Arizona's First Political Blog

E-mail Anonymous Mike at zonitics4-at-yahoo.com

By Anonymous Mike, pseudonymously.

 
The Pastor Canary

I noticed yesterday that the entire Arizona delegation voted against the bailout package; after thinking about why, it does make some sense.

On the Republican side you have Flake who has pretty solid libertarian cred, he's not going in on this one. Sort of the same with Shaddeg plus he has a pesky race for his seat. Not too surprised by Renzi or Franks, but then again I hadn't followed their positions too closely.

Mitchell and Giffords are first-term reps up for re-election with the former in a majority Republican district and the latter in an area that was Republican for a long time. Grijalva wasn't surprising at all as he comes from the progressive wing... sort of like Flake, a safe seat but this thing wasn't going to go on ideological grounds.

So that leaves Pastor. Yeah, yeah he's a founding member of the Progressive caucus, but he's more of pork barrel-type of guy than a red-hot ideologue like Grijalva. He's also been in he House for 17 years and probably has the safest seat next to Flake's in Arizona.

He's also one of the 9 chief deputy whips for the Democrats.

So not only did the Democrats not whip the caucus for the bail-out vote, it appears they even didn't get their own chief deputy whips. While the rest of the national media goes on a beat-down on the House Republicans over the bill's failure, somebody should look into this one.
posted by Anonymous Mike at 8:17 AM