/joke
Fuck him then, I say. This little drama turns out to be some partisan Republican conservative attempt to throw egg on the President's face, which the public -- in both their solid support of both Obama and the stimulus package -- can see right through.
Gregg sought out the position. He knew the policies. He said he could accept and support them. He publicly supported the stimulus package (even though he abstained from the vote).
Last week Gregg stood by Obama's side to accept the nomination as commerce secretary and declared that partisanship should not get in the way of repairing the country's economy:
"This is not a time for partisanship. This is not a time when we should stand in our ideological corners and shout at each other," Gregg said on Feb. 3. "This is a time to govern and govern well. And therefore, when the President asked me to join his administration and participate in trying to address the issues of this time, I believed it was my obligation to say yes, and I look forward to it with enthusiasm."
He even made a deal that his replacement in the Senate would be a Republican.
And now he's saying it had become apparent to him he couldn't do something that he had already agreed to do and in fact had done publicly.
The White House source in the CNN article is right that Gregg was erratic. But in another sense, Gregg is being consistent. He's always been a right-wing Republican, and like all Republicans aligned with the most conservative faction of their party, that allegiance is more powerful than their duty to country, indeed their oath of office.
Given the choice of serving his country during one of the worst economic crises in the past hundred years, Judd Gregg would rather obstruct.
Just like John Cornyn.
Every Republican member of the House of Representatives voted against the stimulus. All but three Republicans in the Senate voted against it. The public supports the stimulus package. But the Republicans don't listen to the public, except for that small minority that makes up the extremist Republican base. The Limbaugh Listening Caucus.
When called to serve his country, Judd Gregg flinched, revealing himself too beholden to the views of a Republican party controlled by bitter, vindictive zealots.
Bi-partisanship only works when both parties put the national interest first. All but a few of the Republicans in Congress put their party before the good of the nation. Judd Gregg's refusal to serve in the Obama cabinet demonstrates once again that the Republicans would rather obstruct progress than contribute to the welfare of the United States of America.
Why do Judd Gregg and the GOP hate America?
