After seeing Representative Don Manzullo (R-Illinois) last night on Rachel Maddow, and seeing Chris Matthews and Kramer harping on the atrociousness of the bill that came before Congress last night, I'm left confused by all the posturing.
My analysis is this: Republicans decided to take a stand on this and vote no regardless of what was in the bill. That much seems pretty clear, but I'm wondering if that decision was partly based on the content of the legislation. Rep. Manzullo said he could identify with Representative Peter DeFazio, who lamented how little actual infrastructure spending was in the bill.
Here's my problem: I think that very little work was done by Democrats to pass a good bill. It seems to me Dems saw this as an opportunity to spend lots of money on policies and programs that have been unfunded or underfunded for many years. Rather than approaching this legislation carefully, since they knew anything would pass they chose to be lazy and gave in to their worse instincts. So out went stimulus (read: infrastructure) and in went starved social programs.
When you have every progressive expert saying we need massive infrastructure spending, and you have weekly occurrences of pipe bursts and power outages across the country, it seems impossible that such a small amount of this stimulus package actually addresses our country's infrastructure needs.
I think that when Republicans saw how the legislation was heading, they realized that they would do better voting against the bill instead of supporting it. The bill has like 10% good spending, 40% non-stimulus related spending, and then lots of stupid tax cuts. It looks like an absolute boondoggle from where I'm sitting.
Am I completely off the mark here? I just saw Brian Williams report on the Nightly News that Republicans are demanding middle class tax cuts and infrastructure spending. I was floored. They're coming out of this looking like the reasonable ones.
Is this Obama looking to build a new coalition by going around the House leadership altogether? Did he just assume they weren't going to be able to craft a decent bill, and therefore believes his new best friend John McCain is going to deliver the goods in the Senate after he allows the Republicans to humiliate Pelosi? I'm having trouble understanding what exactly is going on.