September
2008
Pelosi Blunders Bailout Bill
I'm not a member of Congress, nor some sort of political messiah, but I've got at least a modicum of political savvy and common sense. I can no longer say that of Democratic Majority Leader and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
Pulling together a bailout package, or economic rescue package as supporters would like it to be know, took a lot of wheeling and dealing. My background in politics tells me that a lot of chips were called in to pull together a majority of congressmen who could be cajoled into supporting the package.
Voting for something which is, at least on the surface, contrary to every fiber in your being is what many democrats and republican congressmen were asked to do by their leadership. That had to be tough enough.
Pelosi chose that time to insult the republican policies over the past 8 years which have led to this economic calamity. That was not smart.
Pelosi didn't have enough votes from members of her own party to pass the bailout package. She reached out to Republicans who hammered out a bill that both Pelosi and republicans could support. After receiving committments, Pelosi proceeded to talk about how right wing policies of the last 8 years (Republican President George W Bush has been president during that time and Republicans controlled both houses for most of that time) have led to the problems.
Somehow she figured that she could rub republican faces in the mess and then get their votes. That's like talking in babytalk to a tail wagging dog and then kicking it in the face when it gets close enough to you.
That being said, if the package was the right thing before Pelosi's incompetent blunder, it should have still been the right thing after the slap in the face. Republicans who believed the package had merits but changed their minds after Pelosi's meltdown, showed they were no better than the Speaker. If they were leaders, as their constituents voted them to be, they would have followed through on their committments and taken their pound of flesh out of Pelosi at a later date.
There is a time to define differences and there is a time to work together for the common good. At a time when bi-partisanship should have been so important, Pelosi chose showmanship over concensus. This was more than unfortunate. Pelosi once and for all proved she is not a leader.
Jim McGuigan
Jim McGuigan
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Despite one’s position on the bailout, I think time is close at hand for Democrats to look for a new speaker. She failed, and has failed miserably, to achieve not only what is good for her country, but also to complete any of the items on her own party’s agenda.
Perhaps the worst speaker ever, at least Pelosi has made it okay to challenge the patriotism of the other party with her other remarks.
Normally, I would agree with you on this wholeheartedly. Many of Pelosi’s positions have ticked me off repeatedly.
However, there was a lot of scuttlebutt about how Republicans were planning on trashing this bailout plan from the very beginning, in order to take advantage of the fact that the vast majority of Americans were very much opposed to the bailout, and by leaving the Democrats hanging on this by themselves to support an unpopular bill, Republicans put themselves in a position to win or hold onto marginal seats.
“President Bush is warning Democrats they must not wait but must act now to bail out Wall Street the way he wants to or the economy will be, well, even worse.
But on a Republican blog, one consultant is urging Republicans in tight races to vote against the bailout and attack Democrats who vote for it.
Quote, “God himself couldn‘t have given rank-and-file Republicans a better opportunity to create political space between themselves and the administration. Let this be the political establishment—Bush Republicans and the White House, plus Democrats in Congress—saddling the taxpayers with hundreds of billions in debt—more than the Iraq war conjured up in a single weekend and enabled by Pelosi, by the way—while principled Republicans say, “No” and go to the country with a stinging indictment of the majority in Congress.
A bailout may be inevitable, but so too can be the political benefit for congressional Republicans if played correctly.”
This open call for Republicans to vote based not on, say, country first, coming from Patrick Ruffini, a former RNC staffer who‘s Web site says, it‘s a joint project with a veteran of the McCain campaign who was suspended this spring for circulating an anti- Obama Web video.”
Reported on Sept 23, on Countdown with Keith Olbermann
If she knew about this ahead of time, and she probably did, it is possible if not likely that she said what she said, in order to calm down people who would naturally revolt and want to punish anyone who supported this bill by voting against them in the upcoming elections.
What she said, explained why Democrats were supporting an unpopular bill, even if she did so in a manner that was not “acceptable” by Republicans. But I need to also remind everyone that the same type of remarks, and even more offensive ones, were being thrown around by Rep. Cantor, Rep Paul Ryan and Rep. Boehner in the media.
There’s plenty of blame to throw around, and besides the lack of leadership from both sides and the grandstanding that was occuring on both sides, members who wouldn’t come together to come up with a good package in a time of crisis, and vote for it once they agreed on it, demonstrates that members are more interested in keeping their own jobs through political stunts, than they are in fixing the problems.
McCain has been claiming that he was responsible for saving the day and rescuing the bill, even though reports from inside the meeting indicate he said very little, and his own staff had reported that he spent most of his time detached and making phone calls rather than being there in person. Then after the vote failed he suddenly changed his tune and claimed that it was Obama’s fault for being mum and Pelosi’s fault for upsetting the House Republicans who switched their votes.
So much for not playing the blame game.
His attacks have been so bad and so inaccurate, that factcheck.org has done an extensive piece to debunk it
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/keeping_quiet.html
But getting back to Pelosi’s comments. Given that Cantor and his group were already predisposed to vote against this bill, and his childish comments about why they voted against it, (particularly when they agreed that they would probably have to vote for it eventually, and the fact that this information came out before they took this action), regardless of Pelosi’s comments, probably isn’t going to make the Republicans look good.
And anyone who had money in the stock market when it tanked (and at least 50% of what was lost would have been owned by those among the richest people in America), probably aren’t going to be so happy with the membership that didn’t vote for the bill. Maybe that’s why they aren’t talking.
It’s a catch-22. The poor and middle class won’t be happy with anyone voting for this bailout, and the rich won’t be happy with anyone voting against it.
The Democrats probably ticked off more people for voting for it, but the measure didn’t pass, so that irritation will proably subside. The Republicans, however, lost a lot of money for their key supporters, particularly for those who are/were most likely to donate to their campaigns.
Having lost over 1.2 Trillion dollars in one day is going to tick off a lot of rioh Republicans.
The one good thing that might come out of this, might be that Republicans have managed to do something that Democrats have never been able to do. They’ve managed to inadvertently cause more “shared sacrifice” from their base in one day, than we’ve ever been able to do in a decade.
What was that the Republicans say about people who want to redistribute their wealth, or lose their money from stupid policies? Don’t they call them Socialists?
Christopher,
Pelosi was no worse in her partisan remarks than Gingrich or Hasterd. A big difference is that Pelosi was unable to get her party to march in lock step so she needed to reach out across the aisle. That is not a challenge that either of the previous several GOP speakers have had to deal with.
Republicans have challenged the patriotism of Democrats for decades. Pelosi didn’t benefit from the unity in her own party that republicans have enjoyed — that’s the only reason this even made the news.
Les,
Geez…brevity in comments please. Never repost things from other sites here. If you’re itching for people to read other stuff, then send a link.
Jim:
Can you point to a time when a republican with the authority of Pelosi questioned the patriotism of the democrats in such a public format?
I certainly question the patriotism of some democrats, but I’m not the speaker of the house–who, for dignity’s sake alone, should refrain from interjecting the same bitterness into a discussion so vital. It is just unprofessional to use that pulpit for such shameful remarks. Why isn’t there an outcry for her to make amends?
ON September 30, 2008 on the Rachel Maddow Show, Representative John Shaddegg Republican - Arizona, stated that he doesn’t know anyone who actually changed their vote based on Speaker Pelosi’s speech. (He voted against the bailout.)
If he’s telling the truth, then House Republicans never intended to back the bill in the first place, (in spite of Republican Leaders claiming that they would), not because they didn’t want the bailout, but because they wanted to embarrass Pelosi and the Democrats for not passing a bill that they “should have passed” “because they control Congress”. (That’s the Republican spin to claim that Democrats can’t get anything done, even though they knew that such an unpopular bill would never be passed by only just one party - it would be political suicide.)
It appears that they are now so embarrassed by the public’s impression that they would put their personal feelings ahead of the Nation’s economic stability, that he had to refute what would be, by his revelation, a lie by Republicans to cover up their intentional double cross.
But the only people who would be miffed by that would be the people who wanted the bailout - the rich who wanted the payout. He’s apologizing to THEM. He doesn’t want them to feel that it was something so minor and petulate that scuttled the bill. He wants them to believe that there were more substantial reasons behind it and they wanted to “strengthen” the bill, and make it a “better” bill, even though Republican leadership and the Treasury Secretary have been claiming that without its immediate passage, there would be an “economic meltdown” that would destroy our ecomony.
This just reinforces the fact that Republicans are willing to lie about their reason behind not backing the bill that their leadership wanted to pass, because it was so obviously a giveaway to the rich to cover their losses, at the expense of the taxpayers. It was a gimmick to gain support of the voters so they could protect their seats in Congress.
Now the Republicans are in a catch-22, because now they CAN’T pass the bill AT ALL without appearing to be going back on their promise to the public.
If they do, the voters will rise up against them for it.
If they don’t, their rich patrons will punish them for not bailing them out.
This just keeps getting more interesting.
I want to see how they dig their way out of this one.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a crisis, just that there are better ways to deal with it than by throwing money at it, when it was created by a pencil pusher’s write-down.
So how do you fix it? You can start with a pencil pusher’s “write-up” or re-valuation of assets, to ease up credit. But in the long term, you still will need more jobs in order to put money in consumers’ hands so they will continue to consume.
We’ve already lost about 700,000 jobs this year, with three months to go. If this continues, we could possibly see around a million jobs lost this year.
We’re already expecting a million homes foreclosed this year with the same number to be foreclosed next year, continued job losses will obviously increase that number.
Democrats are negotiating to have the ability to renegotiate mortgage loan terms, so that homeowners who have been caught in increased interest rate scams, don’t end up losing their homes. But don’t believe that Republican’s are opposing this because people who are needing this are poor, or shouldn’t have received the loan in the first place, or aren’t credit worthy (even if they claim that that is the case.)
You might recall that a number of years ago, Donald Trump was in bankruptcy because he couldn’t pay HIS bills. He was into so many banks for so much money that they not only renegotiated the terms of his mortgages, but they also gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars every month so that he could continue his lavish lifestyle.
If they can do that for billionaires, they should be able to do that for regular working class people as well.
Uh Jim…Pelosi didn’t need the Republicans to pass the bailout. I don’t know if you know this but the Democrats have the majority in the House and could have easily passed it even with some dissenting Democrats. You complain about Republicans in your post yet it was the Democrats and Pelosi who couldn’t finalize the deal.
And where, pray tell, was the de-facto leader of the Democrat party Barack Obama? If he is such a uniter, then why could he not step in and get all of the Dems on the same page to get this done? I know, I know, he’s a Senator and not a Congressman…but right now he’s the face and leader of the entire party yet he sat on the sidelines while nothing was done in a Democrat-controlled House.
It’s obvious to me the speaker knew what she was doing and that if the “baby” republicans couldnt take the heat of a few comments then they should get out of her kitchen…The next logical step would be to create a new bill with provisions the most liberal congressmen wanted then pass it without repugnican votes, send it to the senate and put it on the presidents desk.
Include in the new bill the extension of employments benefits protection for homeowners etc…Way to go Nancy you punked the punks!