GOP Unanimously Rejected Clinton Stimulus, Too

Here's another curious fact as the Republicans reject the American people's call for an end to gridlock partisanship. No House Republicans voted for Bill Clinton's 1993 economic stimulus package just like every single one of them rejected President Obama's this past week.

It seems those guys just want to keep on keeping on with the progress our nation has made the last eight years.

As I noted yesterday, President Obama's tax cuts are larger than George W. Bush's combined tax cuts in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Yet -- somehow, some way -- the GOP continues to say that the Democrats want to raise our taxes. They're just mad that these tax cuts are for working families and the middle class rather than more giveaways to the wealthy and big corporations.

Now comes another reminder of how enlightened the GOP remains. President Clinton, like President Obama this week, also did not get a single Republican vote for his 1993 economic stimulus package, and a Senate filibuster killed it on a 57-43 party-line vote. The pieces that survived barely passed the Senate on a 51-50 vote (Al Gore cast the tie-breaker) and the economy started to rebound.

Past is prologue. The House's party-line vote legislation has been threatened with a Republican Senate filibuster (remember when the GOP hated those filibuster things?) unless some Dem and Repub "moderates" chopping away at the stimulus package reach agreement tonight or this weekend.

Comments

[jlover]

i'm glad that harry reid did what he did.......­.........i­t makes mccain look STOOPID........ALL THAT WHINING AND CRYING AND HATIN.......the bill still passed and is now law.....the old gizzard is still upset that he got SMOKED in the election..... now is the time to go on the attack.....tell the american people what this bill will do.........

[Kgprophet]

Hmmm...If the Republicans are all whiny again and not supporting the bill, then it might be better than we thought.

[RogerTheShrubber]

Past is indeed prologue. Fowler's historical notes make me even more unhappy every time I see Boehner, Cantor, McConnell & Co. spouting their rhetoric about being "shut out of the process", etc. The GOP's m*sturbatory fantasies about tax-cuts have been interrupted by a scene change with new models: tax-cuts for working class and middle class folks. Same thing applies to the spending side: if the stimulus largely went to military spending, they'd be silent wallflowers.

[rabiddog6708]

Repubs never change, no matter how bad the numbers. They will spend 8 billion a month to occupy another country (since there's oil), but don't want to spend a dime to repair their own country's tanking economy. Tax cuts......that is their answer......their only answer.....to every problem.

[HMDMSR]

I think we need to stop drawing correlations between economics and the party memberships of presidents. We should believe that Clinton, who took office in 93, helped launch the "recovery" in the economy? For a package not entirely of his administration's design? This way of thinking is part of a larger strategic error made by the Democrats. From the 30's through the 80's, Democrats were the party of putting people before the economy. Their primary vehicle for doing so was Keynesian economic theory, which emphasized the likely failure of national economies to achieve the nice, balanced outcomes predicted by the older economic models. In the 80's a new view was incorporated into the Democrat's political strategy which had them bowing at the alter of the market. While Keynes was no socialist, by any stretch of the imagination, he understood that the happy, marketplace stories told by politicians and economists were only play pretend.

Beyond all that, the current economic crisis has roots in the 70's and, more fundamentally, in the operation of the market itself.

[jazzman]

Moderates is a relative term built on the idea of a middle in a bell curve configuration with the left and right tugging at both ends. But the bell curve can move in one direction or another given the political climate of the times. Thus Albert Speer might have been considered a moderate in Hitler's Nazi Germany. However, Albert Speer was still a Nazi and still subscribed to the most heinious parts of Hitler's regime. It's just that in an extreme government, the bell curve had shifted so far to the right that the 'middle' was now Albert Speer.

Today, with the Republicans and conservatives, supply siders and Friedman disciples having controlled the orthodoxy in Washington for so many years, the middle is still the right, especially in the mind of the corproate controlled media. Thus when the Washington Post, MNSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, or FOX are talking about the 'middle' or 'moderates' they are referring to those figures who are actually to the right but a little less to the right than their fanatical conservative leaders.

So out of Washington you are seeing the emergence of a bill with more tax cuts and less spending. It's not a moderate bill in terms of where the American people are but its considered moderate because it's not as extreme as Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy. However, in reality, the 'middle' is a bunch of hooey cooked up by pundits to label Democrats as liberal extremists.

[jwworldwide]

Donnie Fowler's article is very disturbing. As is the entire Obama bipartisan rhetoric. The Republican party have been deceiving their own base since Reagan, he he, you think they care if the few people that pay attention notice that they are playing political hardball to the detriment of the county? The fact that Obama or any pundit is upset that the Republicans are using this naivety to their own advantage tells me we need new pundits and we should have elected a democrat with balls and savvy like Hillary.

Well we cant redo the election but we can turn our prissy blogging outrage towards Obama. We should hold his feet to the fire and make him deliver the change he promised. Not the same old compromises that will deliver the the same failed policies of the last 30 years.

Stop the fake shock over Republicans being Republicans and write about the real story Donnie. Obama and the new Congress are jeopardizing everything we have worked for by being weak and incompetent. After all, we are not ditto heads. We need to hold our politicians feet to the fire.

[TXfemmom]

Obama and Pelosi and Reid need to pound this message into all the TV's and reporters and everyone else they encounter. STOP LETTING THE REPUBLICANS MAKE THE TALKING POINTS WHICH GET REPEATED BY THE CORRUPT MEDIA.

Besides, we need to bring in some Teddy Roosevelt into the country. When he was breaking up the Rockefeller and other things, one Supreme Court decision was that one can have the overwhelming wealth of a country in the hands of just a few, or one can have a democracy, but not both at the same time. That is what the Congress and the people of this country need to remember and repeat every single day.

[ESerafina42]

That's what I've been saying. It's time for them to get on board or get out of the way. They also stood up there in '93 and predicted doom, gloom and recession as a result of that bill, and announced to all and sundry that THEY wouldn't be responsible. And they weren't. Responsible, that is, for the longest economic expansion in our history.

[Daughter]

They are also angy that President Obama has capped CEO exec pay for banks that receive a taxpayer bailout. Go figure.

[mommadona]

"They're just mad that these tax cuts are for working families and the middle class rather than more giveaways to the wealthy and big corporations."

Exactly,
Then WHY can't Reid and Pelosi KEEP POINTING IT OUT.

Good grief...
After McCain went ballistic on the senate floor tonight at the beginning of the stimulus discussion....Harry Reid...HELD A LOVE FEST FOR HIM....THANKING him...(never said exactly WHAT he was thanking him for....) - It was utterly tail-betwe­en-the-leg­s and disgusting to watch.

[citizen of the universe]

I know I watched that on CSPAN and if you noticed, no Democrats got to respond when the Rethugs spewed their hate, and not one of them had read the bill.