Rep. Sen. Voinovich : Republican's are 'playing games' by blocking legislation

And Republican obstructionism has continued to the present day.

http://www.examiner.com/article/sen-voinovich-turns-whistleblower-admits-republican-s-are-playing-games-by-blocking-legislation

September 14, 2010

President Obama has a republican whistle blower in Senator George Voinovich. The Ohio Republican said that Americans didn’t have time for anymore partisan messaging, “This country is really hurting.”

The Voinovich remarks came after his Republican counterparts tried a block a bill that is designed to help small businesses get loans to grow jobs and bolster the sagging economy.

Senator Voinovich said he "refuses to support" the Republican "blockade" any longer."We don't have time to play games any longer."

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The Republican defection to the side of the good of the nation signifies that at least some members of Congress are ready to admit that their vendetta against Barack Obama has gotten out of hand.

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http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/

The Party of No: New Details on the GOP Plot to Obstruct Obama
By Michael Grunwald Aug. 23, 2012

TIME just published “The Party of No,” an article adapted from my new book, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era. It reveals some of my reporting on the Republican plot to obstruct President Obama before he even took office, including secret meetings led by House GOP whip Eric Cantor (in December 2008) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (in early January 2009) in which they laid out their daring (though cynical and political) no-honeymoon strategy of all-out resistance to a popular President-elect during an economic emergency. “If he was for it,” former Ohio Senator George Voinovich explained, “we had to be against it.” The excerpt includes a special bonus nugget of Mitt Romney dissing the Tea Party.

But as we say in the sales world: There’s more! I’m going to be blogging some of the news and larger themes from the book here at TIME.com, and I’ll kick it off with more scenes from the early days of the Republican strategy of No. Read on to hear what Joe Biden’s sources in the Senate GOP were telling him, some candid pillow talk between a Republican staffer and an Obama aide, and a top Republican admitting his party didn’t want to “play.”

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Vice President Biden told me that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any bipartisan cooperation on major votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ ” he recalled. His informants said McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was, ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden said. The Vice President said he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along those lines.

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One Obama aide said he received a similar warning from a Republican Senate staffer he was seeing at the time. He remembered asking her one morning in bed, How do we get a stimulus deal? She replied, Baby, there’s no deal!

“This is how we get whole,” she said with a laugh. “We’re going to do to you what you did to us in 2006.”

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Lewis blames Obey and the Democrats for the committee’s turn toward extreme partisanship, but he doesn’t deny that GOP leaders made a decision not to play. “The leadership decided there was no play to be had,” he says. Republicans recognized that after Obama’s big promises about bipartisanship, they could break those promises by refusing to cooperate.

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http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/southshore/12486802-113/obama-president-republicans-economic

Sabotage from day one

Michael Zucker
August 6, 2014

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The scheme was hatched in earnest on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009, when more than a dozen high profile Republicans met secretly at a Washington restaurant to develop a plan to sabotage the new administration by what freelance columnist Robert Draper has described as showing united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies and attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. Among the attendees were several of today’s prominent GOP politicians including Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Tom Coburn (Okla) and Bob Corker (Tenn).

While the Obama people were designing policies to pull the country out of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, these Republicans were concocting plans to subvert the administration no matter what the cost would be to the country.

Political commentator Thomas Hartmann remembered that Newt Gingrich, who also attended the dinner, bragged that its purpose was to come up with a plan to sabotage the Obama presidency and that the Republican conspirators vowed to bring Congress to a standstill, regardless of how badly Congressional inaction would hurt the already hurting American economy and people.

Hartmann wrote in AlterNet, “In essence, they pledged to each other to obstruct, filibuster and block any legislation that might improve the economy, and thus make President Obama look good… (and that) Congressman Pete Sessions told the National Journal in March of 2009 that the Republican sabotage plan would borrow a page from the tactics of the Taliban terrorists … (saying) ‘we need to understand that Insurgency may be required when (dealing with Democrats on) the other side.’”

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