WP: "The Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders debate over the auto bailout, explained"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/07/the-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-debate-over-the-auto-bailout-explained...
So it seems like she's willing to take the gamble that fact checkers may call her out for her tactic Sunday -- but that voters won't.
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{Bush} hoped Congress would approve a separate bailout for GM and Chrysler. Democrats in Congress tried to, but in December 2008, Senate Republicans blocked a $14 billion plan over a disagreement about its terms.
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Clinton and Sanders were both in the Senate at the time, and contrary to what Clinton implied Sunday, both supported the idea of an auto bailout.
Sanders argued that letting the auto industry go under was too big of a risk for middle-class workers...But Sanders was vehemently against the larger $700 billion bailout to prop up the banks. (As evidenced by his presidential campaign, Sanders is no fan of Wall Street.) So he voted against the bank bailout.
The bank bailout was so big it had to be doled out in portions. In January 2009, Senate Republicans tried to block the Treasury Department from releasing the second half of the money, some of which was designated for the auto industry. Sanders, based on his opposition to the Wall Street bailout, voted against releasing that money as well.
That vote gave Clinton the opening she needed to hit Sanders as anti-auto bailout on Sunday.
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Clinton is technically correct that Sanders voted against releasing the money that went to the auto bailout, but Sanders can also correctly argue that he supported the auto bailout when it wasn't tied to the Wall Street one.
And you just know that, if he had voted the other way, Clinton would be taking him to task as a hypocrite, saying he had voted for the Wall Street bailout.
= new reply since forum marked as read
2008 was a period where there were NO good answers or silutions.
It was a perfect storm. Among otehr problems, the economy (including access to credit, etc.) had become too concentrated and at the mercy of too few financial monoliths. And a climate where chicanery had become standard operating procedure.
The auto industry was affected by that....as well as otehr problems of its own making.
Bernie supported the auto bailout, and he wanted to handle thata on its own terms. But he also -- based on years of opposing that larger reshaping of the economy -- believed it was more important to tend to the systemic problems of the larger economy.
One can disagree with that, but it should not be misrepresented as being "opposed" to the auto bailout.
Again:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081217043510/http://www.sanders.senate.gov/news/record.cfm?id=303313
Essentially, he was willing to go along with the Wall Street bailout (estimated at the time to possibly cost as much as $1 trillion), but with additional conditions, which had to do with how to pay for it (that it be partially paid for by increased taxes on the wealthy, which would raise $300 billion), and that, if it worked, the average taxpayer would see some of the benefit ("equity stakes"
, and that it be accompanied by fixing the systemic problems that led to the crisis (undo some of the deregulation, break up companies that are too big to fail).
Trust Buster????
re: "If Sanders had his way, the money would never have made it to Detroit."
Not true. As I said above, Congress was not just going to throw its hands up and walk away.
There were two possibilities. Possibility one, which happened, was that the bill passed. Possibility 2, if Sanders had gotten his way and prevented it, he would have had the opportunity to make it better. (For example he tried to get an amendment to the bill passed that would have partially funded the Wall Street bailout by a temporary surtax on incomes over a million dollars, so middle class taxpayers wouldn't be completely on the hook if things went south.) Either way, the auto industry gets bailed out.
There were enough votes and enough consensus to be assured that nobody was going to simply walk away on this. Sanders' vote addresses the fact that he saw $14 billion of "good" spending and the rest of the $700 billion as problematic, which, despite virtually every major bill having a mix of good and bad, is a pretty bad cost-to-benefit ratio overall, which he wanted to try to fix. And there had been discussions of other ways to address the Wall Street bailout, as discussed in post 46. But there was going to be an auto bailout, one way or the other.
re: accepting nuance in a vote...
As I posted in another thread:
Yes, Sanders voted for the crime bill, but you can see video of his floor speeches at the time where he praised what he liked about it (i.e. Violence Against Women Act), but also video where he complained about what he didn't like about it (as the debate questioner quoted back to him, "Back in 1994, here's what you warned, we are dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of bitterness, mystery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence"
. Meanwhile, Clinton's floor speeches of the time talked about super predators who must be brought to heel. So it is much harder for her to make the case that she didn't support the more onerous parts of the bill.
Similarly, you can read/view what Sanders said at the time, and see clearly that Sanders supported the auto bailout, but not the wall street bailout. AFAIK, Hillary never spoke against the Wall Street bailout, which would have made her vote an easier win-win from her perspective.
Meanwhile, in a previous debate, Hillary took Bernie to task for voting for the deregulation of derivates, which was part of an omnibus bill, and where the Bill Clinton administration had taken an active part in adding that deregulation to that bill.
Most bills have a balance of good and bad that have to be weighed. Sometimes we'll like the choices they made, other times we may not. But I don't see a difference in what latitude is being granted to different candidates, beyond the situations where one can more easily document what their exact positions were.
Picking up from that, Hillary has claimed that her IWR vote was merely to give Bush more leverage, and he misused the power she had voted for. But again, look at the videos of her speaking at the time, and it is hard to read her vote that way, that definitely comes off as revisionist history. She is hardly pleading for restraint when casting that vote.
But maybe I'm forgetting something. Can you point to some other time, when Hillary's vote was being explained by nuance, and Sanders (and his supporters) did not accept it, and there was no empirical reason to doubt it?