Please enjoy this article provided by guest blogger Derek Clark from Geek Politics.
Harry Reid has done a wonderful job of showing exactly what is wrong with Washington lately. He is playing politics when we need leaders to guide us through this recession. Last week Sens. Max Baucus and Charles Grassley had a bipartisan jobs plan all set to go that even had the blessing of the White House. At that Reid decided to kill the $85 billion dollar bill in favor of a more focused $15 billion dollar bill of his own.
His reason for killing the bill? Has Harry turned over a new leaf and become a fiscal conservative? Nah that can’t be it. Try this:
One of Reid’s allies said that the Baucus-Grassley bill would have only received three or four Republican votes and that the GOP would have used the bloated initiative to “beat the living s**t out of us” — although Democrats have not had any problem hailing their legislation as bipartisan with as few as three Republican votes.
Harry apparently just figured out he’s going to lose his seat in the Senate this November. He wants to continue painting the Republicans as the “party of no” and allowing this to go through would have stopped that talk. This will have some interesting consequences for him and the Democrats though:
Reid’s decision takes the second stimulus package cost down from $85 billion to $15 billion. That may please fiscal conservatives, but it sets up an embarrassing problem for Barack Obama. No one believes that his $787 billion Porkulus package, now repriced to $862 billion, worked to create jobs, but the Left wing of Democrats thinks it didn’t work because the Democrats didn’t spend enough money.
What this means is that this bill is pretty much a joke from every angle, which means it should pass easily. I don’t think the Republicans will waste time filibustering this pathetic attempt at job creation, but they won’t vote for it either. Harry and the Democrats can continue to paint Republicans as the “party of no”, but I don’t think it is going to matter come November. They’ve accomplished so little while spending so much, Americans are looking for a change. Again. Funny how that works when the change you bring is socialism.
I suspect this will end any chance of Republicans working with Reid and the Democrats this year. This is a little frustrating to me in that everyone will continue playing politics like this. On the bright side, the bill Baucus and Grassley put out was really awful. I guess wasting less money to not create jobs is technically better. Let me know what you think of Reid’s political move in the comments below.
Derek Clark blogs about conservative politics at Geek Politics. You can also follow him on Twitter @clarky07.
I hate Harry Reid. I think he is the true personification of every single thing that is wrong with politics in America. He is power hungry, he is a master of protocol and procedures, and he is willing to say whatever needs to be said at any time to make himself look good.
He doesn’t know what he wants. When asked last week about the current financial crisis he told us “nobody knows what to do.” That’s what I call leadership. Yesterday he called out John McCainand said“We need, now, the Republicans to start producing some votes for us. We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do.” Then today Reid said “it would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy… We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.”
So which is it Harry? Do you want McCain to play or not? I honestly don’t think you give a crap about what McCain does or does not do or say. Your main goal is to publicly say whatever you can to drum up negatives for McCain. You, Mr. Reid, are a shameless, power-hungry bastard.
