Peter Roff, writing at U.S. News & World Report, suggests that some Democrats on Capitol Hill are concerned that voting for the International Monetary Fund’s "global bailout" that the House leadership wants to attach to the war supplemental next week could jeopardize their re-election chances.
Members on both sides of the aisle feel like they got their fingers singed over the last round of bailouts and they are not exactly keen to touch the stove again. They feel a global bailout bill, especially in an environment where U.S. unemployment has reached 9.4 percent and almost 2.2 million jobs have been lost since the current Congress was sworn in, has some members worried about keeping their seats come the next election if they can be tagged as having supported it.
If this report is true, it’s a wonder that there isn’t more dissent in Democratic ranks about the wisdom of the House leadership’s strategy.
Currently, the House leadership is working to pass a war supplemental with IMF funding with only Democratic votes. To do this, the House leadership needs the votes of both more conservative Blue Dog Democrats who represent Republican-leaning districts, and who might be quite vulnerable to attack on the IMF bailout, as well as progressive Democrats representing liberal districts, who might draw primary challenges from anti-war candidates if they betray previous commitments to vote against war funding. While many Democrats would no doubt easily survive primary challenges, fighting off the challenges would use up resources these Democrats surely would prefer to use fighting Republicans.
Is giving the IMF more money such an emergency that Democrats should being willing to sacrifice their own Members?
I’d like to think that behind some of that expressed worry is actually principled objection. If you’re a Democratic Member of the House, and the leadership is pressuring you to vote for the IMF bailout, perhaps it’s easier to say, "I’m worried about my seat," than to say "I oppose your IMF bailout because it’s a taxpayer rip-off and the IMF is an anti-worker institution whose policies hurt the interests of my constituents." The IMF’s austerity policies in Latin America and Asia have contributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States, by forcing these countries to export their way out of IMF-induced crises at the expense of U.S. production.
More than forty Democrats have signed on to a letter led by Rep. Maxine Waters to the House appropriators objecting to the Senate's IMF language, which they called a "blank check" for the IMF. [Most of the signatories can be found here.] These Democrats want the increase of IMF resources and power to be conditioned on the Treasury Department’s support for changes in IMF policies. In particular, they want the IMF to stop imposing contractionary policies, like draconian budget cuts and punishingly high interest rates, during recessions.
But at the end of the day, if principled opposition to the policies of the IMF cannot sustain 34 Democrats in voting no on the IMF bailout, fear may suffice.
Firedoglake has created "Citizen Whip Count Tool" for tracking responses from Democratic Members to citizens requesting that they vote no on the war/IMF supplemental. You can find it here.