Under the Democrats’ original plan, 20% of what the Treasury recouped from the risky loans it purchased would have gone to ACORN and other Leftist organizations like LaRaza. House Republicans forced the leadership of the Democrat Party to remove that provision.
At 228 – 205, a 12-vote swing would have passed the bailout bill in the House today. Knowing that, take a look at the names of those who voted ‘nay.’ 19 (of 42 in the House) members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted ‘nay’:
Butterfield; Carson; Clay; Cleaver; Conyers; Cummings; Edwards (MD); Green, Al; Jackson (IL), Jackson-Lee (TX); Jefferson; Johnson (GA); Payne; Rush; Salazar; Scott (GA); Scott (VA); Thompson (MS); and Watson.
According to Larry Kudlow, Nancy Pelosi is now planning to put ACORN and company’s 20% cut back into the bill:
A number of Republican House members and staff, along with others who are plugged in, are telling me that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats will come back with a new bill that includes all the left-wing stuff that was scrubbed from the bill that was defeated today in the House.
As this scenario goes, the House Democrats need 218 votes, and they have to pick up a number of black and Hispanic House members who jumped ship because the Wall Street provisions, in their view, were too benign. So things like the bankruptcy judges setting mortgage terms and rates, the ACORN slush-fund spending, the union proxy for corporate boards, stricter limits on executive compensation, and much larger equity ownership of selling banks through warrants will all find itself back in the new bill. Of course, this scenario will lose more Republican votes. But insiders tell me President Bush will take Secretary Paulson’s advice and sign that kind of legislation.
Hat tip to HotAir.com for the NRO Corner link.
Update: Not to be funny yet I just noticed that either the Congressional Record or Black Caucus has made one mistake. The former lists Representative Watson as having voted today while the latter indicates (by bold type) her to be deceased. I’m relieved to see that her web site says she is in fact alive.
Update II: Senator Barack Obama is a member of the Congressional Black Congress yet:
Mr. Holtz-Eakin said Mr. McCain had made “dozens of calls†on the bill, some to House Republicans who opposed it.
Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure.
In other words, Barack Obama took care of his friends at ACORN and allowed the bill in the House to fail.
.jpg)
This is past politics; it is outright theft. The prevention of this socialistic fiscal cancer should have focused on education and communication and for now the left owns those entities. A body cannot protect itself if it has no mind. We only have Fox News and talk radio. We know the problem and you have to deal with it directly. We need to buy several newspapers and another channel. We talk about student loans for essentially liberal art programs that require you to be proficient in socialism while you bypass free market capitalism as it used to be taught in Eco 101.
It is a shame that Sarah Palin is caught up with McCain because she and Romney would have been a natural ticket to deal with the issues this election presents. These problems represent the greatest of ideological issues that distinguish America from the entire World and some of it McCain doesn’t really accept. I am dismayed at how his camp cannot see the economy the way he needs to connect with voters. This bailout bill is designed to help Congress, Wall Street and the poor more than it ever was to protect Main Street. This is a crisis of confidence and I’m not sure you can ever get that back. Where were all these bailout geniuses 4, 6, or 12 months ago? The housing market has been in an obvious decline for 2 years and even when it was good the poorest loans were still in default and thought of as assets, when they were not, because they represented whole neighborhoods that were blighted. If this hit us on an incremental basis we could have handled it, but you would have to have called it for what it really is and that is “Welfareâ€Â. It needed to be expensed out as part of the yearly deficit and that would have killed Fannie and Freddie a long time ago. Obviously that was not in the interest of democrats. It was, and still is, just another form of entitlement. This bill, from democrat viewpoints, went down because constituents called and objected to saving Wall Street and they were conservative constituents. There were other democrat representatives that killed the bill because their constituents wanted more pork. Part of this group is the black caucus.
There is too much pragmatic altruism in Bush and McCain. They never dealt with the liberal snake correctly. You go straight for the head because if you grab it anywhere else you are going to get bitten. When Bush was in Texas there were a lot of similarities between republicans and democrats. They are completely different on a national level. National democrats could have taught Karl Marx a thing or two. There really are only two ideologies in this country and the two parties should be named the socialists and the capitalists. The socialists are anti-constitutional and achieve what they want by illegal legislation and failing that by the courts. Between the energy debacle and the mortgage monster democrat policies could take down the world. That is what socialism always does and I have 2500 years of recorded history to back it up.
If you want to use 700 billion you could actually use this amount, and a lot less, to start and fund brand new banks or seed existing sound institutions that could immediately add liquidity to the market based on solid real asset secured loans under existing SEC regulations. This amount gives tremendous leverage and puts the taxpayer on the hook for nothing and the guilty don’t get off it. This is an easy payback. But then what do you do for the poor?