The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Death of Omnibus Boosts GOP

Posted on | December 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

Defeating Harry Reid’s pet pork package gets Republicans off on the right foot going into the 112th Congress:

Senate Republicans sought to build momentum on Friday after successfully forcing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to beg off a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.
Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote a valedictory e-mail to GOP supporters cheering the death of the omnibus bill.
“You did it. Facing pressure from you, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Thursday night he was withdrawing the Democrats’ last-minute, 2,200-page-long, $1.1 trillion spending bill,” Cornyn wrote, crediting Republican wins in Senate races this fall for the victory.
Reid pulled the spending bill from the Senate floor after Republicans signaled they would not support the legislation . . .

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

The defeat last night of the OmniPorkulus bill, as the Boss Emeritus calls it, gives us a chance to revisit the long-held — and long-true — belief that both parties are equally addicted to pork-barrel spending.

Ed links to a column by Byron York that argues Republicans really did get the message of the Tea Party movement and the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, the passage of the tax “compromise” leaves liberal Ezra Klein perplexed:

The tax deal passed last night, and without changes. Liberals don’t really like it. Conservatives don’t really like it. Even people who supported the deal — myself included — don’t really like it. It’s tempting to say that this broad spectrum of gnawing dissatisfaction just shows that the bill was a true compromise, with everyone getting a little and giving up a bit. And maybe it was. But it was a compromise that said something bad about our political system, not something good: It said we’re operating without a clear theory of what’s gone wrong in the economy, or how to fix it.

Who is this “we,” Kemosabe? “What’s gone wrong in the economy” is the collapse of a speculative bubble, followed by a misguided attempt to re-inflate the bubble through Keynesian interventionism. As I tried to tell all you genius experts two years ago: “It Won’t Work.”

As for “how to fix it,” the answer is equally simple: Stop!

Stop the endless deficit spending, stop the endless extension of unemployment benefits, stop trying to “fix” the housing market with further interventions, stop trying to “fix” deflation  by having the Fed buy Treasury debt, stop the government takeover of the health-care industry — stop just about everything that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama have been doing since January 2009.

Once you’ve stopped doing the wrong things, that will be about half of the solution. The other half of the solution — actually doing the right thing — will probably have to wait until January 2013, when the next president is sworn in and we rid ourselves of Barack Obama, who now looks much less like the messiah Ezra Klein once worshipped and a lot more like the Second Coming of Jimmy Carter.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll notes that ObamaCare is the next big target in GOP sights.

Category: Barack Obama, Congress, Republicans, Senate, Taxes

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