Stimulating thoughts
The House has approved President Obama’s economic stimulus package on a straight party-line vote: Not one Republican voted for it. The LA Times ventured a guess why:
For their part, Republicans showed remarkable unanimity. On major economic issues, typically a few moderate Republicans stray from the party line. This time, they seemed to be concerned chiefly with re-establishing their bona fides as fiscal conservatives, deriding excessive government spending while returning to their pro-tax-cut credo.
This begs the question: Where were these fiscal conservatives the past eight years when we could have used them? The massive deficits of 2001-2008 didn’t arrive by FedEx this January 20th.
Over at the Washington Post, George F. Will parses the package for the GOP. I’ll sum it up: Defer to the President — who, as Will points out, “received nearly 53 percent of the popular vote — better than Ronald Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980” — but don’t support pork projects not tied to stimulus. That seems fair — except these guys have no credibility on the issue. (See above.) And voting as a uniform bloc against the package? That doesn’t reflect individual thoughtfulness. That’s a crude political calculation. We’ll know within two years, if not far sooner, if it was a smart one.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:56 am
Rather than learning from their defeat, the GOP seems content to circle their broken-down wagons and become more obsructrive/divisive/ exclusionary, as reflected in the post-election rhetoric and now this vote.
January 29th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Or maybe they just want to be able to say, if it doesn’t work, “Hey, WE didn’t vote for it.” Of course, if it does work, they’ll find themselves looking foolish or worse.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Dick Polman from the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a commentary on his blog about this topic. Click on the link below to read it.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/americandebate/