GOP Lemmings

Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post looks at the mentality - or one might say lack of thought process - of the Senate Republicans who seem hell bent to hasten the demise of the Big Three automakers and the demise of the larger U.S. economy as well. Their motivation? Revenge on the pro-Democrat United Auto Workers' union and helping the foreign owned automakers with plants in their own home states. I'm not necessarily a fan of the UAW, but at some point one needs to put down the Kool-Aid and look at the larger picture of what's going on. True, that's hard for the today's GOP - remember John McCain stating that the economy was fundamentally sound even as the bottom was falling out on Wall Street. The GOP has run the economy into the ground and wildly expanded the national debt , but the Senate Republicans apparently do not believe they have yet wrought sufficient financial destruction. Here are some column highlights:

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Despite the popular belief, lemmings don't really hurl themselves off cliffs to reduce their numbers. That sort of behavior is seen only among Republicans in the Senate, who gave us a demonstration when they torpedoed legislation to bail out the auto industry.

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It may be that General Motors, Chrysler and Ford are lumbering, Jurassic beasts that deserve their looming extinction. But only a free-market fundamentalist, a lunatic or a Senate Republican -- perhaps that's redundant -- would conclude that now is the moment to hasten Detroit's demise.

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To recap: We're in the midst of a global financial crisis. The housing bubble has burst and prices have collapsed. The economy has been in recession for a year. Unemployment has risen to 6.7 percent, and if "marginally attached" workers are included -- those who have given up even looking for jobs -- along with those who want to work full time but are forced to accept fewer hours, the rate is 12.5 percent.

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[I]t would be insanity to throw hundreds of thousands of auto company employees, and maybe a few million others in the supply and sales chains, out of work -- leaving them and their families at the mercy of an economy that has no replacement jobs for them. Public funds would end up supporting these people anyway, except that we would have lost our domestic auto industry -- which, despite its many failings, is the only domestic auto industry we've got.

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Some of the most vocal critics of a Detroit bailout -- Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), for example -- happen to have foreign-owned auto plants in their home states. This has led to accusations that they are deliberately trying to sabotage the Big Three to help foreign automakers, but I think it's more likely that they're just being doctrinaire and ultimately self-defeating.

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They have managed to position their party as being against unions, against America's domestic industrial patrimony, against the blue-collar working class -- and also, incredibly, against the Rust Belt states, such as Michigan and Ohio, that are home to UAW-represented auto plants and that also regularly tip the balance of presidential elections.