From the Wonk Room.
On May 27,
the Wall Street Journal editorial board
wrote
about the Climate Security
Act
(S. 3036):
Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.
A week later, Sen. Jim Inhofe changed “reorganization” to “expansion,” writing in the Wall Street Journal that the climate legislation “will create the largest expansion of the federal government since FDR’s New Deal.”
Conservative senators have been coordinated on the Senate floor in repeating the Wall Street Journal-Inhofe message:
Judd Gregg (R-N.H.):
These allowances which really are a consumption tax in my opinion will essentially be used to greatly expand the government.
John Cornyn (R-Tex.):
This is the kind of huge expansion in government power over our lives and over the economy that is really unprecedented in our country, and I suggest is the wrong solution – is a – is a wrong answer to the – to what confronts us today.
George Voinovich (R-Ohio):
I feel it is overly aggressive, outpacing what technology can provide and thus assuring economic pain on the country and it is overly bureaucratic and cumbersome in its implementation, representing an unprecedented expansion of government power and a massive bureaucratic intrusion in American lives that will have a profound effect on businesses, communities and families.
The right wing is still upset with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and wants to go back to an era without the system of labor, health, economic, and environmental protections that built the American middle class. They fear that the American public will realize that a New Green Deal of progressive policies could restore our economic future. Yesterday, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) complained:
The bill before us creates a raft of new government spending programs.
He and his fellow conservatives have put us on a sinking ship, are burning the life preservers, and won’t even let us build a “raft.” As David Roberts writes, “Unless we want to go down with the ship, we need to start building an ark.”