I knew when we elected Scott Brown to the US Senate we were not going to get a rubber stamp for the Republicans. I harbored no illusions that the man from my very liberal home state of Massachusetts was going to be hard core conservative. It was my assumption that he would stay fiscally conservative and keep himself pretty moderate when it came to the social issues of the day. That was fine for me because he gave me the confidence to think that he was going to listen to the people of his home state when it came down to the tough choices, and not buckle to the Washington Machine.
It seems though that Senator Scoot Brown is back peddling a bit his principles. The chair that Mr. Brown currently occupies seems to be less the peoples and more, well his own. It started when he voted for the Jobs Bill shortly after he was elected into office. I could give him a pass for that, but that bill does seem to be doing much of anything for all of the taxpayer money it cost.
Today Senator Brown announced that he will be supporting the financial reform bill known as Dodd-Frank. Yes, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank are the ones who has a massive role in creating this mess now want to right the law that fixes it. Scott Brown supports it because they eliminated the tax increases to pay for it.
"I decided that while the bill was far from perfect", he writes in his Facebook post, but it is a "vast improvement". In other words the bill still sucks, but I'm going to vote for it anyway because I don't have spine and I want to try and keep my liberal voters happy in my liberal run bankrupt home state of Massachusetts.
While it is true Senator Brown that the tax increase is gone, Senator Brown it is still being paid for with tax payer money. All the Senate has done is take the left over money from TARP that they weren't going to spend anyway and moved it over to pay for this bill. TARP money from bailout number 2 (I think).
Secondly there is tax on banks in this bill. A tax on banks is a fee increase for the banks customers. After all they aren't just going to swallow that cost on their own. So we switch tax increase to extra bank fees. The difference is?
I had a boss once who had two budgets. One budget was for the permanent department, and the second was for the expanded version of the department to cover the costs of needing extra staff. The project ended years early, so he took that money and used it to create a new position on the permanent side. He was caught and promptly fired.
Good luck with your reelection Scott Brown