you can be good to the last drop. i think we need more cups, mom.

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some of the nation's toughest questions. and the over sixty thousand people of siemens are ready to do it again. siemens. answers. developing this hour, right now on "andrea mitchell reports," look at those picture. helicopters and boats searching for any sign of 12 people now missing after an explosion on an offshore oil rig. these pictures just into msnbc show the rig on fire last night off the coast of louisiana. the platform is still burning. it's now tilting about 70 degrees. most of the 126 workers were evacuated safely. they will be arriving back on land tonight. 15 were taken to area hospitals. seven are believed to be in critical condition. nbc's ron mott is on route. we'll have a report tonight on nbc nightly news. scientists are telling --

travelers are on the move again in europe. now the debate is heating up over whether the air space should have been closed in the first place. what to do if this were to ever happen again. nbc's chris jansing is live in iceland where you have been for a week doing amazing duty. your reports have been just riveting, chris. thanks for all that you've been doing. tell us what they know now about the numbers of volcanos that are active in iceland and what iceland plans to do. i know you had a very important interview there. >> reporter: yeah. i talked to the president of iceland. because he made some comments right at the time that we were hearing that this volcano had lost so much strength. and most importantly, it was only putting out about a tenth of the ash that it had that caused so much trouble for airlines. he said basically sometime in the next few year or even next few months there could be another explosion here. and this is a major flight path. this upset a lot of scientists who say there is no current

indication scientifically that another volcano is about to blow. it upset the tourist industry. i sat down to talk with the president of iceland. and he said to me, he felt that it was a statement he had to make. here's what he told me. >> it could be that this is creating alarm and so on and people have said. some people from my tourist companies have criticized me for it. but we are not alone in the world. >> reporter: i will tell you that i've spoken to a number of geologists. what they will say is that there are a lot of geological problems in this world and that any of them at any time could go. and this island has about 30 volcanos. so i think there is agreement on the fact, given what we've seen over the last weekend, the chaos that it caused, andrea, that it's a good idea to get some sort of contingency plan in place in case it does happen again. >> chris jansing.

again, thank you so much. we'll see you tonight on "nightly news." thanks, chris. fancy meals, luxury travel, expensive hotels. the democratic and republican national pit tecommittees are l the high life. new analysis today shows lavish ways the parties are spending their cash not limited to republicans. welcome both. reed, first of all, you're reporting on the hawaii trip and what they actually spent the money on. what have you come up with? >> that's right, andrea. this is the semiannual meeting the republican national committee holds. they held it the last weekend of january. while they were out there the republican national committee spent about $340,000. that we know of so far on this three-day meeting. there are 168 members of the republican national committee. that works out to about $2,000 per member. by the way, the members themselves had to pay for their own tickets to get out there. by and large, this is a much bigger expense. it comes at a time when republicans need all the money

they can to take advantage of this great political landscape they face. >> in fact, they took 33 staff members and paid for them. they weren't paying their own way. >> that's right. at least 33 staff members went. 29 of them were given some form of reimbursement. we know they were in hawaii as well as another four of them who are rnc officials, including former chief of staff ken mckay, chairman mike steele, treasurer randy poland and the koe chairwoman, janua larimer. they were all out there. it was a pretty hefty expense. >> jon shrum, this is pretty lavish. what happens when democrats and republicans go back to the big donors, to the fat cats, if you will, and say anteup, and they say wait a second, i'm not going to pay to send michael steele to hawaii. >> first, some of this money is spent on the big donors. secondly, i do think it was stupid if not idiotic for the republican national committee to

do this in hawaii. the reporters who went out there to cover it were sort of happy about it. they also knew they had a big story. now these numbers come out and they're embarrassing to steele. look, steele's only -- this spending of money is not steele's only problem. he has a whole set of other problems. we're going to see more accountability in the future on the part of these committees because of the stories we've now read. i also think we have to be a little bit careful. because some of what's defined as overhead, that is administrative expenses, consists of people at the committees, both committees, who actually work on campaigns. that's a perfectly legitimate expense. now, in the presidential campaigns i was involved in, one hoped to see at least two-thirds of the money that went to those committees and even higher, if you could do it, spent on media and advertising and actually voter contact. i think that's a standard that people are going to strive for. but some of those administrative expenses actually do involve that. >> but what we're seeing from the republican and democratic national committee, according to

"the washington post" reporting today, guys, is a very high percentage not going towards the actual political effort. >> that's right. >> the overhead is way too high. >> there's a lot of money being spent on raising the money itself. we've seen that over the last couple of years. especially in some of these other -- the dnc is not immune from spending too much money -- i shouldn't say too much. from spending a lot of money on their own meetings. at their annual winter meeting out here when the snowstorm hit d.c. so hard they spent about $170,000 on a downtown hotel. so you're right. there is a lot of spending going on. as bob mentioned, the spending is supposed to be on advertising with supposed to be on convincing people to vote for one candidate or the other. and money at the moment is going to hotels and to try to raise even more money to spend on ads in the future. >> shrum, briefly, is this -- will it ever be thus? is this the way national political committees have to work and campaigns have to work? >> some of it is going to be

ever thus. look, i should be in favor of spending 100% of it or i should have been on advertising. because that's what i did when i was in this business. but you're not going to hold a democratic national committee meeting almost anywhere for less than about $170,000. i suppose you could go to the middle of the country and do it in a motel 6. that's not going to happen. >> no motel 6s for michael steele or tim kaine. thank you, bob shrum. thank you very much, reid wilson. thank you very much. good to see you. coming up next, mike pence on why he has the financial reform bill is really a wall street bailout. msnbc is now on sirius xm satellite radio. tune in to sirius channel 90, xm channel 120. you gonna ask him this time? about what? our erectile dysfunction. shh...no...i don't want to talk about it.

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senate republicans appear to be softening their opposition to wall street reform. days after criticizing the bills in the senate now for making

bailouts permanent, minority leader eer mitch mcconnell say bipartisan talks are making him optimistic. republican mike pence has also been one of the bill's chief critics. he joins us now. you also called this a bailout bill. >> right. >> criticizing that was chris dodd, the chairman, earlier on this program. he said you all went with that long before you even had legislation. that you went off of the franklin consulting memo, calling it a bailout bill when no one even knew what the legislation was going to include. do you still claim it's a bailout bill? >> well, it's not just us claiming it. it's congressman brad sherman, a prominent democrat in the house. i think he described it as a permanent bailout fund. the administration in expressing a willingness to drop the bailout fund in the middle of the bill gave tacit

acknowledgment that there was a bailout. this feels to me like the left hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. i think the american people see this. what they're doing is taking the bad ideas of the wall street bailout and t.a.r.p. and trying to institutionallize them not only in this $50 billion fund, but in the extension of authority to the fdic and treasury for years to come. >> congressman, the $50 billion fund was bob corker's idea. he is a republican from tennessee. it wasn't in the treasury bill, it wasn't in the white house's version, it wasn't in chris dodd's version. it was suggested by a republican. >> well, what we've seen is bailout funds in both the house bill and the senate bill. but that's not the extent of the bailout. the last time that wall street came to washington, d.c., to bail them out of all their bad decisions, if memory serves, that was about a $700 billion request. so $50 billion -- >> under george w. bush and secretary hank paulson, two republicans in the republican administration. >> andrea, you're absolutely

right. i vigorously opposed the wall street bailout when the bush administration bought it. and we are vigorously opposing intents to make wall street bailouts permanent under this so-called financial services bill under this administration. >> what do you think of the derivative regulation that came out of the senate agricultural committee just today. >> i'm not familiar with it. let me be clear. you know, i think there is a need, you know, for some of these boutique financial instruments to be regulated, like ordinary, you know, financial instruments. there's more consumer protections we can pass. but i have to tell you, the extension of authority here to the treasury, to the fdic that allows them to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, that keeps alive this deeply flawed concept that some institutions are too big to fail. i just think it's an approach the american people have utterly rejected across political lines in this country, and they want to see us do what republicans

are offering, end the era of bailouts entirely. end the era bailouts entirely. let's reform the bankruptcy code and get these big institutions that make bad decisions in the same bankruptcy courts small businesses have to go to. >> don't you always have to have -- bankruptcy courts are very slow procedures. don't you have to have emergency procedures for treasury, for the new york fed, for some entity, fdic, to dismantle a bad institution quickly? >> well, i think the federal bankruptcy courts if we added a new chapter to the federal bankruptcy code could be given the authority to move very quickly to interdict with these types of vast and complex financial firms but the very idea that we ought to have bureaucrats in washington, d.c. at the fed or the fdic making arbitrary decisions about taxpayer dollars in the future is just something the american people have rejected. they're tired of the borrowing, the spending, and the bailouts. i think the reason they're having so much trouble with this bill as the american people see it, this isn't getting tough on

wall street. this is an answer to wall street's prayers. >> thank you very much, mike pence. we'll see what the president has to say about all of this tomorrow of course in the big speech. thank you for joining us today. >> you bet. >> and what political story will be making headlines in the next 24 hours? that's next right here on msnbc. and it's green week on msnbc. tomorrow, environmentalist and costar of nbc's "law and order" sam waterston joining us to talk about the new msnbc documentary "future earth, addicted to power" which he narrates. [ crowd cheering ] [ male announcer ] competition... it pushes us to work harder.

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what political story will be making headlines in the next 24 hours? joining us now chris cillizza "the washington post" national political reporter and author of "the fix" and our own luke russert on the hill is now confirming breaking news out of the house ethics committee. chris? >> yeah, you know, this is relatively big news, andrea. eric masser the former democratic congressman from new york who resigned amid lots and lots and lots of allegations about inappropriate actions with

staff is now going to be investigated formally by the house ethics committee. he is gone from congress but since he left about a month ago we've seen back and forth between his chief of staff and him about a $40,000 payment, what was that for, why was it done? they disagree about that. lots of questions lingering. and again, this is not something if you're a democrat running for office you want -- in the fall you want eric massa away from the public spotlight in every way possible, not which is what he will be now, more in the spotlight as the house ethics committee looks into his behavior and actions and sees whether anything was unlawful or untoward. >> and, in fact, we now have a two-page resolution from the house ethics committee so this is going to continue, these kinds of investigations will certainly continue through the fall. thanks so much, chris cillizza. that does it for this edition of "andrea mitchell reports." we'll see you back here tomorrow. friday on the show, house

financial services chairman barney frank. tamron hall is up next with a look at how the battle over immigration is hitting a fever pitch now in arizona. gecko: uh, you wanted to see me sir?

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if you cannot afford your medication, call 1-866-4-trilipix for more information. trilipix. there's more to cholesterol. get the picture. i'm tamron hall. right now on msnbc news live as president obama tackles financial reform. he's under new pressure to act now on immigration reform. latino leaders calling on the president to keep his promise to tackle this lightning rod issue. we'll talk with one of the democratic lawmakers who is holding the president's feet to the fire. another spending scandal rocking the gop. this time it's in florida. the irs is looking into whether senate candidate marco rubio and other florida republicans used their credit cards for personal expenses. and taken from florida and abandoned in new york city. the bizarre mystery about a toddler found alone and crying

on the steps of st. patrick's cathedral with a note attached to him. plus, pop star rihanna taken to the hospital. the details on what happened to her and the scoop. we want to begin with breaking news you heard at the end of the hour. the house ethics committee has opened a full investigation of former congressman eric massa. nbc's luke russert joins us now from capitol hill. luke, i understand that the investigation cannot focus on a former member but the panel can look into what others knew and what they did about it. >> reporter: correct, tamron. what this investigation is really going to investigate is what did the democratic leadership know and officials pertaining to this matter know and when did they know it? this is something that john boehner the republican majority leader has been hitting on for a long time. he has said going back to last week, going back for the past few months, there should be a full, open investigation into what steny hoyer and nancy pelosi specifically knew regarding the issues pertaining to eric massa.

the committee has unanimously voted to conduct a full and complete inquiry into whether the conduct of any member, officer, employee of the house violated any rule, law, regulation, or any other standard of conduct applicable to the performance of their duties in respect to the allegations of misconduct involving former representative eric massa. this is a big deal, tamron, because politically this will keep eric massa in the spotlight. the investigation will continue into what these folks exactly knew and the real important thing we will look at now are dates. the story speaker pelosi put out there said she first heard about this on wednesday, march 3rd, 2009. that is going to be the day that's going to be very interesting to look at. did she know anything before that? we'll keep an eye on this. obviously the investigation should take a few weeks, could stretch out months. this is a big win you could say for john boehner and the republican party that this happened. they've been calling for it and it's going forward. >> thank you very much. the coast guard is still right now searching for several people unaccounted for after a