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How are we going to pay for it?
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Feb 13, 2009 07:05am |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Media | Magazine - US News and World Report |
| News Date | Wednesday, June 14, 2006 04:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Back in the '50s and '60s in the House of Representatives, there was an irascible conservative Republican from Iowa named Rep. H.R. Gross.
Gross enjoyed being a cantankerous, even obnoxious figure, to the majority Democrats and even to the moderate Republicans. As my colleague David Broder of the Washington Post and I agree: "He was a real pain in the ass."
At that time, with Democrats routinely spending overbudget, Gross would always be stationed in the well of the House and chanting loudly, "How are we going to pay for it?" The rantings of Gross, a newspaper publisher from Waterloo, were usually greeted with laughter. No one took him seriously, even many of his fellow Republicans.
"That's just old H.R. letting off steam," I recall a Texas Democrat telling me when Gross was on his regular tears to halt spending for any cause if he thought it wasteful. He would introduce amendments out of order, challenge speakers to defend their spending requests, or do anything to make a pest of himself.
In those days, the majority Democrats were the big spenders. Traditional Republicans were opposed to deficits then, even agreeing from time to time with Gross that Congress was merely passing massive debt to future taxpayers.
How times have changed.
Too bad that cranky H.R. Gross isn't still around. Surely he would attack the Bush administration and fellow Republicans for their profligate ways. |
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