Senate GOP Blocks Jobs Bill

Greg Sargent outlines the Republican strategy of blocking President Obama's jobs initiative to undermine public confidence in government in his Washington Post blog, The Plum Line.

Voters either don’t understand, or they don’t care, that the GOP has employed an unprecedented level of filibustering in order to block all of Obama’s policies, even ones that have majority public support from Dems, independents and Republicans alike. Their reaction, in a nutshell, seems to be: The Obama-led government isn’t acting on the economy? Obama can’t get his policies passed? Well, he must be weak.

Indeed, if the GOP’s strategy is to deliberately create government dysfunction out of a belief that the public will blame Obama for it and lose faith on government in general, turning to GOP ideology instead, it very well may be working. The new AP poll finds that only 41 percent say government can do much to create jobs, a finding that’s borne out in other polls.

This is further evidence of the Republicans putting partisan political gain ahead of the good of the country. The GOP hardly has the market on venality cornered. However, they have certainly upped the ante. Sadly, as Sargent explains, the media is complicit with sloppy reporting of the Senate voting the measure down with no mention of GOP blockage.

--Ballard Burgher