The NRSC sends out a fundraising letter:
Ed Markey’s career is a living testament to failed Washington policies. Throughout his 37-year career in Washington, the Congressman has voted to raise the debt ceiling 31 times and in favor of higher taxes 271 times. He was an architect of the Wall Street bailouts. He was involved in Congressional check bouncing scandals to the total of $63,000, and he has repeatedly voted to give himself pay raises with taxpayer dollars. To sum it up, Ed Markey isn’t needed in the Senate, but new leadership is.
Are we to presume from this that, if a Republican had been in that seat, we would have 31 votes to default on our debt? that the Republican would have voted to let the financial sector crater in 2008?
If I understand correctly, we are to believe that Congressmen and Senators should still be paid whatever they were paid in the late eighteenth century — and that way, we’d only have a rich, reliably Republican Congress.
that so many votes to raise the debt ceiling were necessary because Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush kept running ever-larger deficits. And that the Republicans (with an assist from Clinton’s signing of Gramm-Leach-Bliley) were the ones who put the financial sector at the point of cratering.
And that, yes, with significant inflation over 36 years, no member of Congress should ever have gotten a pay raise.
…here.