Here is how the vote went down among our California Republicans:

PATRIOTS (voted no)
Brian Bilbray
John Doolittle
Elton Gallegly
Duncan Hunter
Darrell Issa
Kevin McCarthy
Devin Nunes
Dana Rohrabacher
Ed Royce

WELFARE FOR WASHINGTON (Voted Yes)
Mary Bono Mack
Ken Calvert
John Campbell
David Dreier
Wally Herger
Jerry Lewis
Dan Lungren
Buck McKeon
Gary Miller
George Radanovich

Is your representative a Democrat? Look them up on the Roll Call vote here.

It was very disappointing to see so many Republicans (in fact a majority of our state GOP delegation) go up on this huge taxpayer subsidy of Wall Street. I don’t live in a bubble, and understand that the situation is quite severe… But IF you get past the immorality of this vote (the very notion that politicians in Washington, D.C., would literally take $2000 for each man, woman and child in America and "gift it" to help prop up privately owned financial institutions), you then have to confront the reality that this legislation contains no "pathway for escape" for potential future bail outs. There is no mechanism in this bill to phase the U.S. government out of the business of manipulating the market (such as, for example, a time-certain end to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which are great examples of institutions that, using government backing and funds, inflate the market).

I will add, for good measure, that having as a spokesman and advocate for this bail out of Wall Street our U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is very UN-popular with readers. Having a product of Wall Street, a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs with a reputed net-worth of a half-billion himself advocating a plan for everyone in America to bail out the very firms headed by the people with whom Paulson recreates… Well, let’s just say it doesn’t set well.

Here’s Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s floor speech on the bill, in case you still didn’t need a reason to vote against it…

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.