Friday, April 03, 2009

The party of 'No'

Both the House and Senate passed budgets yesterday, with not one Republican vote in either case. Zero Republican votes in the House, zero Republican votes in the Senate.

As for the GOP budget "plan" -- you know, the one without any substance or even many actual numbers (see for yourself), Deputy Director for Management and Budget Rob Nabors called it a "joke." And it appears that some Republicans may have agreed with him.

About twice as many Republicans (38 or 20 percent of their conference) voted against the GOP alternative budget -- than Democrats (20 or 8 percent) who nixed their party's spending plan.
To be fair, it's possible that those Republicans are so accustomed to obstructionism that they simply voted no out of habit.

So once again we see that it is possible to get legislation passed in both the House and the Senate with no Republican support whatsoever. And we have seen that Republicans are simple obstructionists with no ideas of their own who will vote no to Democratic proposals without offering any meaningful alternative.

So can congressional Democrats now stop trying to work with people who have no interest in working with them? And can the American people just stop voting for Republicans? Because, even in this hour of great national crisis, Republicans cannot be bothered to either support efforts to solve our country's problems or offer an alternative. Even in the face of the worst economic disaster of most of our lifetimes, Republicans would rather do nothing than support the efforts of Democrats.

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