Bailout Deal About To Hit A Wall?
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Now that there is a bailout deal, the House vote is coming up and there is still reason to think that there may not be enough votes to pass the legislation. While party leaders have all signed off on the deal, there are enough skeptics from both parties that passage is not guaranteed. An unusual alliance between the Mike Pences and Dennis Kuciniches of the world is forming. If it stalls in the House this week, I don’t think anything resembling Paulson’s plan is going to pass later. The timing of all this is uniquely bad for advocates of the bailout, as there is much greater unwillingness to vote for this bill right before going back to home districts, where opinion seems to be running almost two-to-one against the plan.
50% are opposed and 24% support the plan in Rasmussen’s latest. What little support there has been for the plan has actually decreased despite the rabid fearmongering of the administration and most of the media. 60% are concerned that the government will do too much, compared to 28% who are concerned the government will do too little. Near-majorities of both parties oppose the bailout, as does a majority of independents. 51% of investors oppose the plan, and non-investors are equally against it. Support is slightly greater among high-income respondents, but never reaches even a third of any income group. Remarkably, the people who have the most reason to oppose the government taking on additional debt, the 18-29 year olds, are most inclined of any group to support the move (36%). It seems likely that any member voting for this bill will face a nasty backlash. The absurdly low job approval ratings for Congress and the wrong-track numbers all suggest that populist outrage over this bill will lead to the ousting of many more incumbents from both parties. Whichever side is perceived as most in favor of the bailout will probably be the one to suffer the most, which could scramble all of the expectations of another big year for Democrats in the House and the Senate.
Update: More profiles in courage. This is pathetic evasion by both nominees if they avoid the vote, but it is also pretty smart politically. Their votes probably aren’t needed in the Senate to pass this anyway if it comes to that, and there is definitely nothing to be gained by voting for it. It certainly puts their doomsaying in perspective.
Judd Gregg of New Hampshire has been quoted saying, ““If we don’t pass it, we shouldn’t be in Congress.” Gregg should understand that if they do pass it many of them won’t be in Congress come January.
Second Update: Paul Ryan (R-WI) has flipped and now backs the bill. That suggests that conservative resistance is crumbling.
Filed under: economics, politics
6 Responses to “Bailout Deal About To Hit A Wall?”
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[...] [UPDATE: Via Larison, the present version of the bailout bill - which is, for all intents and purposes, the final draft that there will ever be - may not have enough votes to pass. God bless Dennis Kucinich!] 1 Comment so far Leave a comment [...]
Wow – if that happens, there are going to be LOTS of people who end up with egg on their faces, all of it well-deserved.
The question of popular backlash is tricky, I think: no matter how unpopular the bailout – oops! I mean “economic recovery plan” – is right now, if it doesn’t pass and there’s a sharp economic downturn, it seems to me that it’s going to be very easy to blame that on whoever opposed it. In any case I’m tremendously glad to see that the talk of a done deal may have been too hasty. It almost makes me wish I had C-SPAN so that I could watch the roll call tomorrow.
I believe you can watch C-SPAN feeds online. They will almost certainly have video of the roll call on their site tomorrow morning.
It might seem logical to blame the opponents if the deal fails and the doomsayers are proved correct, but I think you will see more generalized anti-incumbent sentiment and both more radical conservative and progressive attitudes prevailing in the public. The public has been bombared with warnings of doom over the last week, and public opinion is hardening *against* the deal, so I anticipate that any economic difficulties that follow a failed deal will be pinned on the leadership and not on the dissidents who killed the deal. The “sensible center” is filled with the people who created the crisis, and when crises get out of control they attack the establishment, not the people who opposed the establishment. The response will not be strictly rational, but then anger and outrage are not rational.
Wisdom and courage are in short supply up there these days, and the rush to judgment has limited the effectiveness of the popular backlash.
It took weeks for the grass roots revolt against shamnesty to have any effect.
Not sure if you saw this post, discussing the ways in which pollsters’ questions about the
bailouteconomic recovery plan are influencing the answers they get. I found it pretty odd that Silver is arguing that “rescue” is a term with “negative connotations”: it’s pretty clearly a success verb, for one thing, which is well more than Paulson’s shot in the dark deserves. He does cite a Pew poll from a few days earlier that showed 57% support when the plan was described as “investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure”, but then admits that the real issue may be that public opinion has hardened against it over time. I certainly hope that your diagnosis – “more radical conservative and progressive attitudes prevailing in the public” – is the right one; it would certainly make life more interesting.It’s toast!