GOP Repeats History of One-Way Bipartisanship

By Jon Perr Wednesday
CrooksandLiars
Feb 11, 2009

The Senate's passage Tuesday of the economic recovery package followed a now-familiar 30 year pattern. The Democratic President Barack Obama, like Bill Clinton before him in 1993, faced a monolithic wall of GOP opposition to his economic program. But Republicans Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George W. Bush 20 years later enjoyed substantial Democratic support for their dangerously irresponsible and regressive tax cuts that as predicted drained the federal treasury. Now as then, for Republicans the road to economic stimulus is a one-way street.

After being blanked in the House, President Obama picked up a whopping three Republican votes in the Senate one day after his first presidential press conference. (At this point, prospects for any gains on the final bill emerging from the House and Senate conference seem dubious.) But while his quixotic quest to reach across the aisle may have come up empty for now, Obama can take some comfort from Bill Clinton's experience in 1993. After all, Clinton's package of stimulus programs and upper-income bracket tax increases not only preceded a record economic expansion, it happened to get no Republican votes in either house of Congress.

As the New York Times noted at the time:

"Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party."

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

(More here.)