After voting against one of the largest tax cuts in history, GOPers celebrate their political irrelevance

I'm starting to think Republicans must come from the Bizarro world in the Superman comics given all the celebrations going on.

Quick, name me three legislative achievements of the last four years of the Bush Administration.  Now name me three of the Obama Administration in the past three months.  I honestly couldn't think of one for the first question.  On the second, SCHIP, Fair Pay Act, and the stimulus package.

And that's the news to the least reported story in Washington.  The entire GOP strategy on the stimulus package was a reverse triangulation one where the GOP praised Obama while blaming the Democrats in Congress.  That's the way, they thought, to avoid being hit from Obama's sky-high approval ratings.  While it's true that Congressional approval ratings are still very low (below 50%), the Republicans should take notice of two trends.  Congressional approval ratings over the past month have been going up, and Americans largely approve of Congressional Democrats far more than Congressional Republicans-- who have seen their approval rating dropping on the # 1 issue to Americans of stimulating the economy.    In fact, only Congressional Republicans got a net negative approval rating.  Even among the most "hostile" poll for the stimulus package-- Rasmussen Reports-- showed that support for the stimulus package jumped seven points last week as it neared passage.  Fox News, the only polling outfit that has polled enough during the current Congress to show a trend, showed the Congressional approval rating jumping a staggering seventeen points in a matter of a few weeks last month

Only one poll that is giving the Republicans any hope is the same outfit time and time again- Rasmussen.  Except that Rasmussen also finds that more voters believe that the GOP opposition to the stimulus plan (43%) is purely partisan politics than not.  Also, a majority of Americans believe that the Obama Administration had made sufficient effort to try and win bipartisan support from Republicans for his stimulus plan.

The Senate plan was different from the House.  The Conference contained even more concessions to Republican demands.  And yet not a single GOPer budged from their initial vote.  While the chattering classes praise the Republican solidarity, one has to wonder why saying "No" when you know you're politically irrelevant is a hard thing to achieve.  And what did that unified opposition get them?  Nothing.  They flexed their political muscle with all their might, and Obama got a stimulus plan that was largely what he had proposed in the first place. 

The Republicans, in the process, exposed their complete ignorance of American political history in the 1930s.  Whether it was the War on FDR, or Eric Cantor's naive believe that Winston Churchill lead his party from minority to majority status during the Great Depression (even though the conservatives were already in the majority in the late 1930s during the Great Depression).

Perhaps the Republicans, as Tim Russo believes, sees repeating the rites of 1992 as a means to summons another 1994.  But there is absolutely nothing to believe that the GOP's unified opposition to Clinton's first budget had much, if anything, to do with the 1994 Republican "revolution" instead of health care and the fact that frustration with what appeared to be a permanent national Democratic majority that had existed for forty years was reaching a boiling point.  After all, most Americans credit the fiscal conservativism that first budget started as a crowning achievement of the Clinton Administration.  None of the boogeyman scenerios the Republicans predicted came true.

Perhaps the Republilcans should dust off those Great Depression political history books.  If they did, they'd learn what Frank Rich observed recently:

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

It's been said that the Republicans opposed the stimulus bill as a bet on failure.  Problem for them is, that the Republicans have been betting on America to fail before and lost.

Come next November, every Democratic challenger is going to run an ad attacking the Republican for voting for higher taxes... nearly $280 billion in higher taxes... because that's how much tax cuts were in the bill the GOPers voted against.  "My opponent," every Democratic challenger will honestly say, "voted against new construction jobs here at home, new schools, keeping police patrolling our neighborhoods, health care for our children, and equal pay for women."

And that's just the material we've gotten in the first month.