Congressional, White House Democrats Take a Stupid, Un-Strategic Deal

There's not really a good reason for Congressional Democrats or the White House agreeing to the Continuing Resolution that passed Congress last night and was signed by President Obama. It's bad political strategy, and undermined one of the President's core accomplishments as President. We should have unanimously voted against the C.R., and let the GOP figure out how to keep the government open under their new control of Capitol Hill. We failed that test.

First off, the policy is terrible. In exchange for keeping the government open, we allowed Republicans to gut out key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Bank legislation, and now banks will be able to gamble on risky trades again with public money, and then expect to be bailed out for their behavior. Obviously the whole bill wasn't negated, but some key parts were. There's no reason that Democrats were casting votes for a bill that undermined the key reason this President was elected in 2008. It makes even less sense when you realize that the Dodd-Frank bill was working.

Second off, what terrible politics. Aside from having a small number break to vote for bad policy, Democrats also signaled to the new GOP majority that they can rely on them when their own members are too irresponsible to keep Washington running. They also allowed a bill to pass that sets up a Spring showdown over funding the Department of Homeland Security over the immigration executive order the President recently signed. Why give the GOP any leverage for a future fight? This is just dumb politics.

To be fair, Nancy Pelosi and most of the Democrats in the House and Senate voted no last night. They did the right thing. Unfortunately, just enough did the dumb thing, for the country and the party.