Did the Republicans Really Block Obama from Fixing the Economy?

September 7th, 2012 by Jeremy Knauff

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Now that President Obama’s first (and hopefully last) term is finally careening to its long-awaited end, many American’s are starting to look back over the last four years to see what he’s accomplished, and it’s a pretty bleak picture.

No one, including Obama, can really say they’re happy with his performance, but is he to blame? Most Republicans say that Obama had misplaced priorities, while Democrats adamantly claim that Republicans blocked him from enacting the legislation needed to fix our economy.

We all know that these days, partisan politics has turned Congress into something just short of a cage fight, but did the Republicans really block Obama from fixing the economy?

It’s true that the Republicans broke the filibuster record early in Obama’s Presidency, but the fact is they simply didn’t have enough votes to block anything, so no, they didn’t block him from fixing the economy.

In fact, during Obama’s first two years in office, the Democrats held the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives, along with appointing two Supreme Court Justices. That’s a level of power that few American presidents have had the opportunity to wield. What did he do with that massive power? He used it to ram the massively unpopular Health Care Bill down our throats. He used it to funnel taxpayer dollars to his campaign donors at “green energy” companies, most of which closed their doors almost immediately after receiving the money. He used it to push his so-called stimulus plan to create “shovel-ready jobs,” but later joked that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” He used it to advance pretty much every much every liberal wet dream known to man, but he sure as hell didn’t use it to fix the economy.

The Republicans did not block Obama from fixing the economy; he simply wasn’t interested in fixing it.

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