The Betrayal

The Right Side of Life published:

There are many reasons to believe that only a slight handful of GOP Senators are going to be proverbially peeled away from the caucus to vote for this thing. For starters:

It seems the House passed bill on ’stimulus’ is not going to survive the Senate. First off, no Republicans (rightfully) voted for it and 11 Democrats joined them. Now Rassmussen is showing that support and opposition for the bill is now equalized:

Forty-two percent (42%) of the nation’s likely voters now support the president’s plan, … The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 39% are opposed to it …

Update: Fox News is reporting that certain activist groups are putting the pressure on Republican Senators:

The ad will target Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine; Olympia Snowe, R-Maine; Judd Gregg, R-N.H.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

Here are two links with the ads being run for the above Senators as well as others (both from AmericansUnitedForChange.org):

• NEW ADS TARGET REPUBLICAN SENATORS ON RECOVERY BILL
• NEW VIDEOS ENCOURAGE SENATORS TO SUPPORT PRESIDENT OBAMA’S ECONOMIC RECOVERY PLANS

Update: An “influential Senate Democrat” is also questioning the stimulus:

An influential Senate Democrat said Friday that it’s unclear whether President Obama’s $819 economic stimulus bill will win enough support to pass in the Senate.

“I don’t even know how many Democrats will vote for it, as it stands today,” Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., told FOX News.

Nelson, a moderate Democrat, is famous for gathering lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in a so-called “Gang of 14″ to avert a shutdown of the Senate over judicial nominations. He is seeking a similar bipartisan effort to improve the stimulus bill.

Next:

Angry Republican senators vowed Thursday to put up a fight against President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill after the package passed the House of Representatives with no opposition support.The senators denied they were indulging in political games against Obama, insisting that the 819-billion-dollar stimulus bill would prove a colossal waste of money without a greater emphasis on tax cuts and targeted investment.

“This isn’t about playing the game, this is about doing something good for the American people,” Republican Jon Kyl said at a briefing with several of his Senate colleagues, accusing the Democrats of ignoring their objections.

“It doesn’t seem they were interested in the same kind of bipartisan outreach that the president was,” Kyl said. “We are too often met with this response: ‘we won.’”

And it also appears that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) is seriously taking the lead on this issue:

• DeMint: Stimulus Is a ‘Mugging’ (TheHill.com)
• Sen. Jim DeMint to help lead effort to stop stimulus (GreenvilleOnline.com)

As RedState presciently puts it:

I fully expect Republican Main-Streeters like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter [emphasis mine] to vote for this monstrosity which borrows and transfers more money than there is total currency currently in circulation; however, I’m hereby challenging every one of them and their colleagues to prove me wrong. …

Call your Senator and tell him or her not to abandon the House GOP on the Front Lines of the current battle for Congress and for America’s future.

The Democrats have enough votes to pass this and every other rotten item on their agenda without Republican help. Let’s make them do it — and, through that, make them own every single negative outcome that results from their awful policies.

What say you? Are you with me?

Just a moment, ladies and gentleman — what’s this that HumanEvents.com received? A leaked memo from Speaker Pelosi?:

To: Interested Parties
From: Brendan Daly [Speaker Pelosi’s communications director]
Re: The Republican Problem
Date: January 29, 2009

The House Republican Leadership put its Members in another politically untenable position yesterday: trying to reclaim the mantle of lower taxes and small government — at the exact time when economists of every ideological stripe agree that government investments are the only way to get our economy moving again and make us competitive for the long term. 

So yesterday, while we are facing the greatest economic crisis in decades, Republican House Members ended up voting unanimously against:

* Jobs in their own communities 

* Tax cuts for 95 percent of American workers

* Long overdue investments that will transform and grow their economies to compete globally

* Critical services in their own communities, such as police officers, teachers, and health care

Instead, their substitute did not create as many jobs and it increased the number of people subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax. 

The hypocrisy of the Republicans complaining about the process does not obscure the record of recent Republican leadership:

* 2.6 million American jobs were lost in 2008 alone.

* The national debt has almost doubled in the last eight years; the debt borrowed from foreign countries has tripled.

* The Clinton Administration left a record budget surplus. President Bush turned it into the worst deficit in American history.

* We face an economic recession unrivaled since the Great Depression, as a result of years of failure to invest in our own global competitiveness, failures to bring common sense to Wall Street and our housing market, and tax policies that favored massive corporations and most affluent individuals.

This is not the first time the Republicans in the House have unanimously voted against a needed economic package. The last time, in 1993, when Democrats voted for tough action to clean up after Republican economic mess, not a single Republican voted for the legislation that produced record surpluses and a balanced budget.

Once again this week, as another Democratic President and Democratic Congress worked to address historic deficits and recession brought on by Republican mismanagement of the economy, not a single Republican voted for the legislation. There’s a pattern here of Republican economic mismanagement and Democrats stepping up to do what’s needed for the good of the country while Republicans acted in a partisan and irresponsible manner.

They almost swerved into the truth of 1994. What they failed to remember was that the GOP absolutely sweeped the House in that year, giving the Republican caucus majority status for the first time in roughly 40 years.

One would think that once one began hitting the proverbial septic tank that one would stop digging. Or, maybe not.

-Phil

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