Obama Complains About GOP Opposition To His BailoutSmital Mind

Obama Complains About GOP Opposition To His Bailout

Today in Washington, D.C. - Oct. 25, 2011
The US Senate is not in session this week' it is Senate constituent work week. When the Senate returns for legislative business next Monday, it will vote on a district judge nominee. On Tuesday, Nov. 1, the Senate will resume consideration of H.R. 2112, the Fiscal Year 2012 Agriculture appropriations bill, which combines the FY 2012 Agriculture, Commerce-Justice-Science, and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development appropriations bills (also referred to as an Ag-CJS-THUD minibus).

Tomorrow, the House is expected to consider H.R. 1904, the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act. Then on Thursday, the House is expected to consider H.R. 674, to repeal the 3% withholding tax on private companies that do business with the federal government, and H.R. 2576, to fix an unintended consequence of ObamaCare that would make millions of middle income Americans eligible for Medicaid.

Yesterday, the House passed by voice vote H.R. 441and H.R. 295. H.R. 441, the Kantishna Hills Renewable Energy Act of 2011 would authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue permits for hydroelectricity projects in the Kantishna Hills area located within the Denali National Park. Additionally, this legislation would facilitate a small land exchange between the National Park Service and Doyon, Limited which owns and operates one of the facilities that can take advantage of a proposed hydroelectricity project. H.R. 295, would amend the Hydrographic Services Improvement Act to authorize funds for hydrographic surveys and coastal mapping of the Arctic region. Currently, base hydrographic data in the Arctic is inadequate to support marine activity.

By voice vote the House passed H.R. 2594 to prohibit US airlines from participating in the EU's Emission Trading Scheme (ETS). No companion bill exist in the US Senate. This was a US Sovereign Rights bill telling the EU to back-off!. The bill leaves it up to the US secretary of transportation to determine what action to take toward those US airlines that would choose to comply with the EU's ETS requirements in the face of such a US prohibition.

At a campaign event at the Bellagio in Las Vegas last night, President Obama attacked Republicans, blaming them for the failure of his state bailout bill, a piece of his $447 billion stimulus that the Senate voted down last week.

The president complained, “The question is, why, despite all the support -- despite all the experts who say this jobs bill couldn't come at a more important time, when so many people are hurting -- why the Republicans in Washington have said no? They keep voting against it.” Of course, the opposition to the president’s bill last week was bipartisan. And several Democrats went out to their way to make their opposition to the bill known. Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) said, [W]hen you look at the president's jobs act, even if you break it down to bite-sized pieces, it's spending money we don't have, and you got to raise taxes to pay for it . . . .” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) said, “If I didn't think much of it on the one thing, you've got to assume that I won't think much of it for something else … I don't think you increase taxes for new spending.” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) lamented, “We have to be responsible, and basically if spending money would fix our problems in America, we'd have no problems.” And Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) said, “It's a little philosophical in the sense that I'm not sure federal taxpayers should be paying for teachers and first responders. That's traditionally a state and local matter . . . .”

At his campaign event, President Obama claimed, “we could have saved 400,000 jobs” by passing his bailout bill. But the nearly $1 trillion stimulus in 2009 and another $26 billion bill in 2010 were also supposed to “save” hundreds of thousands of jobs for the same group of people. The president claimed the stimulus would “help prevent our states and local communities from laying off firefighters, and teachers, and police.” Less than 4 months after Democrats passed his massive stimulus bill, Obama was claiming, “We've created and saved, as you said, Joe, at least 150,000 Jobs - jobs of teachers and nurses and firefighters and police officers. People who had been laid off are not being laid off . . . .” And yet the following year, the president and Democrats pushed through a multi-billion bill they claimed would save 300,000 jobs. Then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said it was “a very important proposal, particularly to ensure that 160,000-plus teachers didn't get fired as a result of bad state budgets.” And Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) claimed, “There is no doubt about it, if we fail to pass this bill, hundreds of thousands of teachers and firefighters will lose their jobs.” Both bills passed, but now the president is saying another 400,000 jobs are at risk despite that? If the last two didn’t work, why would doing the same thing again change the outcome?

The president also claimed his bill was about “saving the jobs of teachers and cops and firefighters,” but Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) worried last week, “I'm all for individual states making smart choices with their own money, but giving them federal money and just hoping they'll use it for education and teachers - well, that's not good enough.” And in fact, news reports show the last couple of Democrat spending bills that were supposed to save education jobs resulted in school districts buying iPads, laptops, tickets for movies and water parks, and even had funds diverted to prisons.

As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday, “Look, we have a debt the size of our economy. That alone makes us look a lot like Greece. The question is whether the federal government can afford to be bailing out states. I think the answer is no. Second, it's important to note that the only thing bipartisan about these proposals has been the opposition to them, that a reasonable number of Democrats opposed each of these measures as well for the same reason. Look, we are not going to get this economy going by continuing to shower money on the public sector. Unemployment, among public sector workers in America, is one-half what it is the private sector. We are not going to get this economy growing again by continuing to borrow and tax and spend and pump up the . . . public sector.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Chairman, Republican Study Committee responded: "President Obama’s new slogan – “We Can’t Wait” – is an odd choice. Right now, 15 different House-passed jobs bills are stuck in the Senate, awaiting action from Harry Reid and his fellow liberals. And this week, the House will vote on two more jobs bills. One (H.R. 674), will repeal a three percent withholding tax on the money paid to private companies that do business with the federal government. This is a bipartisan way to keep more capital in the hands of job creators. The other (H.R. 1904), will support the development of American copper resources and help create thousands of private sector jobs.

Conservatives in the House and Senate have been offering solutions that promote growth and job creation all year long. At the RSC, we’re gathering many of these proposals for a package that reduces the red tape hindering small businesses, flattens and simplifies the tax code, and removes obstacles to American energy production. I hope President Obama and Senate Democrats will choose to work with us on these common sense ideas. Americans who want to get back to work shouldn’t have to wait any longer for Washington to get out of the way."

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