Opposition
Yuval Levin has a smart post up about the House Republican reaction to the stimulus bill:
When they manage to unify the entire House Republican caucus with David Brooks and Peggy Noonan, you know the Democrats have seriously botched something up. And boy, they really have. The more you look at the stimulus bill the clearer it becomes that it is the Congressional Democrats, not the opponents of this bill, who have failed to see that we are in a genuine and exceptional crisis. They’re working to use the moment as an opportunity to advance the same agenda they haven’t been able to move (with good reason) for a decade and more, and in the process are showing that agenda to be what we always knew it was: a massively wasteful, reckless, profligate, slovenly, higgledy-piggledy mess of interest group troughs and technocratic fantasies devoid of any economic thinking or sense of proportion.
The larger question, as David* hints at here, is what kind of counterproposal the House GOP offers, and what arguments their surrogates make opposed to the Democratic bill and for whatever counter the GOP comes up with. As we’ve seen so far, both efforts are lacking.
*Donadio. Seriously, we have too many Davids writing around these parts.