From the ArcaMax Publishing, Mark Shields Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/markshields/s-420772-557814
Former Republican Senate leader Bob Dole, a man of uncommon candor,
once said of his Senate colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, "We
like to make tough speeches, but we don't like to make tough choices."
I can only hope that Bob Dole was watching (as I was from the Senate
press gallery) last Wednesday night, less than five weeks before a
national election, when U.S. senators faced a tough, unpleasant and
politically unrewarding choice of voting for an overwhelmingly
unpopular $700 billion bailout -- oops, make that rescue -- intended
to keep the nation's financial system from imminent collapse.
By a 74-to-25 vote, the Senate did the difficult and painful -- rather
than the easy and popular -- by backing the bailout. I was personally
impressed by senators like Republican John Sununu of New Hampshire,
already facing an uphill re-election fight against popular former
Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, who knowingly put their own political
futures at risk by voting for the bailout.
Just before the big vote, with some 95 senators sitting in their
assigned seats on the hushed Senate floor, every ear in the chamber
heard the insistent ringing of a cell-phone. The phone belonged to the
embarrassed Democratic senator from Nebraska, Ben Nelson, who was
obviously being needled for this interruption by his Senate seatmate,
Connecticut's Independent Democrat, Joe Lieberman. Nelson quickly
retreated to the Senate cloakroom to take the call.
After the vote, Lieberman told me what he had said to Nelson when the
latter's phone pierced the moment: "If that's (America's most
successful investor and Nebraska resident) Warren Buffett, I want to
know what he's telling you."
Nelson later told me that it was not Buffett calling but instead his
daughter Sarah, who was watching the Senate drama on C-SPAN in her
California home and just wanted to tell her dad how much she liked the
tie he was wearing.
There's an old Washington political maxim that holds that nobody ever
got into political trouble by voting against a bill that passed or by
voting in favor of a bill that did not pass. The argument being: You
can always explain that your intention was to improve the legislation
that did pass or that you wanted more to improve glaring shortcomings
in the bill the majority favored. On an October night in a crucial
election year, 74 U.S. senators ignored that maxim and voted for a
bill that could -- shortly -- get some of them into large political
trouble.
There is enormous blame to go around for the pain and fear millions of
American families are enduring because of the greed, dishonesty and
arrogance of powerful individuals mostly in the financial world. At
the very least, these men owe their fellow citizens a contrite, public
apology.
But let us pay proper credit to at least a few among us who did their
best to warn America against the fateful. When the Congress voted in
1999 to repeal the New Deal law that guaranteed the security of
commercial bank deposits but which regulated banks by limiting their
ability to engage in speculation, the dean of the House, Rep. John
Dingell, D-Mich., warned the House not to do it: "I just want to
remind my colleagues about what happened the last time (the Congress)
deregulated the savings and loans. It wound up imposing upon the
taxpayers of this nation about a $500 billion liability. That is what
it cost to clean up that mess. ... Taxpayers are going to be called
upon to cure the failures we are creating tonight, and it is going to
cost a lot of money, and it is coming. ... You are going to find out
they are too big to fail, so the Fed is going to be in and other
Federal agencies are going to be in to bail them out. Just expect
that."
Thank you, John Dingell.
To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit
the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
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