There’s been lots of excellent discussion so far on our junior Senator’s puzzling decision to block the most effective means of stimulating the economy. For more on that general topic, here’s the always-excellent Gail Collins on the state of the Senate and young Scott’s role in it. She starts off with the food safety bill, a bipartisan measure designed to prevent Americans from being poisoned.
“Oh, my gosh! It’s so important,” said Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m glad I rushed back from our break to work on food safety.”
Brown felt the Senate should have been focusing on economic issues, particularly his effort to stop the extension of unemployment compensation benefits until the Senate agrees to the Scott Brown Unemployment Compensation Funding Plan.
“Is it because I’m a Republican that we’re not going to pass that? Is it because I’m the new guy?” he demanded.
We will now have a moment of silence to contemplate the suffering of Senator Brown. Who had to come back the week after Thanksgiving in order to vote on a major bipartisan bill aimed at keeping people from being poisoned by contaminated food. And then became a victim of discrimination.
The ability of Scott Brown to whine and mewl apparently knows no bounds. One wonders how his apparently fragile psyche will handle no longer being the “new guy” once the frosh are sworn in next month.
Anyway, also worth reading is Paul Krugman, who does a fine job eviscerating the “strategy” of the Obama administration on tax cuts for the rich.
After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?
On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking – successfully, it seems – to destroy him.
So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.
Ouch. It gets worse.
Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands – to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.
But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies….
It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure – that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.
The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?
And here’s a truly painful, because difficult to contest, bottom line:
Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse – a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.
One really does wonder what Obama is going to accomplish for the next two years.
I guess we got some healthcare legislation out of Obama (we’ll see how much gets gutted as regulations are written), but the man is a colossal disappointment. Krugman, to his credit, had him pegged from the beginning.
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p>He’s sucked on DADT; he’s sucked on civil liberties; he he sucks on the economy; he supersucks on education; he’s done progressive Democrats no favors at all; if he doesn’t pull out of this nosedive, he’ll be known as the biggest disappointment in Presidential history.
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Mitch McConnell is kicking him out of Kennedy’s office.
And yes, Scott, that one is because you’re the new guy. đŸ˜€
Brown, as a freshman senator with little seniority, now could be forced to move to the virtual Siberia of Capitol Hill offices. Brown’s staffers have been showing senators around Kennedy’s former office halfheartedly for days, saying things like, ”we’re so cramped here” in an effort to dissuade them from taking it.
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p>That kind of strategy fails even in the gift swap games.
…the Scott Brown Unemployment Compensation Funding Plan isn’t going to pass is that he’s not interested in letting anybody in on it.
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p>It’s not on Thomas yet, so I’ve called his office three times in an effort to get them to email it to me. First time they said no, second time they said yes, and third time they said they were really busy.
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p>One staffer described the plan to me as taking “unspent money” and using it for unemployment. This sounds like something from an earlier bill of his (the one he filed this summer to deflect criticism of his opposition to that UI extension). It went something like this: “the Office of Management and Budget shall come up with $4 billion by taking actions including but not limited to checking under the sofa cushions for loose change and seeing if there are any empties to return.”
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p>The bill is Senate 3990, if you care to inquire. Maybe they’ll get to it after the party tonight.
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of better than nothing. If there had been truth in advertising, that would have been Obama’s campaign slogan.