| 23 February 2010
Yesterday, Massachusetts Junior Senator Scott Brown voted for cloture on a $15 billion "jobs" bill. This has riled some in the right wing of the blogosphere. Among the aggrieved is Monica Crowley who writes:
In his maiden voyage vote, the newest member of the Senate, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, voted the wrong way. Yesterday, he voted with the Democratic majority for the $15 billion "jobs" bill. Apparently, Senator Brown fell hook, line, and sinker for the Democrats' line of BS that this WAS, in fact, a "jobs" bill.
It's nothing of the sort. It's Stimulus II. Since Stimulus I, in all of its $862 billion infamy, did not work, the Democrats decided they needed another big-spending monstrosity. So they produced this thing of a bill that costs us $15 billion we do not have. $15 billion we cannot afford. $15 billion for tax credits for businesses (which do not work in spurring job creation and are not to be confused with tax cuts, which do work) and highway spending.
In other words, it's nothing but spending. After the voters sent Senator Brown to DC to STOP spending. If they had wanted another Ted Kennedy spendaholic, they would have voted in Martha Coakley.
The problem however is that Brown went to Washington with the promise of stopping health care reform, not preventing the entirety of the democrat agenda. What my conservative friends may have missed was he was the least bad option. And that when forced to choose between bad options, bad results will follow. Therefore if your objective is to stop ObamaCare then "Brownie", as Crowley calls him, is still doing a heckuva job.
Look, before the special election, Nate Silver's bunch at 538 showed that Brown was ideologically to the left of Dede Scozzafava, whose liberal leanings were suffiecient to encourage Doug Hoffman to run as an independent. The lesson the tea partiers took from Hoffman's loss was that a little more than nothing is still more than nothing. By throwing their weight behind an ill-informed and relatively talentless politician, conservatives alienated the voting populace. Instead of a pickup, the party sacrificed the seat in the name of purity.Things were different in the Massachusetts special election. What Crowley mistakes as closet liberalism is in fact what Brown was before he went to Washington. If conservatives and libertarians are disillusioned they should reassess what exactly the better choice would have been. Martha Coakley, Brown's opponent, would have voted for this legislation as well, but she also would have supported ObamaCare. The libertarian in the race, Joseph Kennedy would not have supported either, but he would not have been successful against Coakley in the special election. Casting aspersions towards Brown means the honeymoon is over. But it doesn't mean that he isn't doing what he was elected to do.
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