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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Politics in opposing ‘stimulus’?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Republicans are, of course, going to lose the battle to reshape, or to materially influence in any way at all, the $825 billion spending bill that’s being dressed up as “economic stimulus.” That’s $825 billion now. Stay tuned for new totals to come.
The party that runs Washington has, as we all know by now, used the recession as an excuse to bulk up every new spending notion the left ever had and bury it in the stimulus spending bill. For Republicans under the bus, it’s an opportunity to learn how to be an effective minority, even in defeat.
It’s a quick learning opportunity to decide how to deal with the new President. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Savannah) thinks that President Obama is, or should be, as eager as they are to corral the runaway spending Congressional Democrats are about to launch. A Tuesday visit with Obama left House Republicans unconvinced. “The only thing it [the pending bill] will stimulate is more government and more debt,” said the number-three Republican in the House, Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. Democrats did remove $335 million for funding contraceptive programs through Medicaid, but that’s a drop in the bucket and few Republicans are likely to vote for the legislation.
The President has acknowledged that the minority has “legitimate” complaints about the bill, “but I do hope we can all put politics aside and do the American people’s business.”
Here’s where Obama may be able to twist Republicans into a more ineffective minority if they’re not careful. He won in part by selling the notion that he can be a bipartisan President — and indeed he would like an overwhelming show of bipartisan support for the proposed new spending bill to demonstrate that.
The reality is, however, that the bill is filled to the brim with political agendas. By some accounts the liberal activist group ACORN could be in line for billions. The politics is, therefore, seeped through and through. It is a political-agenda document.
So when Obama urges Republicans “to keep politics to a minimum,” that’s a message to Main Street that politics is a one-party game. Clever. Wrong, but clever use of the bully pulpit in effecting the leadership persona of the post-partisan President.
What can Republicans, and the fiscal conservatives among them, do? Continue the battle, even after they lose on the stimulus, to explain to the American people what liberals have done under the guise of economic stimulus. There’s too much coming down now to stop or explain it all, but six months from now when it’s perfectly clear to the unemployed and to those who are still working and paying taxes that it wasn’t stimulus, but instead was more of the same failed approaches from decades past.
