Monday, September 29, 2008

House bails on bailout

The Hosue has just defeated the the Wall Street rescue bill 228-205 with sizable numbers of both Democrats and Republicans voting against it, although a larger percentage of the latter.

Am I too paranoid and cyncial to be thinking that somehow McCain is behind this? Will he now make another rescue-dash to Washington to bring the House Republicans on board after some tinkering and a revote? Or is he going to now say that he saved us from a bad bill being passed?

Somehow, he will try to make some political captial out of it, I'm sure.

So, what now, Congress? The President and leaders of both parties strongly urged passage of the bill. Too many constituents, who probably do not understand the whole situation and are reacting naturally with outrage at little guys having to pay for big guys' mistakes, have flooded their representatives with negative messages. And it's 5 weeks from re-election time, with 100% of these House members up for re-election (unless they're retiring).

So, what IS the next move?

Ralph

2 comments:

Ralph said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ralph said...

McCain's in a tough spot politically over the failure, because his surrogates were already giving him credit for getting it passed, saying that he brought the Republicans to the table.

Well, he didn't. So this looks like he failed as a leader of his own party, let alone his famous "reaching across the aisle."

Will he now claim that he really didn't think it was a good bill and try to take credit with voters for stopping it?

You can't have it both ways, Johnny B. Either you tried to get it passed and failed; or you scuttled it and now the failure is in your court; or else you did nothing. Which is it?

And if you claim you had nothing to do with it, then what was all that "suspending" your campaign and rushing to Washington to save the day?