Hot Springs, Va. — “Thank you for the vote you took this week,” former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney told an assembly of Republican House members, who responded with a cheer. “We want you to know that we’re proud of you.”
Romney was addressing a late-January retreat of the House Republican Conference—whose members were strangely jubilant, considering that their party is now officially out of power in both chambers of Congress. Last week’s show of Republican unanimity against House Democrats’ $819-billion stimulus package has done wonders for morale in the House GOP. The bill passed 244-188, without a single Republican vote, and with 11 Democrats voting against.
“Everyone is talking about our big victory this week,” a senior staff aide told National Review Online. “I have to keep reminding people that we lost the vote—the bill passed.”
But when former Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke here on Thursday, he reminded those present of another such loss. It came in 1993, when congressional Democrats raised taxes without any Republican help.
No one here seems to think that last week’s vote on the stimulus package will bring about a repeat of 1994, but neither does anyone seem worried about negative political consequences arising from their vote against the bill, despite its connection to a new and popular president. Conservatives believe that they lost their mandate by losing their way—among other things, with consistent deficit spending during the six years in which they controlled both chambers.
Between fiscal 2002 and 2007, GOP lawmakers added $1.7 trillion to the federal debt held by the public. Conveniently, the measure that Republicans voted against on Wednesday is a much larger version of their own past folly. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Democrats’ stimulus package puts them on pace to heap up nearly the same amount of debt just in Obama’s first full fiscal year, which begins in October. All by itself, the bill passed on Wednesday would cost more than the $657 billion that the CBO estimates the government will have spent on the Iraq war through March 2009.
Republicans are also convinced that the Democrats’ stimulus bill is identical in kind to their own perennial deficit spending, consisting largely of projects that promise to offer little in the way of economic stimulus: billions for national parks, disease control, government cars and computers, welfare spending, and arts grants.
“With all of the job losses that were announced, it’s clear that we need an economic rescue bill that will work,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) told reporters at the retreat on Friday. “We don’t need a bill that’s going to work for bigger government, and I think the bill that the Democrat leaders put on the floor the other night won’t work for American families and businesses.” Its spending trickles out slowly, and it contains numerous items that cannot be understood as “stimulus” by any common definition.
House Republican campaign chairman Pete Sessions (R., Tex.) characterized the Democrats’ bill as “government spending to create more government programs.” In the face of criticism from the Left, Republicans say they are satisfied that they did what they could in presenting a far less expensive alternative containing less deficit spending and more tax cuts for businesses. Rep. Thad McCotter (R., Mich.), chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, told me it had not been a difficult decision—there had been no tension whatsoever between conservative and moderate Republicans over whether there was any reason to support a bill of the kind the Democrats were proposing.
President Obama’s personal effort lobbying the Hill did nothing to create bipartisan agreement. In fact, the only bipartisan efforts so far have come in opposition to the bill. Moderate Sen. Ben Nelson (D., Neb.) announced this week that he hopes to assemble a coalition from both parties committed to a rewrite.
Republicans are betting big on the ability of voters to understand the difference—to believe that House Republicans voted against a bad bill and have not simply voted against economic recovery. McCotter told me that he believes people understand. While making a radio appearance in his district, he had taken questions from a caller named Glenn, who bemoaned the recent loss of his job in a mass layoff. It had prevented him from throwing a promised birthday party for his daughter.
“What really angered him was when he saw what they were spending money on in the stimulus bill,” McCotter said. “None of it was going to help put him back to work, and he knew it.”
House Republicans must hope that there are many more people like Glenn. If so, their stand against the stimulus bill in the House will give President Obama an early choice: demand a better bill than the one his fellow Democrats have produced in the House, or else take ownership of a potential disaster.
— David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.
