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We've had some great participation today in the comments and in private notes.

First, Scott Lewis has done some great research comparing the votes of the various Senators to the campaign contributions they got from the credit card companies. One such stat: "Yea" votes got $26,389 in their peak years. "Nay" votes got $14,888. The spread was greater among Democrats alone. Go read.

There's a lot of anger and embarrssment on the Democratic side about Reid's "Yea" vote. He did not set a good example to his colleagues. From the comments:

I just got off the phone with Senator Reid's office. I asked why he voted for the bankruptcy bill. The woman who answered said that the senator has a statement that will be going up on his site. [...] Long and short, she eventually checked with the press office and told me that the statement may go up later today or tomorrow or Monday. She also said that it might not go up at all. I told her that it would be more efficient for the senator to post the statement, rather than have folks keep calling to about this bill. She said, "well I guess people are going to have to continue calling." I think we need to have the phones ring off the hook at his office before we will see any statement. Please ask anyone you know who cares about this to call Senator Reid.

I talked to his office too. The line that got me was "It's an improvement over current law. " Yeah? Prove that, Harry.

Among the left, there's been some curiousness about the blogs linking to this site - specifically, a lot of popular conservative blogs, a lot of smaller liberal blogs, and almost no A-list liberal blogs (aside from the public-driven Recommended List over at daily kos). I basically attribute this to there not being an extremely popular liberal blog that enjoys regularly linking to folks outside its immediate network. (Update: I spoke too soon, and missed the support from Talking Points Memo. Wonderful!)

Continue checking out BizzyBlog for more details on how the bill will impact consumers. BizzyBlog makes the point that the companies that will be advantaging from this bill are the same ones that are proving so incompetent in protecting our personal, private information from identity theft.

This is not the only left/right coalition out there. We'll link to other such "orthogonal politics" sites. The Online Coalition is about the FEC. More blogs want to inhabit translator roles; this new blog expressed such a desire in the comments.

Since Chapter 13 doesn't mean low fees, it would hurt the economy:

When you have people paying outrageously high fees and outrageously high interest on their credit card debt, you drain money away from productive portions of the economy. When people fall behind in their bills it is not rare nowdays for credit card companies to charge interest rates on the order of 30%, plus high late fees, plus overlimit fees.

Finally, taking a suggestion from Simian Brain, here is the same table as before, limited by the Senators that are up for re-election in 2006.

Also, Lieberman and Feinstein deserve mention, because despite their "Nay" vote, Lieberman voted for cloture, and Feinstein voted it out of committee.