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Specter’s Weak Tea

Jimmie | February 9, 2009 | Comments (1)

Arlen Specter has weaseled his way to the editorial pages of the Washington Post to explain why he is working against the will of the American people and is trying to pass the Congressional Vote-Buying Act of 2009. His reasons are so weak that he might as well not have bothered. I almost feel bad refuting it, but it needs to be refuted because if we don’t stop this man and his friends in the Senate, we’re going to be in serious trouble.

I am supporting the economic stimulus package for one simple reason: The country cannot afford not to take action.
The unemployment figures announced Friday, the latest earnings reports and the continuing crisis in banking make it clear that failure to act will leave the United States facing a far deeper crisis in three or six months. By then the cost of action will be much greater — or it may be too late.

These reasons, by the way, are exactly the same ones Congress and President Bush used to shove TARP down our throats. This bailout has already cost us upwards of a trillion dollars and now here’s Arlen Specter telling us that we need to spend another trillion dollars because the situation is just as bad or worse than it was four months ago.

So what happened to that first billion bucks, hmm? Well, we know that it wasn’t used to buy up toxic assets (which, you know, is the entire purpose of the program in the first place). We also know that some of the money was forced onto banks that weren’t in any trouble at all (and the government then had a direct say in the banks’ operation, which isn’t working very well at all). Some of it was spent on a bank in Barney Frank’s home state at his behest. We have no idea what’s happened to most of the money. Indeed, we have no way at all of knowing whether that money will stimulate the economy.

Let me suggest an alternative theory. The reason the economy is bad right now is because of Congressmen like Arlen Specter, who can’t see how dumb a rationale “we have to do something” really is.

His second reason is exactly as brilliant as his first.

“In politics,” John Kennedy used to say, “nobody gets everything, nobody gets nothing and everybody gets something.” My colleagues and I have tried to balance the concerns of both left and right with the need to act quickly for the sake of our country. The moderates’ compromise, which faces a cloture vote today, is the only bill with a reasonable chance of passage in the Senate.

That’s simply not true. Imagine what might happen if Specter stood firm against any sort of pork-filled payoff bill and used his negotiating skills to bring the one or two other Republican holdouts (the only holdouts in the entire Congress, by the way) over to their party’s side. Republicans could filibuster this bill and any others like it indefinitely until Democrats relented enough to make it a bill that actually would stimulate the economy. If the need for action is anywhere close to what Specter says it is, then Democrats will give in early and we’ll get real stimulus instead of a lwft-wing wish list that we’ll be paying off for generations.

And if the Democrats don’t relent, well, what does that say about the constant panic they have inflicted on us? If Specter would simply do his job, we would either get a much better stimulus bill or we wouldn’t get a bill at all because we’d find that the Democrats were full of crap.

Either way, we’re stuck with a nightmare of pork and payback unless Arlen Specter actually does his job. I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.