It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that a Democratic president
can ram an “emergency” spending package through a lopsidedly
Democratic Congress in the midst of a recession, but it’s enough
to impress the Washington Post. “Twenty-four days into
his presidency,” staff writers Michael Shear and Alec MacGillis
enthused, “Barack Obama recorded… a legislative achievement
of the sort that few of his predecessors achieved at any point in
their tenure.”
Swooning aside, they are closer to the mark when they write, “In
size and scope, there is almost nothing in history to rival the
economic stimulus legislation that Obama shepherded through
Congress in just over three weeks.”
As a percentage of GDP, the stimulus is twice as big as the early
New Deal. And it was indeed written and passed in a matter of
weeks. Just three weeks to decide whether to spend $1.14 trillion
of the taxpayers’ money (including interest set to accrue on the
increased debt) during record federal revenue shortfalls. Just
months after enacting a $700 billion Wall Street bailout and days
after the Obama Treasury Department indicated it was prepared to
ask for more. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) has called it “a bill
no one has read.” It similarly runs up a bill no one knows how to
pay.
Of course, the new president doesn’t deserve all the credit or
blame for the great “legislative achievement” now sending a
thrill up reporters’ legs. If this were an album rather than a
spending bill, its title would be The Democrats’
Greatest Hits. It moves the country toward
national health care, including significant expansions of
SCHIP and Medicaid. It doles out billions of dollars to state
governments, whether their governors want the money or not. By
creating a $3 billion “emergency fund” that rewards states for
increasing their welfare caseloads, the stimulus takes a
step back in the direction of welfare as we knew it — before
Bill Clinton.
It is a polite fiction that the stimulus was primarily written by
three moderate Republican senators with the help of some friendly
neighborhood Blue Dog Democrats. The only Democrat who seemed to
believe it was Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon). While six
other House Democrats voted against the bill on fiscally
conservative grounds, only DeFazio opposed it from the left.
Apparently, tax cuts and even token Republican support gives him
the vapors. “Been a lot of talk in Washington, D.C. over the last
few years about the Bridge to Nowhere in the last highway bill,”
he said in his floor speech last Thursday explaining his vote
against the package. “But what we have with the passage of this
bill is a lot of tax cuts to nowhere.”
“I’ve never met a tax cut that could build a bridge… I never
met a tax cut that could even fill in a pothole! I never met a
tax cut that could build a school,” DeFazio continued. “Three
Republican senators insisted on a lot more tax cuts. They
hijacked the bill because of the arcane, obsolete, and in fact
discretionary rules of the Senate.” But that’s not how most
Republicans see it. “This was totally a Democratic bill,” says a
GOP staffer. “More Pelosi-Reid than even Obama.”
Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), and
Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) were essential to the stimulus measure’s
final passage, but less so its overall direction or content.
Atlantic Monthly senior editor Ross Douthat
described the Senate moderates’ contribution as follows:
“Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as
you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.”
“The Democrats wanted a bipartisan vote for a partisan bill and
then were angry when the House gave them a bipartisan vote
against it,” says a senior House Republican.
Congressional Republicans were adamant that their constituents
opposed the spending in the stimulus bill, which is why the House
GOP twice voted unanimously against it and only three Republican
senators ever voted for it. This is the flip side of Democrats’
victories in the past two elections. They have the votes and the
raw political power to pass most of what they want. But they will
often find it difficult to gain bipartisan cover because they
have already unseated most of the Republicans who had a political
incentive to cut deals with them. The surviving Republicans hail
from more conservative districts and, the change mantra
notwithstanding, they all won their elections too.
All things considered, that is not a bad position for President
Obama and his congressional allies to be in. While the stimulus
fight proved much more difficult than expected, they are still in
the driver’s seat. The Republicans were effective in opposition,
but less so at uniting around an alternative to the Obama
administration’s slightly refurbished Keynesianism. While the GOP
helped the electorate understand that the stimulus cost a lot of
money and contained some dubious projects, relatively few
Americans seem to sense that the country is toying with the
return of stagflation.
Until they do, the political calculus will be simple: As the
senators from Maine go, so goes the nation.
