This lump of clay might just be smarter than
your average Blue Dog.
Apparently Blue Dogs don't learn new tricks. After having their ranks completely decimated in 2010—their caucus was
cut in half in 2010 by losses and a handful of retirements—they're still acting like Republicans.
Today's installment in stupid Blue Dog tricks: the Balanced Budget Amendment.
Despite the fact that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said yesterday he would encourage his party to vote against the radical plan, Blue Dog Democrats endorsed the amendment on a press call today, Politico’s Marin Cogan reported on Twitter. ThinkProgress confirmed that endorsement with a spokesperson for Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), the Blue Dog Coalition’s co-chair for communications. According to the Hill, Ross said on the call that Blue Dogs favored such an amendment “before balanced budget amendments were cool”:
"We were advancing a balanced budget amendment when balanced budget amendments weren’t cool," a co-chairman of the coalition, Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), told reporters on a conference call. [...]
"If any Blue Dog does not vote for it, I’d have to question how much they’re a Blue Dog," [Blue Dog Rep. Jim] Matheson [D-UT] said.
It's hard to overestimate the negative effects such an amendment would have on the country's economy. In addition to destroying millions of jobs, it would force such massive spending cuts that House Republicans' own budget would be unconstitutional. According to a recent study by Macroeconomic Advisers, enacting a BBA now would double the nation’s unemployment rate and cause the economy to shrink by 17 percent—a far cry from the 2 percent projected growth that would occur with no such amendment.
This Blue Dog display is just pathetic. There's a lot to be said for the big tent, but that doesn't extend to sheer, stupid destructiveness. That's not independence, it's being tools of the GOP.