Republican What???
Byron York is reporting from Capitol Hill on something that’s only been a rumor until this week. He’s reporting on (gasp) confident Republican senators. Similarly, he’s noticing an uptick in concern from the Democrats’ allies.
On Capitol Hill, you can feel the Republicans’ growing sense of confidence. They’ve scored a lot of hits on the stimulus bill, and now they’re aiming higher. “We’ll try to make the bill better,” Sen. Jim DeMint said a few moments ago, “but this bill is so bad…you can’t fix it by tweaking around the edges…The best thing to happen would be for President Obama to lead, to call a time out.” Several Republicans now want to throw the whole bill out and replace it with a package that is nearly all tax cuts, “twice the jobs at half the price.”
After the Republican news conference, I asked DeMint how many Republican senators oppose the bill, and how many might be won over by a minimum number of changes stripping the bill of its notorious spending provisions, rather than demanding a complete overhaul of the bill. “I think we’ve got nearly 100 percent of Republicans who are going to vote against this bill unless it is fundamentally changed to include real economic stimulus,” DeMint said. “I think just about every Republican has come around to the realization that this is a massive spending bill, it’s a grab bag full of the Democrats’ wish lists, and they’re shamefully using the economic troubles we’re having as a country as an excuse to pass their wish list of spending. I think as that grows on people, it makes them more and more outraged.”
It’s been ages since Republican senators felt confident challenging Democratic legislation. That’s clearly happening with this stimulus bill. The Republicans’ uneasiness has disappeared, replaced by a surefootedness that hasn’t been seen since…well, if there are any political historians that read this little blog, I’d appreciate hearing from you.
Since Mr. York penned this article, Senate Democrats have added another $37 billion to it, bringing it now to a whopping $925 billion.
What’s nice about the Senate Republicans’ not blinking is the fact that they aren’t jjust opposing this monstrosity of a pork bill. Sen. McCain has put together a counterinitiative that actually costs half what the Democrats’ bill costs AND it actually creates jobs. When Robert Gibbs, Harry Reid or Dick Durbin complain about obstructionist the Republicans’ obstructionist tactics, they’ll be able to step to tell the American people that they aren’t obstructing, that they’re supporting a different bill that costs hundreds of billion less, lets them keep more of their money and actually creates jobs.
With that, they’ll sink this oinker of a bill deeper into the dustbin of history.
Several things happened that stiffened the Senate Republicans’ spine. It started with President Obama foolishly picking a fight with Rush by telling Republicans that they can’t “listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Immediately after that, President Obama’s stimulus plan started dropping in popularity.
It started dropping in popularity because Rush started telling the American people about the crap that’s contained in the bill.
After Rush jumped into the fight and started highlighting the payoffs to the unions and other Democratic political allies, House Republican resolve stiffened because (a) Eric Cantor did a great job whipping the troops and (b) Mike Pence led a anti-pork rebellion that stunned Democrats.
When they saw that support for the bill that Pelosi commissioned and that President Obama sanctioned started dropping, House Republicans understood that they wouldn’t pay a price for opposing the bill, that they’d actually rise in popularity.
That laid the groundwork for the stiffening of the Senate Republicans’ spine.
Now E.J. Dionne is whining that President Obama is losing this fight “to a defeated GOP”:
Obama’s network appearances were planned as a response to a wholly unanticipated development: Republicans, short on new ideas, low on votes, and deeply unpopular in the polls, have been winning the media wars over the president’s central initiative.
They have done so largely by focusing on minor bits of the stimulus that amount, as Obama said in at least two of his network interviews, to “less than 1 percent of the overall package.” But Republicans have succeeded in defining the proposal by its least significant parts.
The first mistake Dionne makes is linking President Obama’s popularity or the Republicans’ unpopularity with what the American people want. Americans’ ability to compartmentalize is apparent. They’re able to approve of a charismatic president while still strongly disagreeing with that charismatic president.
Secondly, the American people’s definition of pork is different than the Beltway Democrats’ definition. They know that the Democrats’ attempts to pay off their political allies is pork; they know that won’t create jobs. They know that much of the spending is for things that either needs to be improved or eliminated in committee.
Many of the items in this bill won’t jumpstart the economy because the money won’t get into the economy until 2010 or later. The American people question why this money is dumped into a bill that’s supposed to give a jolt to a staggering economy.
In the end, this bill will either pass with little or no Republican support in the House and Senate or it’ll fail because the bill is a disaster. If the American people determine that the bill is a disaster, it’s largely because President Obama picked a foolish fight with a idealistic conservative named Rush Limbaugh.
It will have been exposed as a business-as-usual Democrat Christmas tree.
Technorati Tags: Pork, Nancy Pelosi, President OBama, Political Payoffs, Democrats, John McCain, Tax Cuts, Rush Limbaugh, Republicans
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog