I believe it was the late William F. Buckley, Jr. who said he would rather be governed by people whose names had been chosen randomly from the Boston phone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University. In the wake of the bank bailouts and the so-called "stimulus" package that were muscled through Congress without a single public hearing, Bill Buckley's wisdom has been affirmed repeatedly in recent weeks and months.
It's been especially amusing to observe the squirrelly conduct of our much-lauded and applauded US Senators, now more affectionately known as the stimulus sisters, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Reacting to the firestorm of public outrage and indignation over bonus payments to employees of bailed-out American International Group (AIG), our gals in DC fell all over themselves to feign surprise and anger.
Why, we're shocked, just shocked about these AIG bonuses. It's absolutely disgraceful!
Trouble is, both our esteemed Senators voted for the original blank-check bailout legislation last September. And just a few weeks ago they voted for very specific language in the stimulus bill that allowed the AIG bonuses. But what a remarkable performance they gave pretending to be surprised and offended. With a little practice, they can learn to keep their faces and their stories straight while declaring that they voted for the bonuses before they voted against them.
It's also been fun to read some of the fanciful commentary by various boosters and cheerleaders who have volunteered to help our Senators convince voters that an unprecedented torrent of spending, taxing, and borrowing will somehow "jump-start" the economy. Columnist Jill Goldthwaite can be counted among the legions who claim that Collins and Snowe exhibited great "leadership" for their key role in enabling passage of the Obama administration's 1,100-page stimulus package. In her February 26th Ellsworth American column, Goldthwaite was especially impressed with the bipartisanship of our Senators.
No question these ladies are bipartisan, but it's quite a stretch to call them leaders.
They both went along meekly with the unprecedented $700 billion bank bailout last fall after the Bush administration's Treasury Secretary invoked a national emergency requiring immediate federal intervention. No time for hearings, ladies, hurry up and vote on this bailout package we wrote behind closed doors.
Five months after being hoodwinked by Hank Paulson, the stimulus sisters went along with the new administration's scare campaign. President Obama insisted that if Congress didn't immediately adopt his $800 billion spending bill, crisis would quickly give way to catastrophe. Pass it now, or we could be looking at another Great Depression.
For the second time in less than six months, our Senators were scared into suspending the regular rules of the legislative process so that a huge spending bill could be written behind closed doors with no public hearings. Never before in American history has this amount of money been appropriated for any purpose, and certainly never without hearings and the opportunity for public input into the process.
$1.5 trillion with a "T" is the combined amount of the bailouts and the stimulus, not counting interest on that debt. It's twice as much money as the US has spent on the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and for Hurricane Katrina relief -- combined.
Bad things happen when you act in haste and in fear. In this case, they didn't even allow themselves (or us) time to read the final bill before they voted for it. Now they will have to take ownership of every rancid piece of it, since they held veto power over the contents. If at any point either Collins or Snowe had exercised true leadership and withdrawn their support, this legislative monstrosity would have died a quick and merciful death in the Senate, at which point Congressional leaders could have restored the regular rules so that the peoples' business could be conducted in an orderly fashion.
In her Ellsworth appearance just a few days after enactment, Collins made the dubious claim that she went through the original House version of the stimulus bill "line by line" to scrub unnecessary spending. But the final bill overlapped 90% between the House and Senate versions. It is a pork-packed pile of special-interest payoffs to the most favored constituent groups of the bill's authors. The bill was loaded with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of spending that never would have survived the normal legislative process. Most of it has more to do with growing government than with growing the economy.
Collins and Snowe are playing with fire when they arrogantly lock us out of the legislative process. The American people have lost trillions of dollars in retirement assets in the past year as a direct result of government-sponsored entities (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) polluting the financial markets with toxic assets from the sub-prime mortgage market. So far, the root causes of the financial meltdown have not been honestly addressed by our congresscritters.
If they were truly leaders, the stimulus sisters would have long ago demanded Congressional ethics investigations of Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd for their roles in shielding Fannie and Freddie from proper oversight.
That would be real leadership for Maine and the nation.
Lawrence E. Lockman lives in Amherst. His email address is larrylockman@rivah.net.
