Watch: stock indexes
Ambers:
More than 131 House Republucans and 95 House Democrats vote against it.Yeesh, everyone wants political cover....
A rush to cash-in on T-bills...
Dow down nearly 600...
Will Pelosi hold the vote open to get 12 more votes?.
Where Were You When The World Economy Collapsed?CNN:
Where's Tom Delay when you need 'em?
Who gets blamed for the House Republicans? McCain? Obama? No one?
What's the contingency plan?
What can the government do by itself?
Legislation to bail out the U.S. financial system appears near defeat on the floor of the House. More than enough members of the House had cast votes to defeat the bill, and the vote was being held open, apparently as efforts were under way to persuade people to change their vote. The Dow reacted sharply, plummeting more than 700 points.developing storyMcArdle:
I've been watching the debate on CSPAN, and as of now, HR 3997 looks like it's just failed, unless this is some weird procedural vote I don't understand. Nays won 228 to 205, with 1 vote still uncounted. The markets just plunged, with the NASDAQ and the S&P both down more than 6%.FiveThirtyEight:
Democrats voted for it pretty narrowly -- 140 to 95. The Republicans shot it down 65 to 133. I find it hard to believe that they're voting their conscience; they're voting their electoral interest in November. I hope their constituencies enjoy the bank panic.
Actually, what I hope is that I'm wrong, we don't need a bailout, and after a period of liquidation, everything will settle down. If so, I will happily confess my error. But I'm very much afraid that I am not wrong, and things are about to get pretty grim.
Sullivan: "In the end, they were worried about re-election."Among 38 incumbent congressmen in races rated as "toss-up" or "lean" by Swing State Project, just 8 voted for the bailout as opposed to 30 against: a batting average of .211.
By comparison, the vote among congressmen who don't have as much to worry about was essentially even: 197 for, 198 against.
NYT has a great vote chart. If my Rep. had voted no I'd be on the phone right now.
NRO's corner is an interesting read today if you want to understand WTH the neocons are thinking. Politically, two points stand out so far:
- The failure of Republicans to deliver the votes they promised is bad for McCain, who bragged about his supposed success in getting them to vote for it
- Democrats are now likely to say: "Well, we tried to come together" and proceed to pass a leftist version of the bailout on a party line vote
The best case: This is an example of America's democratic institutions reasserting themselves in the face of the attempt by a panicked technocratic elite to prop up reckless institutions that richly deserve to fail.That last line is the first sign of good news for the future that I've come across. Could it be so?
The worst case: You know what.
The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm without 1930s-style suffering; the Republican Party is not so fortunate. Even though most Americans claim to oppose the bailout [update: not anymore], the House GOP's obstructionism is widely viewed as having worsened the economic situation; the fact that these are contradictory positions does not faze an electorate that wraps all of the country's current troubles up, ties them with a bow, and lays them at the feet of the Bush-led GOP. John McCain loses by a landslide in November. The Democratic Party regains years or even decades worth of ground among the white working class, consolidates the Hispanic vote, and locks up a large chunk of highly-educated voters who might otherwise lean conservative. The much-discussed liberal realignment happens. And a politician running on a Ron Paul-style economic platform does very, very well in the GOP primaries of 2012.
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