RESISTANCE IS UTILE:

Sticking It To Rahm: From their shared loathing of Rahm Emanuel to the insurgency led by the minority leader (“he took us by the throat”), the inside story of why not a single House Republican supported the President’s stimulus package. (John Batchelor, 1/29/09, Daily Beast)

"Rahm told the President that he can take care of Congress," a senior Republican reported to me. "He said, ‘These guys will roll over, they're afraid of being called the party of No. Believe me, I know them. They'll be easy.’"

The day before the vote, Emanuel sent the President to the Hill to meet with the House Republicans for a generous 90-minute question and answer session well received by the members. "He's charming," was the universal verdict, one prominent Republican told me. “The president was patient, he gave us plenty of time. But he didn't convince anyone. After he left, we looked at each other, and said, ‘How can they stick him with this garbage?’”

Since the beginning of his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama has spoken repeatedly of “post-partisanship.” He promised that he would transcend the divisions of the past by uniting Democrats and Republicans alike. His actions, engineered by Emanuel, were intended to win enough Republican votes to claim not just a victory on the stimulus bill but also confirmation of his “post-partisan” leadership. The result, with not a single Republican voting in favor, despite Obama’s wining and dining, joking and cajoling, reveals a Washington as polarized as it has ever been. The dream of post-partisanship did not last one vote in the Congress.

The day before the crucial vote in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner told his troops that the Republican Party is no longer a bureaucracy. "He took us by the throat and told us, ‘You're no longer the majority, stop acting like it,’" a senior Republican told me about the run up to the vote. “‘If you've got an idea, get it on MSNBC. This is an entrepreneurial insurgency.’ He was kicking the ball around. He wants everyone involved. If there's an amendment, he told us to offer it. If you have 48 seconds for YouTube, get it up there. Get busy and resist in every instance.”

Emanuel, working with his old boss and ally, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, made it easy for the Republicans to resist. Every penny in the more than 600-page bill came from a Democratic wish list of pork that dated back to the beginning of the Bush administration.

One thing about this iteration of the House GOP, no one who won in '08 can possibly lose in '10, so they have no need to bend to the UR.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 29, 2009 6:11 PM