Community Commentary:

There is nothing like a national crisis to bring out the hypocrisy of many in the Grand Old Party, and leading the charge is Rep. David Dreier. In lock step with the other 175 Republican sheep in the House, he unapologetically voted against the stimulus package, a program which is predicted to create or save 3 million to 4 million jobs. Its passage will allow many Californians to remain employed and able to pay their mortgages.

His Feb. 20 puff piece in the Glendale News-Press (“Responsible homeowners shouldn’t be punished,” Pol Position) is testament to the fact that Dreier is yet to make the connection. Those “responsible” home owners Dreier claims to want to protect are losing their homes because they have lost their jobs.

Dreier’s attitude is a remnant of the old Washington partisan politics that President Barack Obama is attempting to change. Unable to break ranks and oblivious to the message the American people sent in November, he is staking his political survival on the desperate hope that the administration’s plan will not work. He is, by his actions and those of his Republican peers, risking the economic survival of the country for some misguided sense of partisan gain.

Representing a district in a state with a 9.3% unemployment rate and a $42-billion budget deficit, he was unable to find any redeeming value in the stimulus package. Having gone along for most of the last eight years with President George W. Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress, who turned a budget surplus into a trillion-dollar deficit, our man in Washington has suddenly had an attack of fiscal responsibility.

Dreier is typical of those free-market, deregulation advocates who yearn for a failed presidency and spout the Limbaugh-Hannity line that Franklin Roosevelt’s federal spending program did not bring the country out of the Depression. Those who lived through the 1930s will tell you that Roosevelt’s “reckless” Keynesian spending avoided a revolution, provided many a job, fed many a child and yielded a degree of dignity and hope for vast numbers of desperate families.