Leaders? NOT!

The leaders of Congress recently went before the cameras and the microphones to declare they had a deal that would result in legislation that would stabilize the situation in the country's credit markets. But, something went wrong. Today the House rejected the deal. It is hard for me to understand why the leadership would bring the deal to the floor of either house if it did not have the votes for passage. Still that is what happened. So, talk this afternoon is that House Speaker Pelosi, who once supported the deal, changed her mind and torpedoed the deal with a speech chocked full of partisanship. Given what happened, this seems credible to me. After all, I'm going to assume that the House Speaker can count votes, especially when the majority of the votes in the House profess to be in her own political party.

At the end of the day, what happens next? The end of today's story is that the members of Congress headed home. Granted they headed home because of a religious holiday. But, the choice to run home seems irresponsible to me. After all, because the leaders said they had a deal that would stabilize our credits markets, when in fact they did not have such a deal, large numbers of people panicked this afternoon and sold off significant value in equities. People took a big hit because of what seems like the incompetence of our leaders. And, on top of that, our leaders show they are also irresponsible, and probably full of arrogance, because until Congress acts to stabilize the credit markets (something they purport to want to do) people are likely to continue to get nervous and even panic and take hits for bad policy choices years ago by people just like those (in some case exactly the same people)who ran home this afternoon.

If "change" is the password of the day in presidential politics, maybe it is time to see that the change that is needed is for us to elect true leaders to replace those in Congress who have failed this day. Oh, and by the way, 3 of the 4 leaders on the presidential tickets are currently members of Congress, and those 3 have each had opportunities in the past to change the legislation that led to this current credit crisis.