On Fox News over the weekend, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann blamed the the nation’s falling credit rating on President Barack Obama and called on the president to fire Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. Bachmann lays the “destruction” of the nation’s credit rating squarely at Obama’s feet, but Standards & Poors, the agency that issued the lowered credit rating blamed the move on a volatile political environment where making consensus is difficult. Bachmann voted against the consensus between Obama and congressional Republicans last week.

“This president has destroyed the credit rating of the United States through failed economic policy and his inability to control government spending by once again raising the debt ceiling,” Bachmann told Fox’s Greta Van Susteren. “We were warned by all of the credit agencies that a failure to deal with the debt would lead to this downgrade in our credit rating. But instead, this president submitted a budget that had a $1.5 trillion deficit and then he requested a $2.4 trillion blank check on top of that.”

Bachmann added, “President Obama is destroying the foundations of our economy one beam at a time. I call on the president to seek the immediate resignation of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and to submit a plan with his list of cuts that balance the budget this year, turn this economy around and put our people back to work.”

S&P, the agency that downgraded the United States’ credit rating, noted that partisan bickering played a role in its decision.

“The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed,” the agency wrote. “The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.”

S&P also noted that it takes no position in the debate over whether spending cuts or revenue increases or both are an appropriate way to manage the nation’s debt.

But despite S&P’s assertion that lack of consensus between Democrats and Republicans led, in part, to the credit rating downgrade, Bachmann suggested that Obama was at fault and might try to blame the tea party.

“I’m very concerned that this administration tomorrow might look for anyone else to blame,” she said. “They may blame the tea party. They may blame the rating agencies or anyone else. They knew this was coming this year in January but they didn’t write a plan and they still don’t have a plan.”

Geithner released a statement Sunday that he’s staying on the job.

Here’s the full interview:

It’s not the first time Bachmann had strong words for Geithner. In 2009, at a Financial Services Committee hearing, she questioned him on whether or not there was a push to abandon the dollar as the nation’s currency.

But Franken isn’t backing down. His spokesperson Jess McIntosh said reform must happen now.

“We know what went wrong with Wall Street’s credit rating system — conflicts of interest eroded it by rewarding cozy relationships instead of accuracy,” McIntosh said in a statement. “And we know how to fix it — the Franken amendment that passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support,” she said.

“You can be sure that if such a study came back, it would confirm the conflicts of interest. It just makes more sense to end the delay and instate the reform now.”

MnIndy file photo

Sen. Al Franken’s amendment to eliminate conflicts of interest between credit rating agencies and financial institutions passed the Senate by a 64-to-35 vote on Thursday. The amendment is now part of the financial reform bill being debated in Congress.

“Today is a major victory for Main Streets all over America,” said Sen. Franken said in a statement. “We’re cleaning up Wall Street’s dishonest system and replacing it with one that rewards accuracy instead of fraud. My proposal wasn’t conservative, or liberal, or even moderate. It was just plain common sense. That’s why I had the support of colleagues on both sides of the aisle and why we were able to win today.”

Sen. Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi added, “Today, the Senate sent a strong, bipartisan message that conflicts of interest must be removed from the current credit-rating system.”

Franken was interviewed by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein on Friday about the amendment:

Why did you decide to focus on the rating agencies?

The agencies were an enormous part of the problem. They were giving AAA ratings to products that didn’t deserve them. There’s this inherent conflict of interest where the issuers of these financial products were shopping for raters. It’s become very clear that what’s going on was they had an incentive to inflate the ratings to get more business. In some cases the agencies were just stupid, but there was also a reason to be stupid. They had motive.

How does your amendment fix the problem?

Instead of the issuer shopping for ratings, we’d form a board under the SEC that would decide which rating agency rates each instrument. I don’t mandate how they do it. But it wouldn’t have to be totally random. The board would be comprised mainly of investors and people who manage pensions and university endowments. One of the advantages of this is that it’d inject more competitions into the business. Right now, we have Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s and Fitch doing 94 percent of the ratings. This board could give business to smaller agencies. You’d be rewarded on accuracy and so the incentive would be to be more accurate.

Franken also spoke on the Senate floor about the amendment:

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This week Minnesota’s members of Congress went back to work after the July 4 break, except for Sen. Al Franken who was showing up — finally — for the first time. Rep. Keith Ellison put forward a credit reform bill, Rep. Betty McCollum announced her plan to expand the Peace Corps, and Republicans criticized the Democrats’ energy and stimulus policies. Here’s how the week shook down:

Rep. Keith Ellison introduced legislation to reform credit rating agencies on Wednesday. “When these agencies put their mark of approval on complex products they confer a legitimacy that may not actually exist,” he said. “We’ve learned of instances where credit rating agencies have given top ratings to products backed by dubious mortgages and other loans. Under current law there was really no one looking over the agencies’ shoulders to make sure that they were making reasonable assumptions or had even a basic understanding of the risks they were assessing.”

Rating agencies are currently subject only to limited oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but are critical elements of the financial system.

Rep. Michele Bachmann sent a video to people attending the Tea Parties over the weekend; she was appointed to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s Advisory Board; and she says that President Obama is destroying the American dream — or, rather, the American dreams of Chrysler auto dealers.

Rep. Betty McCollum is gearing up for a Congressional softball game. Proceeds from the game be donated to the Young Survival Coalition (YSC), a group that works to educate and support young women living with breast cancer.

McCollum also spoke passionately on the House floor on Thursday about expanding the Peace Corps.

[T]oday the Peace Corps, one of the most successful foreign policy initiatives, is at a crossroads. Peace Corps is not capable of meeting the demand of Americans of all ages who want to serve… We have an opportunity here today in this moment to reinvigorate Peace Corps for the next new century, but it’s going to take leadership from Congress. The President’s request simply was not enough, even though the President does propose to double, increase and fully fund Peace Corps out into the years.

Rep. James Oberstar is still pushing a $450 billion funding bill and $50 billion for high-speed rail. Also, Oberstar was in New York on Friday with Obama’s transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, to mark the 50th anniversary of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which is crucial to Duluth’s status as a seaport.

Rep. Erik Paulsen talked to the Eden Prairie News about the cap-and-trade energy bill working its way through Congress. “If we’re going to be serious about securing our energy future, we need to focus on having nuclear energy be a part of that,” he said.

Rep. John Kline penned an editorial for the website “America’s Right” slamming Obama’s stimulus policies. “Republicans are committed to pro-growth policies that will get our economy back on track without saddling future generations with unmanageable debt,” he wrote. “We offered a stimulus plan that would have created twice the jobs for half the price.”

But Media Matters says his statement doesn’t hold water: “[T]he GOP got its ‘twice the jobs’ claim by misusing a formula in an academic paper that they later admitted they weren’t able to understand in the first place.”

Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar split their votes on immigration policy, specifically on the border fence between the United States and Mexico. Franken voted against it. Klobuchar voted for it.

One of Franken’s first tasks as senator was to sign on to the Employee Free Choice Act, a pledge he’s made throughout his campaign. “I just became a cosponsor of my first bill in the Senate, the Employee Free Choice Act,” he said on Tuesday.