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why did the bailout fail?
Sep. 29th, 2008 04:38 pmThe House of Representatives today refused to pass the $700B bailout plan requested by President Bush, Treasury Secretary Paulson, and the congressional leadership of both parties.
The Republican leadership is blaming a "partisan speech" by Speaker Pelosi right before the vote, but this is a terribly flimsy excuse. As Rep. Frank pointed out, if that were the case all he'd have to do is go to the offended Republicans, speak to them "uncharacteristically nicely," and maybe then they'd vote for it.
But no, the real reasons are much more interesting.
For one thing, the American public overwhelmingly begged congress to vote against this bill. Ordinarily this wouldn't have made any difference, but the election is in five weeks, which is a short enough time for most Americans to remember a vote in congress.
But even more notably, the whole thing felt eerily familiar. You have the Bush administration claiming the nation faces a major crisis, a huge threat to our way of life -- again. You have administration experts who have been consistently and demonstrably wrong insisting that the only way to solve the problem is to immediately give them sweeping powers, with no time to properly review the proposal -- again. A few people from both parties were handpicked to develop a "bipartisan" proposal, shutting out most members of congress from having any voice in the bill as it formed -- again. Having been burned by their support for the USAPATRIOT Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force, too many in congress were nervous to support yet another Bush proposal rammed past the democratic process.
In this short speech, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) gives a succinct explanation into why she opposes the bill (thanks![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lassiter for the link):
It's a fair bet that the bailout is dead. They'll try to revive it, but opponents have the momentum now, and congress is eager to get back to their districts for the election campaign. Besides, the atmosphere of utter, dire ruin any minute now conjured by Paulson and Bernanke seems a little more hollow, now that it's been a week and a half since they started begging for immediate action.
And, while we're on that, it's worth pointing out that economists have been talking about the brewing failure of the credit market for months now. Anyone who's been paying attention to the economy to any degree has been aware of this problem for a long time. Why on earth did the administration wait until major banks were falling apart to bring it up? It's either malicious intent or incompetence, and at this point many of us are prone to suspect, given the nature of the original bailout proposal, that the bailout was engineered as a robbery from the start.
The Republican leadership is blaming a "partisan speech" by Speaker Pelosi right before the vote, but this is a terribly flimsy excuse. As Rep. Frank pointed out, if that were the case all he'd have to do is go to the offended Republicans, speak to them "uncharacteristically nicely," and maybe then they'd vote for it.
But no, the real reasons are much more interesting.
For one thing, the American public overwhelmingly begged congress to vote against this bill. Ordinarily this wouldn't have made any difference, but the election is in five weeks, which is a short enough time for most Americans to remember a vote in congress.
But even more notably, the whole thing felt eerily familiar. You have the Bush administration claiming the nation faces a major crisis, a huge threat to our way of life -- again. You have administration experts who have been consistently and demonstrably wrong insisting that the only way to solve the problem is to immediately give them sweeping powers, with no time to properly review the proposal -- again. A few people from both parties were handpicked to develop a "bipartisan" proposal, shutting out most members of congress from having any voice in the bill as it formed -- again. Having been burned by their support for the USAPATRIOT Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force, too many in congress were nervous to support yet another Bush proposal rammed past the democratic process.
In this short speech, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) gives a succinct explanation into why she opposes the bill (thanks
lassiter for the link):It's a fair bet that the bailout is dead. They'll try to revive it, but opponents have the momentum now, and congress is eager to get back to their districts for the election campaign. Besides, the atmosphere of utter, dire ruin any minute now conjured by Paulson and Bernanke seems a little more hollow, now that it's been a week and a half since they started begging for immediate action.
And, while we're on that, it's worth pointing out that economists have been talking about the brewing failure of the credit market for months now. Anyone who's been paying attention to the economy to any degree has been aware of this problem for a long time. Why on earth did the administration wait until major banks were falling apart to bring it up? It's either malicious intent or incompetence, and at this point many of us are prone to suspect, given the nature of the original bailout proposal, that the bailout was engineered as a robbery from the start.
