History is Happening Now

Now is the time for Democrats to abandon any effort to pass their $800-billion-plus economic stimulus bill in a “bipartisan” manner. The Republicans have officially decided they can be obstructionist without paying a political price — and now the Democrats must make sure they do pay a price.

I’ve written blog posts celebrating Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship, and I’ve written blogs criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for drafting the bill’s first draft in a way that gave Republicans easy excuses to oppose it. But there is no excuse for the attitude the conservative elites are taking toward this process. 

To be specific, Republicans have apparently abandoned any hopes of using their power in Congress to do what is best for this country, and have decided instead to do what is best for their party. 

Consider this latest advice from Bill Kristol:

“This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending — it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.”

With this key sentence from his op-ed in the Washington Post today, President Obama has given Republicans a golden opportunity: Insist on splitting the legislation being debated on the Senate floor into a true short-term stimulus, which can pass quickly, and long-term policy proposals, which require serious debate.

Republicans should stop trying to improve the unimproveable with small-bore amendments to the current legislative package. Instead, they can point out that Obama is supporting under the guise of emergency legislation a bloated catch-all of stimulus, pork and (often bad) policy. They can make clear that Republicans will support a real short-term stimulus (pro-growth tax cuts, housing measures and a few targeted spending provisions unemployment and COBRA extensions) that meets Larry Summers’s criteria of being targeted, timely and temporary. They should introduce such a measure as a substitute — “The Emergency Economic Growth Bill of 2009” — and trumpet their vigorous support of it. And they should insist that all the “energy, health care and education” proposals be debated in an orderly and serious way in the regular legislative process — not jammed through as part of an emergency “stimulus.”

This strategy depends on GOP willingness to slow the process down and to challenge Obama’s arbitrary Presidents’ Day deadline. The Republican position should be: We’ll pass on this emergency timetable a real stripped-down emergency stimulus. But if Obama insists on legislation incorporating an alleged “strategy for America’s long-term growth,” then the country deserves hearings and debate that obviously will take some time. And Republicans should make clear they cannot agree to limiting debate to a couple of days on such momentous long-term legislation.

In other words: If Obama wants a stimulus, Republicans will give it to him tomorrow. It’s the president’s and the Democrats’ insistence on incorporating a huge and problematic policy agenda in this one bill that’s delaying action. Why then, Republicans can ask, is President Obama delaying a necessary, short-term, emergency growth package?

Kristol may be a top-tier spokesperson for stupid ideas, but Kristol isn’t stupid. He knows the Democrats have heavy majorities in Congress, and no “Emergency Economic Growth Bill of 2009″ is every going to pass in a million years. To abandon “small-bore amendments” and instead “insist” and “make clear they cannot agree to limiting debate” — which means filabustering — and trumpet their support for proposals that will never pass — this is a strategy to exploit our national economic crisis to score political points for the Republican Party. 

If Republicans decide they cannot, in good conscience, vote for the current bill, I can respect their decision. 

But Kristol’s proposed filabustering will prevent any bill from being passed — which will lead the American people to believe that Congress is incapable of taking action to rescue our economy. Confidence in our government will drop, and so will stock prices and consumer confidence. Kristol’s proposal to launch alternative legislation will merely provide an excuse for Republicans in Congress to abandon any effort to work with Democrats. Kristol named the column above “The Republicans Opportunity,” because he sees an opportunity to redefine the Republican Party around its opposition to the Democratic bill. What his ideas will mean for the country is beside the point, as far as Kristol is concerned. 

Here’s another example of the new conservative proposal, this one put forward by Daniel Henninger, to lift up the Republican Party on the back of the American economy:

Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom, the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus “package” is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the GOP’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties. If the GOP line holds, the party could win back much of the goodwill it dissipated with its big-government adventures the past eight years.

For starters, notwithstanding the new president’s high approval rating, his stimulus bill (ghost-written by Nancy Pelosi) has been losing altitude with public opinion by the day. People are nervous. …

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says, “Everybody agrees that there ought to be a stimulus package. The question is: How big and what do we spend it on?”

Sen. McConnell should reconsider. He knows that the Bush-GOP spending spree cost them control of Congress in 2006. Thus, “How big?” is not the question his party’s constituents (or horrified independents) want answered. This is a chance for the GOP to climb down from its big-government dunce chair. Until that reversal is achieved, there is no hope for this party.

I think that behind the bill’s sinking public support is the sense that it won’t work and its cost is dangerous. The bill’s design, an embarrassment to Rube Goldberg, is flawed. Even were one to grant the Keynesians their argument, this is a very mushy, weak-form stimulus.

Rather than try to “reform” it, which won’t happen, Sen. McConnell should ask President Obama to pull it and start over. One guesses that privately the president’s economic team would thank the senator. If he won’t pull it, the Senate Republicans should walk away from it. This bill is a bomb. It may wreck more than it saves.

Henninger isn’t stupid either. Pulling this bill and starting over is NOT an option. Henninger knows full well that he’s really advocating for Republicans to try to score political points by opposing this bill with all their heart and soul. Responsible legislators would concern themselves with how this approach is liable to play itself out for the American people, but the only endgame Henninger cares about is restoring the Republican Party’s popularity. 

I had hoped that Obama and the Democrats could get bipartisan support for this bill — because I think that’s best for the economy, best for the country and best for the Democratic Party and Obama — but that time has certainly passed. 

The only way to get bipartisan support for a bill championed by Democrats is to put Republicans in a position where it’s in their best interests politically to support it. My hope was the Democrats would draft a bill that would either force Republicans to defend their core ideology — which is simply indefensible — or support the bill. But Republicans have found a way out: Instead of justifying their opposition to the stimulus bill in terms of their blind support for tax cuts for the wealthy, they have relied instead on a series of lists. By picking out a few dozen miniscule items in the bill, rattling them off in a list, and adopting a snarky tone (see here for another excellent example), the right-wingers have managed to sow doubt in the public’s mind about whether the bill is a waste. 

Now Obama and the Democrats have to switch gears, and fast. Republicans want an opportunity to filabuster, and Democrats need to give them that opportunity. Obama and the Dems need to bring this bill up for a vote — fast! If Republicans want to filabuster and obstruct, they should be given the opportunity. And Pelosi, Harry Reid and Obama need to say it plain: This is the bill, and we will either pass it now or pass it later, but there will be no other opportunity to pass a plan. The Democrats won, and this is the bill on the table, so take it or leave it.

If Democrats want to pass a $800-billion-plus emergency fiscal stimulus bill to rescue our ailing economy, the Dems in the House should have put together a bill that their own caucus could support unanimously and with enthusiasm.

Instead, they put together a bill that can be easily opposed by not just Republicans, but by more than a few Democrats as well. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska has objected to the House version of the bill — and so do a lot of House Democrats, above and beyond the 11 House Dems who didn’t vote for the bill when it passed the House.

The end result of this legislative failure is that as House Republicans win the media war over what this stimulus bill is and whether it will work, House and Senate Democrats are finding it ever-more difficult to stand behind it. This will ultimately force Obama and the Congressional Democratic leadership to make concessions far above and beyond what they would have had to accept if Nancy Pelosi had been thoughtful in designing this bill in the first place.

Consider this excerpt from a Politico article:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has never enjoyed a firmer hold on the leash of her 255-member caucus — but the Blue Dogs are starting to strain against the chain.

Many of the 49 members of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition are going public with deep misgivings about the goodie-packed $819 billion stimulus package the House passed last week.

That’s hardly surprising, considering it’s a deficit-spending behemoth that inherently offends their balanced-budget sensibilities. But the Dogs are really growling about the way in which the bill passed the House — how Pelosi shepherded it through, and how she suspended “regular order” during the passage of the $700 billion financial markets bailout late last year.

“A lot of the Blue Dogs were unhappy with the [stimulus] bill and even angrier because they felt they had zero input — like their caucus doesn’t matter anymore because of the padded majority,” said a staffer for a prominent caucus member.

“I got in terrible trouble with our leadership because they don’t care what’s in the bill; they just want it to pass and they want it to be unanimous,” Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper, the member deepest in Pelosi’s doghouse, told a Nashville radio program over the weekend.

“We’re just told how to vote. We’re treated like mushrooms most of the time.”

None of this is lost on Pelosi, a microscopic observer of intra-caucus politics — although it’s not clear if she’ll do anything to appease the group.

Pelosi confidant George Miller (D-Calif.) said Democratic leaders are “definitely paying attention” to the Blue Dogs’ concerns. But at her weekly press conference Wednesday, Pelosi made light of a reporter who tried to ask her about the topic.

“Speaking of the Blue Dogs,” the reporter began.

“Were we speaking about them?” Pelosi asked, before asserting that “a bill … will pass the House” no matter who opposed it. 

In the past, the Dogs have barked more than bitten. But they could gain major leverage if Republicans continue to unanimously oppose the stimulus — and Pelosi needs every Democratic vote to pass the House-Senate compromise bill.  

The bill will probably end up passing, but it is deeply troubling to see a situation where Pelosi cannot forge consensus on an issue of this magnitude within her own caucus. If Pelosi didn’t clear this bill with moderate House Democrats, what is the likelihood that she cleared it with any Republicans? It seems far more likely that she and a few other top Dems drafted this bill on their own, utterly abandoning not only Obama’s calls for bipartisanship, but any semblance of common sense about how to build the Democrats’ poltical capital.

From another article:

Democrats expressed frustration that the media and the Republicans are focusing on “minor” items, some of which are no longer in the bill, such as measures dealing with smoking cessation and STD prevention.

“The sum total of their grievances amount to one page,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, ripping a page from the 735-page bill.

How did smoking cessation and STD prevention get into the bill in the first place? They got there because Nancy Pelosi put them there. These provisions won’t end up in the bill — they won’t prevent a single disease or unwanted pregnancy — but they will provide Republicans with embaressing talking points that will offend swing voters in the very districts where more moderate Democrats face serious G.O.P. challengers.

This could have been avoided — and then, later on, the Dems could have passed spending items dealing with smoking cessation and STD prevention separately. Their presence in this stimulus bill gives Republicans an opportunity to oppose these worthwhile measures in terms of process — they may be good ideas, Republicans say, but they don’t belong in emergency legislation designed to rescue the economy.

It’s time for Democrats to start acknowledging that Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama have two very different ideas about governance — and Pelosi’s ideas aren’t working.

Thankfully, it appears Obama is finding ways to introduce some common sense:

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — As whispers of tension between the White House and congressional Democrats cloud negotiations over the stimulus, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reassured her rank and file Thursday that they remain President Barack Obama’s “most enthusiastic supporters.”

“We have his back,” Pelosi told a roomful of Democrats at the party’s annual retreat at the Kingsmill Resort and Spa, according to people in the room.

The speaker also pledged “to work in a bipartisan way” before complaining that Republican ideas “take us in the wrong direction.”

Her remarks won loud applause from the assembled lawmakers, according to one participant.

As negotiations on the nearly $900 billion stimulus intensify in the Senate, Pelosi has had to fight back reports that Obama administration officials had tacitly encouraged dissent from moderate Blue Dog Democrats. Many of these fiscally conservative Democrats have pushed back on the size and scope of the stimulus, and Obama has been open about trimming back Pelosi’s version of the bill.

In her remarks to the Democratic retreat, Pelosi also promised her caucus that she would restore regular order to the House by bringing legislation through committees — something Democrats often ignored during their first two years in power. She explained that party leaders decided to expedite consideration of the stimulus package because the economy is “losing jobs at a massive rate.”

Let me be clear: Democrats are the second worst party in American politics. The first worst is the Republicans.

What makes me say on this particular day that the Democrats the second worst, and not the first best?

First of all, Democrats have dominated Washington for only about two weeks, and they are already losing their first major battle over the House Democrats’ $800-billion-plus stimulus package. As E. J. Dionne writes in his column “Obama Losing Stimulus Fight to Defeated GOP,” Republican attacks may rely on making mountains out of molehills, but the attacks are sticking:

But such volleys have gone largely unreturned, and the biggest danger for Obama will come if Republican attacks erode support for the stimulus among Democrats. That’s why the president will be spending more time with congressional Democrats in the coming days. The administration’s visionary emphasis on winning expansive Republican support has been replaced by a down-to-earth struggle to get a bill through the Senate.

Why are Democrats losing? There are clues in this piece of reporting by Slate’s John Dickerson, entitled “Bipartisalesmanship.”

Many Senate Democrats claim that the bill has too many provisions that don’t meet the definition of “timely, targeted, and temporary.” This irritates their House colleagues, in part because it echoes a line House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once used against Republicans in a previous stimulus debate and in part because it echoes the spin Republicans are using against this stimulus bill. Republicans hope to define the bill by its smallest and most absurd provisions even if they are a tiny fraction of its cost. When Democrats also single out those provisions, they are merely “repeating GOP talking points,” as one Democratic House leadership aide put it. …

The tension for Obama is how far to go in accommodating the Senate without causing too much heartburn among Democrats in the House. House Speaker Pelosi met with OMB Director Peter Orszag and White House economic adviser Larry Summers Tuesday night in her House office and let them know her caucus could go only so far. It would be able to accept some of the tax-cut provisions being added to the Senate bill, like the adjustment that keeps the Alternative Minimum Tax from hitting middle-class families. But House Democrats were not going to see the bill they put together thoroughly undone.

The worry is not so much that Obama will lose the vote on the stimulus bill because of Democratic defections. It’s that his allies in the House and Senate will have to swallow hard to support it, or that the process of getting to yes will be bruising. This will create resistance for the next tough vote Obama asks them to take. If he creates too much trouble for himself, by the end of the year the president’s office hours will have to extend all day long.

I used to call this stimulus bill “Obama’s” stimulus bill — because that’s how I heard Nancy Pelosi describe it in an interview a few weeks ago. But I see now that the bill was “put together” by House Republicans who are “not going to see the bill they put together thoroughly undone.”

Unfortunately, the bill they “put together” was put together in a way that invites mockery. Here’s more from Dickerson’s report:

Barack Obama held office hours Wednesday. In 15-minute increments in the early afternoon, he met in the Oval Office with senators who want to modify his stimulus bill. Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska talked about removing spending provisions from the bill. He has a tentative list of cuts totaling more than $50 billion that include everything from $122.5 million for new and renovated polar icebreakers to $198 million in military benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II.

Why does the “stimulus” bill include $198 million in military benefits for Filipino veterans of World War II? Are we meant to believe that John Maynard Keynes himself would recommend extending military benefits to Filipinos as a way to stimulate the economy?

E.J. Dionne writes in his column:

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.

Gosh! Who would have expected that? Republicans opposing a spending bill by pointing out the most absurd and laughable items in the bill? In case my sarcasm isn’t coming across, let me be clear: Whichever Congressman or Congresswoman decided to put $198 million in military benefits for Filipino veterans into this bill should have to wear a scarlet “I” on their lapels for the entirety of this Congress. (“I” stands for IDIOT!) $198 million may not seem like a lot of money when stacked up against an $800-billion-plus bill, but the damage this silly provision is doing to the larger bill’s prospects in Congress is vast — and the same can be said for dozens of other ridiculous provisions.

Consider this from a recent column by George Will:

During World War II, Oscar Levant, the pianist and wit, was asked by his draft board, “Do you think you can kill?” He replied, “I don’t know about strangers, but friends, yes.” Barack Obama might have felt that way when his Democratic friends in Congress proposed expanding contraception services as an economic “stimulus.” Defending that (which was eventually dropped as indefensible), Nancy Pelosi said, “States are in terrible fiscal budget crises,” partly because of all they do for children’s health and education. Therefore, contraception, by reducing the number of wee parasites, “will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.” So: Children are a net cost to government and therefore (non sequitur alert) counterstimulative. Pelosi argues that a trillion dollars of other government outlays will be stimulative. In any case, the stimulus effect of more contraception would have been at least nine months in arriving.

What Democrat moron thought it would be a good idea to put contraceptives in this bill? Maybe this Democrat wasn’t a moron — maybe he was a saboteur sent into Congress undercover to plant provisions in the stimulus bill that would enable George Will to write columns like this one. Or maybe Nancy Pelosi decided to put an early stop to all Obama’s talk of bipartisanship by forcing our new president to support a bill too littered with nonsense to attract even 100% of Democrats, let along a Republican or two.

House Democrats won’t get their contraceptives now, nor will they score their benefits for Filipino veterans. But because of stupid items such as these, Democrats may end up having no choice except to accept changes that could actually weaken the bill. (Spending on contraceptives and benefits for Filipino veterans may be highly beneficial — but it doesn’t belong in this bill, as it contributes to the notion that the bill is just a hodge-podge of random spending items.)

Nancy Pelosi says House Democrats will “only go so far” in allowing their bill to be modified. She’s clearly threatening Obama, saying House Dems will actually vote down the bill if it is significantly altered so it can pass in the Senate.

Here’s my advice to Obama: Screw Pelosi. Do whatever it takes to get a bipartisan bill, even if it means alienating some Congressional Democrats. Otherwise, the age of Democratic dominance may be cut short by some MORON Congressman and his benefits for Filipino veterans. (No offense to Filipinos.)