One is good, the other is bad.
President Bush, obviously heartened by all the “principled” successes of his White House career thus far, is getting a little veto-happy in his last summer as president. Maybe he resents all those GOP congressmen who have distanced themselves from him in this election year, but after spending six years as the president who didn’t even know what the word “Veto” meant, constantly signing anything the Republican congress sent him, he now is threatening to veto anything he hears about.
Two examples, relatively bipartisan, couldn’t be further apart in terms of reason.
One is a recently passed mortgage crisis relief bill for families in jeopardy of losing their homes. This is right. After bailing out Bear Stearns, the sinking investment bank whose practices played a big role in creating the housing market crisis, it only makes sense to try to help the homeowners they swindled. A shrewd President Bush has smugly called the bill “a bailout,” which it is. It’s almost the exact same sort of bailout that Bear Stearns got.
The other is a ludicrous bill to increase the subsidies being doled out to farmers, who are currently making record profits and reaping all the rewards of a world food crisis. This $300 Billion bill would do some very good things. It’s designed to expand the role of American farmers in producing clean energy solutions — from the terrible idea of increasing Ethanol production, to the fabulous idea of tax breaks for opening wind farms and solar fields on their land.
Bush will veto both, and we’ll have to wait until January to get both of them passed. As usual, they will cancel each other out; and, as usual, Bush got one right and one wrong — completely, by my estimate, by accident.
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