CBNNews.com -- Since the failed $700B bailout plan was scrubbed in the House, legislators have been busy working on a new measure to ease the country's economic woes.
CBN News spoke with Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who voted against the bill.
Click play to hear his thoughts on why it didn't pass or read the transcription below
Mazyck: I want to ask you about the vote yesterday and how that all happened. Obviously it was a very tough decision, I would imagine, for you to make.
Barton: It was. It's not often you have vote that potentially impacts the entire world economy like the vote yesterday. But in terms of deciding what to do, it was pretty easy because the bill that was up was up was not a very good bill. It didn't have a way to pay for it. It didn't have a lot of accountability.
It gave the treasury secretary too much authority that was not properly overseen. It would have raised the national debt a trillion-and-a-half dollars, which is just unconscionable. So the substance of the bill was easy to vote against.
Mazyck: How do you all proceed from here?
Barton: I've been on the phone all morning. I've talked to the White House. My basic message is, let's start over with a clean sheet of paper. The Paulson plan is dead, it's sterile. It won't work. It's a bad idea. Let's put together a plan that protects the tax payer, it has a way to pay for it. It solves the direct problem which I think is twofold.
The home mortgage market needs to be solidified and the secondary credit market needs to be solidified. Let's focus on those two areas, put together a targeted plan, do it in a way that doesn't cost the taxpayers and put that package up. It's solvable problem.
Mazyck: What advice do you give to those of us who are kind of in a daze wondering what's going on?
Barton: I would say first of all, this is not a problem that can't be solved. This is not another great depression like the 1920s and 1930s. We have a much stronger economy with a lot more safeguards and a lot more people at work. This is kind of a debt liquidity problem. Too many people borrowed too much money and spent it on things they couldn't afford or didn't make a lot of since.
So stay calm, again, let's put together a targeted plan that's not a $700B giveaway. Put it up in a legislative package that everybody understands. My guess is we can pass it and calm the markets down and restart our economic growth engine here in America.
Mazyck: I have one last question for you. There seems to be a lot of finger pointing. People are blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, people are blaming the Republicans, to me it sounds like there's a larger issue here. This wasn't a piece of solid legislation.
Barton: Well, if you want to cast blame. I'm not somebody who looks back, I'm somebody who looks ahead. You know, there's an old saying in Texas: don't ask somebody where they're coming from. Ask where they're going. We need to get moving. But if you had, you know, Secretary Paulson should not have put that package together over the weekend and presented it to Congress, both Republicans and Democrats on a take it or leave it basis. That's just bad strategy. So you have to blame him some.
Speaker Pelosi is the leader of the Democratic Caucus, but she is also the Speaker of the House and she did not lead in a bi-partisan way. She gave a terrible floor speech in my opinion, way too partisan, and then when they got into difficulties on the vote, she kind of froze up. A
nd then the third thing that she did - Denny Hastert and Newt Gingrich, or for that matter Jim Wright or Tip O'Neal would have never put that vote on the floor knowing how low the vote count was. If you're within four or five votes. You can put something on the floor and they always think, well we can get the undecided, but the whip counts on both the Republican and Democratic side never showed more than 200 votes for that package.
Mazyck: So it was pretty much dead on arrival?
Barton: She should have kept it, the Senate's not going voting on the package, well it's not going to vote on it at all now. The Senate wasn't scheduled to vote on that package until tomorrow. There wasn't any reason we had to put that bill up on the floor yesterday if we didn't have the votes for it. I mean think about this: you had the President of the United States, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the treasury, the Speaker of the House, the Republican leader of the House, the majority leader of the House, the majority leader in the Senate, the minority leader in the Senate all for that bill, and it did not get a majority. When's the last the last time both political parties put their entire leadership on both sides of the aisle in favor of a bill and it didn't pass. It didn't pass.
It didn't pass because it was a bad bill and the poor old House of Representatives rank and file both sides of the aisle, more Republicans that Democrats, but give some of the Democrats credit - for different reasons, said "no, we've had enough."
We're just not going to take it. That shows you that democracy is alive, number one. Number two, if the President and leadership will sieze the moment, we can put together a bill or package that's a lot better for America and the world and move it quickly, but we can't do American politics as usual. Now that's the message I'd give to the American people.
BACK TO MAIN: Will Congress Pass a Bailout Plan?
