Progress Illinois

When President Obama stopped by the Catepillar plant in Peoria last week, he urged freshman GOP Rep. Aaron Schock to buck his party’s leaders and support the stimulus bill. Like every other Republican in the House, Schock ultimately voted against the measure. And his main justification is completely divorced from reality. Listen to his explanation yesterday on WLS’ Don Wade and Roma:

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ROMA: Let me ask this question. How many pages are in that final stimulus package?

SCHOCK: It’s over 1,000 pages.

ROMA: Over 1,000 pages. Would you even dream of signing a contract which you knew was highly controversial with a mind-boggling price tag—$787 billion—without ever reading the contract?

SCHOCK: Absolutely not. This was the biggest spending bill in our nation’s history. And not only would I not sign it without reading it, but no honest American or no honest congressman would sign it either.”

The last phrase is patently absurd. According to his logic, all 246 Democrats in the House and 60 Senators who voted for the bill are not “honest Americans.” I can’t imagine he actually believes that. Then again, he has been prone to these kinds of careless generalizations in the past.

But let’s focus on his first point. Does the length of the bill reflect its value in any way? Stan Collender, critiquing a similar argument made by Foreign Times blogger Clive Crook, says not in the slightest:

But citing the number of pages as a reason to think legislation is bad is ridiculous. That’s on a par with football commentators talking about the number of minutes one team has had the ball compared to the other or the greater number of plays one team has run.

Exactly right. In fact, every member of Congress relies on aides and committees to summarize the package and critique the broad outline of most bills along with any particular issues specifically important to their constituents. In this instance, the question would be whether targeted and temporary spending can spur the economy, not where each individual dollar of the project is headed. And as Matt Yglesias points out, “unless you just want to create a huge slush fund, bills that authorize the expenditure of money for diverse purposes need to be very long.” Of course, the basics of the stimulus bill were drawn up and dissected weeks ahead of the vote. If Schock was paying attention at all to the negotiations, he would have known what was being included and what wasn’t.

More to the point, a short bill ensures nothing. Hank Paulson’s original TARP plan was three pages long. It was also one of the worst written bills of 2008.

Schock’s line of argument is slick, but it makes about as much sense as the Republican-favored stimulus proposal -- which is to say, none at all.  Spending is stimulus and it’s what the economy needs.