Credit to Democrats despite Republican hypocrisy

A productive Congress gets no respect from voters

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The public panned it. Republicans obstructed it. Many Democrats fled from it. Even so, the session of Congress now drawing to a close was the most productive in nearly half a century.

Not since the explosive years of the civil rights movement and the hard-fought debut of government-supported health care for the elderly and poor have so many big things — love them or hate them — been done so quickly.

Gridlock? It may feel that way. But that's not the story of the 111th Congress — not the story history will remember.

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In terms of legislative successes, the current session of Congress is "at least on a par with the 89th Congress" of 1965-1966, said Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Stimulating Hypocrisy: Scores of Recovery Act Opponents Sought Money Out of Public View

By John Solomon and Aaron Mehta

Rep. Pete Sessions, the firebrand conservative from Dallas, Texas, has relentlessly assailed the Democratic-passed stimulus law as a wasteful "trillion dollar spending spree" that was "more about stimulating the government and rewarding political allies than growing the economy and creating jobs."

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Scores of Republicans and conservative Democrats who voted against the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act subsequently wrote letters requesting funds for projects in a massive, behind-the-scenes letter-writing and phone call campaign, documents obtained by the Center show.

Those asking for money include Tea Party favorites like freshman Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., former presidential candidates Ron Paul and John McCain and Republican congressional leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana.

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Sen. Scott Brown’s first press conference after being sworn in.Brown, the Massachusetts Republican upstart who shocked the political world earlier this year when he captured the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy for half a century, said shortly after his swearing in that the stimulus “didn’t create one new job.”

That didn’t stop him from writing a letter less than two months later in support of the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI). In the letter, Brown writes that proposed stimulus projects like MBI’s will “help prepare our next generation of entrepreneurs and job creators.”

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