First Michael Bennet helped lead the call to salvage the public option in health-care reform. Now the Democratic U.S. senator might be pushing his next seemingly lost cause---the effort "to make sure politicians don’t forget the obligation to pay down the debt," according to the Grand Junction Sentinel. Joined by Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers, Bennet says the "Pay It Back Act" (Senate Bill 1683) would use money returned to the federal government from bailed-out banks and car companies to pay down the federal deficit. He wants Senate budget leaders to include the provision in the next federal budget. "If they don't do that, we're going to try to get the budget amended in order to make sure that this money doesn't just become a slush fund that's pushed around for various other uses other than the ones that were the emergency uses that it was originally intended for," he says (via the Fort Collins Coloradoan). Bennet is facing the possibility of a primary against former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, and Westword scopes out their potential Republican competition, including former Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton, who "promises that she will be a more up-market, Greeley version of Fort Morgan's Marilyn Musgrave."