| Just how insane are those governors who want to refuse the unemployment benefits part of the stimulus package?
I think I've found an historical measuring stick for the crazy they feel.
Former New Hampshire Governor, and later Senator, Styles Bridges, is famous, or infamous, rather, for a few things.
Such as his staunch support for Joseph McCarthy. And his friendship with J. Edgar Hoover, whom he used to spy on his political enemies. And then there's the time he blackmailed Senator Lester Hunt (D-WY) into dropping out of his reelection race, or else face his son being prosecuted for the misdemeanor of soliciting sex from a male undercover cop. (Hunt refused. Bridges went forward and outed the boy. The Senator from Wyoming later shot and killed himself in his office.)
But let's leave all that aside. In terms of policy, Styles Bridges is perhaps best known for being one of the loudest Republican voices against the New Deal, particularly regarding what he felt was FDR's bias toward labor unions. As is noted (transcription, and any errors, mine) in James Kiepper's Styles Bridges: Yankee Senator, He complained, "We have expended nationally billions and billions of dollars...and we have made no progress at all...Our present heavy relief expenditures will be with us for many years to come. Don't let anyone tell you differently."
Roosevelt's 1932 election had been a "ghastly mistake," declared Bridges, which submerged "most of the states in the union beneath a flood of Democratic debt, doubt, and delay." You'd think this guy would be the mythy archetype for the Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber set, fitting right in with the modern GOP's Party of No "strategy".
Well, guess what? Style Bridges, the Anti-FDR, was nonetheless one of the strongest supporters of unemployment relief around at the time. From the book (p.249): Unemployment insurance is not a cure-all, but it is the single greatest constructive step from the staggering burden of relief. Moreover, in 1935 then Governor Bridges asked the FDR Administration for an additional $20 million in "direct relief" from the Emergency Relief Administration, driven, in part, by the collapse of the textile industry in New England.
So when Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry and whoever else from this parade of charlatan public servants get on their political hobby horse and proudly declare that they will keep money out of the least fortunate of their citizens' hands, remember Styles Bridges.
Bridges, a man remarkable for the stridency of his conservatism and the ferocity of his partisanship, who nonetheless was human enough to understand the basic morality of accepting money that's been offered for the jobless during a severe economic crisis. |
