According to a website devoted to the electoral college, voting in “safe” disticts was essentially split 50-50, but swing district congressmen voted in favor of their re-election, overwhelmingly.
One of the big talking points is that the GOP was willing to support the “bailout,” but Speaker Nancy Pelosi poisoned the vote when she gave a partisan speech just five minutes before the vote.
So let me see if I can get this straight, House Republicans liked this plan and thought it would help stave off economic Armageddon, but changed their vote at the last minute to spite Nancy Pelosi?
Another interesting tidbit, Jake Tappers blog at ABC indicates that he got an email right after the vote that said:
“What Senator McCain was able to do was to help bring all of the parties to the table, including the House Republicans, whose votes were needed to pass this”
–McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt
Unfortunately, it doesn’t specifically claim it was from the McCain camp. Was this a prediction that Schmidt had made that didn’t come to fruition? Or was this another instance of the McCain camp declaring victory on an event that hadn’t yet happened?
For that matter, what does it say that McCain couldn’t get the House Republicans to vote for the bill?
For the record, Congressmen Higgins, Slaughter and Reynolds all voted for the “bailout.”
One other side note: I read on a blog earlier that this is A LOT different from 1929 … cause we can drink this time around.
First, who really lost in the sub-prime debacle:
– Not the banks, or, at least, not the executives who took massive pay packages and golden parachutes. The vast bulk of their employees, of course, have lost, big time.
– Not really the unqualified lenders who bought much more house than they should have; they should not have had those specific houses, but more modest ones.
– Rather, it was the several million homeowners who bought houses that they could afford to pay off, without sub-prime loans, but at prices that were inflated, not by real worth, but by rampant speculation on sub-primes. A couple might have paid $600K for a house that was worth $300K a few years earlier and that might have realistically appreciated, say, $40K in 3 years. During years of speculative, artificial rises in home prices, they had to pay an extra $260K. They will never see that money back. Talk about bailouts – they are the prime payers of the bailout. The rest of us get stuck with $30K to $50K (who knows?), but these legitimate homeowners really got stuck. Where is the plan to recompense these people and not the unqualified lenders?
Second, was it orchestrated? Admittedly, the financial system is perhaps too complicated for any one person or any small group such as heads of a bank to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, Treasury Secretary Paulson probably saw it coming way in advance; Barack Obama expressed concern directly to Paulson a year ago. Did Paulson let the train wreck happen, so that hasty action would be “necessary,” without time to think through the real fixes that were needed? I do not put it past him; he was a Wall Streeter himself, at Goldman, Sachs. He drafted the first bailout proposal, the most outrageous package of what amounts to compounded theft, arguably the greatest white-collar crime in world history. His package said, “Turn your backs while I loot ever more from the treasury to give to my colleagues.”
Where was Paulson a year ago when oversight could have been put in place to avoid this spectacle? What was he doing three years ago when he took over at Treasury? If he didn’t see the disaster in its completeness, why was he made Secretary of the Treasury? Why should we trust him with the bailout, ever?
This disaster did not happen without the concurrence of many people, and the blame starts at the highest levels. Why is Phil Gramm still proud of deregulation that inexorably led to this? Why is this not the subject of investigation for criminal intent…or for treason?