How about a final post on the pork bill and back to blogging semi-retirement? Apropos my post the other day on why Congress needed to rush the vote only to have Obama go on vacation, here is John Hinderaker (quoting Byron York).
The Democrats' pork bill posed a different sort of test: alleged to be an emergency, it was rushed through Congress and voted on before printed copies were available--the final version was corrected in longhand--and before any member of Congress, let alone the public, had been able to read it. (Copies were, however, made available to lobbyists.) The hurry was such that voting was held open on a Friday night so that Senator Sherrod Brown could be flown back from his mother's wake to provide the last needed vote. All of this was justified by the claim that the bill was an emergency measure. What happened next?
[D]id President Obama sign it rather quickly? Not at all.
He also chose not to sign it on Saturday. And not to sign it on Sunday. And he chose not to sign it on Monday. Only on Tuesday, with a big campaign-style event in Denver, would the president finally be ready to put his signature on the bill.
He signs nonemergency legislation in the blink of an eye. And he lets emergency legislation sit for days before lifting his pen. ...
[W]hy was there such a rush, if Obama had no plans to sign [the stimulus bill] for days?
Go back to “Sunlight Before Signing.” In the case of the stimulus, there was never any doubt Obama would sign the legislation. The period in which the public needed sunlight was before the bill was passed, not before it was signed. And that was precisely the kind of sunlight the White House and Democrats wanted to stop. Once they accomplished that with Friday’s voting gambit, Obama could take a few days off in Chicago while the “emergency” legislation sat on his desk. Then, it was on to Denver for the photo-op.
This delay had nothing to do with sunlight — and everything to do with showmanship.
In the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn finds Obama neglecting his stated principles in the name of political expediency:
In a passage from his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," he sounds like a Republican complaining about the stimulus. "Genuine bipartisanship," he wrote, "assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained -- by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate -- to negotiate in good faith.
"If these conditions do not hold -- if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so -- the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this 'compromise' of being 'obstructionist.'
"For the minority party in such circumstances, 'bipartisanship' comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being 'moderate' or 'centrist.'"
From a policy angle, I heard David Walker on TV the other day damning this piece of legislation as having none of the qualities we should desire in a sound stimulus package. It was neither targeted (most of the spending has nothing to do with stimulus) nor temporary. Perhaps most ominously, he noted, this is the first major bill in American history without a dime of equity, meaning the entire sum is borrowed. Totally irresponsible.
Walker heads the Peter G. Peterson Foundation that provides this chart regarding historic government spending. I think it speaks for itself. This is real per capita spending. See the link for more details.
Recent Comments