-RSC press release
On Wednesday, the day before the hearing, the Republican Study Committee, which claims as members 117 of the 178 of the most partisan Republicans in the House — including Barton Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, and Virginia’s Rep. Eric Cantor, who will likely become majority leader if Republicans win control of the House in November, as well as Barton — issued a press release in which they smeared the Obama administration by inferring that the Obama White House is un-American and referring to the BP Gulf victims’ fund as a “Chicago-style shakedown”:
“[In] an administration that appears not to respect fundamental American principles, it is important to note that there is no legal authority for the President to compel a private company to set up or contribute to an escrow account… BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics.
In Rep. Barton’s apology to BP, he used language from the RSC press release. “I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday,” Barton said to BP CEO Tony Hayward. “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case, a $20 billion shakedown.”
In its press release, the RSC also claimed that the Obama administration is using the crisis in the Gulf to score political points:
“These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control. It is the same mentality that believes an economic crisis or an environmental disaster is the best opportunity to pursue a failed liberal agenda.”
It’s rich, though par for the course, that the Obama administration is being accused of politicizing a crisis by a group of Republican pols who rubber-stamped George Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, a military crisis created by the Bush administration’s political advisers in order to provide Bush with the political advantage of being a war-time president. Under Bush, these same GOP House members also supported the administration’s deregulation of the financial, energy and other industrial sectors that led to the financial collapse in 2008 and the BP oil disaster in the Gulf this year.
The House Republicans’ extreme partisanship may explain why they and their Senate colleagues are the least popular politicians in the capitol, according to a Fox News poll last month that found that while 36 percent of Americans (including 70 percent of Democrats) approve of congressional Democrats job performance, 31 percent of Americans (and just 52 percent of Republicans) approve of the job performance by the GOP in Congress. The president had a 53 percent approval rate overall, with a 91 percent approval among Democrats, in the Fox poll.
A CNN poll released on Thursday, the same day that Rep. Barton apologized to BP, found that 82 percent of Americans approve of the $20 billion fund for victims of the Gulf disaster.
