Obama Talks Stimulus, Transparency, Accountability
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Barack, Legislation, Republicans, VideoThe $787 billion stimulus bill passed and Obama explains how the spending will be tracked and the information will be made publicly available for everybody to see…
Already, Republicans who didn’t vote for the bill are praising pieces of it…
Rep. John Mica was gushing after the House of Representatives voted Friday to pass the big stimulus plan.“I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future,” the Florida Republican beamed in a press release.
Yet Mica had just joined every other GOP House member in voting against the $787.2 billion economic recovery plan…. Mica wasn’t alone in touting what he saw as the bill’s virtues.
What’s more, Arlen Specter tells Huff Post that a “sizable number” of Republicans wanted to vote for it, but didn’t think it was in their best interests…
“When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today,” said Specter, “one of my colleagues said, ‘Arlen, I’m proud of you.’ My Republican colleague said, ‘Arlen, I’m proud of you.’ I said, ‘Are you going to vote with me?’ And he said, ‘No, I might have a primary.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know very well I’m going to have a primary.’”
Do I care that Republicans who voted against it were actually in favor of it? Sure, but I understand that this is still politics and things aren’t going to change overnight.
However, I hope those who realize the value of doing something like this will eventually say as much publicly when it starts paying dividends for our economy and long term strategic goals.
We shall see…
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 14th, 2009 and is filed under Barack, Legislation, Republicans, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 14th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
For some reason they seem to have it in mind that voting no against the stimulus will be good for them come election time in 2010. Personally I think they are delusional.
February 16th, 2009 at 6:02 am
Well if many of the Republicans supported the bill, but were concerned about the impact on a potential primary, then I think you are looking at 4 more years of the same type of votes unless the Republicans are handed more defeats in 2010. I don’t think they will lose much (if any) in 2010 so I think this strategy will continue until 2012.
February 16th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Seems like that High speed rail capital assistance thingy was the only thing that jumped in the Conference- from 3 bil to 8 bil?? Hmmm??? May not be spelled out in black and white in the final but in DC you have to know when to read between the lines in legislation. Guess we have to keep up with the Shanghai’s, but Mag-Lev shovel ready?? Come on!! And Timely, Targetted, and Temporary?? Nope! Not by a long shot! Stevens, Byrd and Murtha must be seething with jealousy!
All in all though I do support the bill. But I just wish Obama and company would not piggy back such stuff in emergency legislation and be more upfront on this stuff. Maybe he’ll learn some lesons from this not to let Nancy, Franky, and Harry write these things that may impinge on the success of his Presidency and the Nation’s future. Here’s hoping!! Cheers!
February 17th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
I can’t tell you how excited I am that we finally have an administration involved in using the internet for transparency. While I’m a little concerned web sites like recovery.gov are just going to be propaganda machines, it ups the ante on government information distributed to the layman. I think there will be no going back…