A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

As a follow-up to a recent posting, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) struck again last week. On the day before she uttered her baffling comments regarding the swine flu epidemic, she decided to discuss the regulatory burden and tax policies of President Calvin Coolidge on the floor of the House of Representatives. Foot, meet mouth: "[President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] applied just the opposite formula, the Hoot-Smawley Act, which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions and then, of course, trade barriers and the regulatory burden and taxpayers. That‘s what we saw happen under FDR. That took a recession and blew it into a full scale depression. The American people suffered for almost 10 years under that kind of thinking."

First and foremost, you complete imbecile, the name of the legislation is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (not Hoot-Smawley, as you refer to it). Not only that but the act was passed in 1930, three years before President Roosevelt entered the White House. Written by two Republicans, Rep. Willis Hawley (R-OR) and Sen. Reed Smoot (R-UT), the bill was signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover (the man who ushered in the Great Depression), despite the opposition from numerous economists and bankers. President Roosevelt and his actions helped the nation recover from the Great Depression.

Bachmann continues to show the rest of the world why we as a nation are not as great as we think we are. Why? Because we allow this woman to vote on actual pieces of legislation. By the way, both Hawley and Smoot were defeated for re-election in 1932, with the controversial tariff being a major factor in their unsuccessful campaigns.