Just a few weeks ago Republican Congressman Paul Ryan stepped up to a mic saying to a national audience that his party was not an opposition party but a proposition party. It was quite an expensive joke as they promptly voted in complete lock step against the stimulus plan. At the time I commented that if the Republicans were not an opposition party then that particular vote proved that they were certainly an obstructionist one. That point has been confirmed with the vote taken yesterday in the U.S. Senate. Only 3 Republicans, out of 41, voted for the greatly compromised stimulus plan in the Senate. I don’t know what definition Ryan and others use for “obstructionist” but I’d say that only 3 votes out of 219 Congressional Republicans fits almost anyone’s definition.
First they ran around falsely declaring that the plan was “full of pork” when they were largely only complaining about just over 2% of the spending in it. Their misinformation campaign was fairly successful for a short time as the media focused on that small percentage rather than on the 98 % that will help our ailing economy and create millions of new jobs. Having a good week of manipulating the media and obstructing during this economic emergency brings only limited political benefit while the downside could make their November loses look like child’s play. The public can and should be very fickle with politicians during such hard times. Hopefully the public will make Ryan and the other obstructionists in Congress pay a heavy price if they continue to play political games while there is so much crisis all around.
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5 comments:
Where do you get only 1-2% pork? Have you personally read the stimulus bill?
And since when is "obstructionist" now defined as anyone who disagrees with liberal agendas? Unbelievable how liberals see reality - actually, it's quite creepy.
Well I guess I could ask the same question of the right wing obstructionists.
As for me, I'm basing my figure on an actual analysis by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/2009-02-stimulus-criticisms.pdf
If any GOPers (aside from the 3) showed any willingness to work with this President on the stimulus, I would not be calling them "obstructionist." But nearly EVERY SINGLE ONE of them chose to stand in the way rather than work together for the common good. Yes, that is an obstructionist!
I think it is more along the lines of 100% pork, including the tax cuts. Handing out tax cuts for things that already happened are not stimulus. You can't change behaviors that are already in the past. All we just did was add 1 billion to the deficit, when deficit spending by both the public and the governement is what got us into this mess. And the rest of the bill just grows government at a time when we least need that drag on the economy. Bush was a reckless spender, and his deficits contributed to the problem, but this one bill does more damage than 8 years of Bush did.
The republicans offered 3 compromises to this massive spending bill and were not even given the time of day not to mention the democrats completely shut them out of committee yesterday. Tell me again who the obstructionist are?
Unbelievable... I'm out of here.
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