They voted for it, before they voted against it. But that was the 7 times they voted to raise the debt ceiling when it was their “President” in the White House.
As ThinkProgress notes in their blog item accompanying the following video compilation of Republicans arguing on the House floor in 2002 and 2004 to raise the debt limit in a clean bill with no spending cuts, “no less than 98 currently serving House GOP members” voted in favor of doing exactly that — back then — in order to pay the bills for spending they’d previously approved.
But that was then, with a Republican in the White House, before they decided to create a fake “crisis” in order to terrorize the nation’s economy in a shameful attempt to return to power. Hypocrisy on parade…
Hypocrisy or selective amnesia?
Saw Lawrence O’Donnell try to nail one of the young Republican congressmen with this type of argument. The congressman artfully dodged it by countering that these were different times and that now the people had elected him to oppose raising the debt ceiling. Since the young congressman said this horseshit with conviction and since O’Donnell, still pursuing his attempt to nail the guy with an argument that had just been side-stepped, said absolutely nothing to challenge him, the congressman came off as sounding reasonable.
And this is a principal reason why TV “journalists” are worse than worthless. With painfully few exceptions(Maddow, Stewart, and Colbert and I know, two of these are comedians) they are not smart enough either with counter-arguments at their fingertips or the ability to think on their feet to challenge the constantly shifting stream of bullshit narratives coming out of the Washington Bubble People who are so terribly disconnected from the rest of us. The effect is to validate the bullshit.
I’d just like to remind people of what I remember very well when Clinton was president: Republicans were arguing that the national debt was getting WAY too high, and that spending had to be cut back, and steps taken to reduce the debt. Of course their real goal was to make the economy stop booming, so that they would have some hope of defeating Clinton. They didn’t, but as soon as a budget surplus showed up, they shut up completely about reducing the debt, in favor of cutting taxes. They just have no shame.