Pelosi's Stimulard Bill

President Obama’s greatest impediment to bipartisanship and working for the common good of the country may be in the House of Representatives. In keeping with her tradition, Nancy Pelosi once again shut out the Republicans from contributing anything to the latest stimulus bill. The House took the opportunity to put together an enormous spending bill and label it as a stimulus package. Everybody wants to stimulate the economy, right? “Stimulus” is the new “earmark.”

Obama has promised a new transparency in these bills. This might come back to bite Pelosi and her profligate spending friends. Now the citizenry will be able to see what the “stimulus” items really are. Money for COBRA and unemployment doesn’t create jobs and neither does climate change research or aid to states that have huge deficits. These may be important, but they are simply payments from one set of people to another set of people. The problem is that taxpayers don’t have a lot of extra cash to spread around these days. They might even be smart enough to separate stimulus items from just plain spending programs.

Maybe the new President will have better success in the Senate, but as far as ending partisanship and putting the country first, he just lost the first round to Pelosi.