Did Nancy Pelosi's Speech Blow Up the Bailout Bill?

House Speaker Makes Partisan Speech During Debate

Did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blow up the financial bailout bill by making a hyper partisan speech on the House floor in the middle of the debate? There are enough Republicans lining up in front of the microphones who are willing to say so.

The British Newspaper Guardian excerpted some portions of the five minute floor speech by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A short reading of the excerpts and a listen to the Youtube video would seem to suggest that Nancy Pelosi was not speaking in the spirit of bipartisanship.

"When was the last time someone asked you for $700 billion?" Pelosi asked, rolling every syllable of the phrase "$700 billion" as if it were candy. "It is a number that is staggering, but tells us only the costs of the Bush administration's failed economic policies - policies built on budgetary recklessness, on an anything-goes mentality, with no regulation, no supervision, and no discipline in the system." Calling Republicans "unpatriotic" the previous day likely didn't help either.

Those are hardly the words of a politician who was serious about passing an important and controversial bailout bill on a bipartisan vote. Those words must have been especially galling to Republican ears, considering the fact of Democratic complicity in the liquidity crisis. Not only did the crisis have its origin in the Carter era Community Reinvestment Act as revised during the Clinton era, but Democrats resisted efforts to head off the crisis before it exploded. Democrats were saying four years ago that there was nothing wrong with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mack.

Why did Speaker Nancy Pelosi do what she did? Possibly she had concluded that the bailout bill was going to fail anyway and decided that there was no downside to unloading. Possibly she thought she had no Democratic votes than she did (in which case she needs to have some harsh words with the House Democrat whip organization.) Possibly-like too many politicians-she is too much in love with the sound of her own voice and could not help herself.