Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders by Eric Cantor;Paul Ryan;Kevin McCarthy
Authors: Eric Cantor;Paul Ryan;Kevin McCarthy
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stimulus vote. For one thing, the majority Democrats were determined to make us pay a price for our opposition to the bill. Chris Van Hollen, the head of the Democrat Campaign Committee, had warned us that opposition to thestimulus bill would be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ 2010 attack ads. And sure enough, once the bill passed, the Left embarked upon a very organized, sophisticated campaign attacking Republican opposition to their agenda.
One House colleague told me about going home to her district, only to wake up in the morning to see an ad on television attacking her. Then she opened the paper and went online and read the streams of vitriol financed by the Left. Getting in her car, she turned on the radio, hearing ads portraying her as someone she didn’t recognize. And when she returned home at night she got more of the same through the mail and robo calls.
But the real reason we weren’t patting ourselves on the back was that Americans were still out of work. Despite the Obama administration’s promise that unemployment wouldn’t reach over 8 percent if the stimulus passed, unemployment surged to over 10 percent as the year went on. Americans were hurting and all we had accomplished was to go $787 billion deeper in debt. Just three and a half months after it became law, the vice president bizarrely took to the microphone and announced that when it came to taxpayer’s stimulus dollars, “There are going to be mistakes made, some people are being scammed already.” And sadly that pattern hasn’t changed. This wasn’t the type of change most Americans expected—nor deserved.
House Republicans had always known that our belief in free people and free markets was the route to economic recovery. After the stimulus vote we had new confidence inour ability—and our credibility with the American people—to translate our beliefs into solutions. We just needed the votes to get it done.
The massive stimulus bill was just the opening round in a high spending, big government agenda, that over the course of the last year and a half that has put at risk what I consider to be the essence of the American Dream: leaving my children and grandchildren a better country and the opportunity for a better life than what I inherited. As Paul will detail later, America is approaching a point of no return in which, if we don’t change our ways, each year we will pile more debt on future generations than the year before. The policies of the past year and a half didn’t create this cascading cycle of spending and debt, but they have dangerously accelerated it.
After the stimulus vote, nothing concrete had changed in Washington. The liberal lifers were still in control of Congress. President Obama was still popular. But something important had changed for my conservative colleagues and me: our ability to stand together on the stimulus vote had strengthened our resolve. We went on to stand unanimously against the president’s big spending budget. We sent a strong message that there is a better way to becomeenergy independent by maintaining strong opposition to the cap-and-trade bill. We had a new confidence. We were moving from playing defense to playing offense. We knew that the model we had followed with the stimulus bill—working hard to present our own commonsense solutions to contrast with the majority’s big government proposals—was the best way forward.
A good example is the housing crisis. Soon after the stimulus bill, the Obama administration rolled out a housing plan that sought to alleviate the mortgage crisis by throwing enormous sums of good taxpayer money at people who had engaged in irresponsible and even fraudulent behavior to get a mortgage, but now weren’t paying their bills.
From the outset of the housing crisis, Washington Democrats had done all they could to direct the public’s anger away from one of the prime culprits in the crisis: the liberal special interest slush funds otherwise known as
One House colleague told me about going home to her district, only to wake up in the morning to see an ad on television attacking her. Then she opened the paper and went online and read the streams of vitriol financed by the Left. Getting in her car, she turned on the radio, hearing ads portraying her as someone she didn’t recognize. And when she returned home at night she got more of the same through the mail and robo calls.
But the real reason we weren’t patting ourselves on the back was that Americans were still out of work. Despite the Obama administration’s promise that unemployment wouldn’t reach over 8 percent if the stimulus passed, unemployment surged to over 10 percent as the year went on. Americans were hurting and all we had accomplished was to go $787 billion deeper in debt. Just three and a half months after it became law, the vice president bizarrely took to the microphone and announced that when it came to taxpayer’s stimulus dollars, “There are going to be mistakes made, some people are being scammed already.” And sadly that pattern hasn’t changed. This wasn’t the type of change most Americans expected—nor deserved.
House Republicans had always known that our belief in free people and free markets was the route to economic recovery. After the stimulus vote we had new confidence inour ability—and our credibility with the American people—to translate our beliefs into solutions. We just needed the votes to get it done.
The massive stimulus bill was just the opening round in a high spending, big government agenda, that over the course of the last year and a half that has put at risk what I consider to be the essence of the American Dream: leaving my children and grandchildren a better country and the opportunity for a better life than what I inherited. As Paul will detail later, America is approaching a point of no return in which, if we don’t change our ways, each year we will pile more debt on future generations than the year before. The policies of the past year and a half didn’t create this cascading cycle of spending and debt, but they have dangerously accelerated it.
After the stimulus vote, nothing concrete had changed in Washington. The liberal lifers were still in control of Congress. President Obama was still popular. But something important had changed for my conservative colleagues and me: our ability to stand together on the stimulus vote had strengthened our resolve. We went on to stand unanimously against the president’s big spending budget. We sent a strong message that there is a better way to becomeenergy independent by maintaining strong opposition to the cap-and-trade bill. We had a new confidence. We were moving from playing defense to playing offense. We knew that the model we had followed with the stimulus bill—working hard to present our own commonsense solutions to contrast with the majority’s big government proposals—was the best way forward.
A good example is the housing crisis. Soon after the stimulus bill, the Obama administration rolled out a housing plan that sought to alleviate the mortgage crisis by throwing enormous sums of good taxpayer money at people who had engaged in irresponsible and even fraudulent behavior to get a mortgage, but now weren’t paying their bills.
From the outset of the housing crisis, Washington Democrats had done all they could to direct the public’s anger away from one of the prime culprits in the crisis: the liberal special interest slush funds otherwise known as
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