Reason’s Jacob Sullum notes the similarities between the stimulus bill and one of the more notorious pieces of “emergency” legislation of the Bush Administration:
I flashed back to the fall of 2001 upon reading the subhead over a New York Times story about Monday’s presidential press conference: “He Says That Failing to Act Could Lead to Catastrophe.” To rush a complex, ill-considered piece of legislation through Congress, George W. Bush invoked the specter of another terrorist attack. Barack Obama, bringing the change he promised, invoked the specter of economic collapse.
Just as the Patriot Act was a grab bag of legal changes that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had been seeking for years, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a grab bag of expenditures that leftish Democrats have long wanted, repackaged for the crisis du jour. In both cases, instilling fear was the key to suspending skepticism and cutting off debate.
(…)
The false sense of urgency created by the president was designed to override two kinds of doubts: about Keynesian stimulus spending generally and about this package in particular. “Doing nothing is not an option,” he said in Elkhart. It should be, especially when the something the president wants to do could be worse than nothing, adding $1 trillion to the national debt and diverting resources from more productive uses without delivering on the promise to “jolt our economy back to life.”
And just as the PATRIOT Act was passed in a rush, with no reasonable amount of time for members or the public to digest even the basics of a piece of legislation that exceeded 1,000, today the House of Representatives (and presumably the Senate later tonight) passed an economic stimulus package that had not even been posted on the Internet for review until 10pm last night, and even then it was posted in a format that made it impossible to do a text-based search.
As with the PATRIOT Act, there is simply no way that any of the Representatives that voted for this bill today had any real idea of what was in it.
That alone is an unconscionable dereliction of duty.
