The Blog @ Spolitics

Nancy Pelosi: Shameless Demagogue

House Speaker Pelosi proved herself to be a petty partisan yesterday when the nation — or at least Congress — needed a statesman. Before the House voted on the $700 billion Paulson plan to help stabilize the markets, she took the occasion to blame Bush for the mess by turning a surplus into a deficit in “just two years.” As if 9-11 had nothing to do with that.

She then blamed Republicans for their “anything goes” economic policy which is a disgusting distortion. For starters, in 2002 Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley — regulatory reform so complex and burdensome it’s credited with scaring companies from going public and joining Wall Street.

In addition, the Bush administration and Congress tried to pass regulatory reform for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and create a new regulator to keep an eye on the GSE’s. If there was “no supervision” as Pelosi claims it was her party that insured it. The Democrats were the ones who blocked tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and it was a lack of regulation of the GSE’s and Congress’s role in pushing bad loans that’s led to the problem we’re in today.

We’ve said it before, but the point needs repeating. This isn’t a market failure, it’s a failure caused by big government interfering with the markets and trying to force banks to make unsafe loans. And now Washington is balking about bailing out the banks they pushed to act irresponsibly.

Pelosi knows Congress helped created this problem by pushing bad loans and Americans should be concerned about the fact that she refuses to acknowledge it. It means she’s not interested in solving the problem, she just wants to gain political capital from it. Even scarier, Democrats wanted 20% of any earnings from the Paulson plan to go to groups like ACORN to help spur more affordable housing — the exact thing that got us into this mess in the first place. It’s clear the Democrat leadership in Congress is more concerned with their select group of political allies — and their own power — than with the American people.