Sticks and stones can break our bones — and bad words can hurt us, too. This appears to be what House Republican leaders tried to tell us after a coalition of 95 Democrats and 133 Republicans killed a modified version of the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout Monday. They blamed the failure of the bailout bill on a speech given by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We could have gotten there today had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said yesterday. Pelosi’s speech, he said, “poisoned our conference, caused a number of members that we thought we could get, to go south.” To be sure, Pelosi had delivered a less-than-conciliatory speech on the House floor, for a bill that was supposed to have been the product of painstaking bipartisan negotiations. She had said of Republicans: “They claim to be free market advocates when it’s really an anything-goes mentality: No regulation, no supervision, no discipline.” As she spoke in favor of a massive bailout of Wall Street, she offered the bizarre statement that “The party is over” for Wall Street. She pointedly accused Republicans of being avid corporate welfare supporters, right before they bucked their own leadership and killed her corporate welfare bill.

These were vitriolic words, intended to score partisan points irrespective of the common good. But do House Republican leaders really want us to believe that Republicans killed the bailout just because their feelings were hurt? Are they trying to tell us that Republicans are touchy whiners who will let their country down on a supposedly essential matter because they were offended by typical, turgid partisan rhetoric? Why don’t Republicans adopt a different political tactic — the one that involves simply telling people what actually happened? The one that also happens to make political sense at a time when a mere 30 percent of Americans support the bailout of Wall Street and only 23 percent approve of the Bush administration’s performance in office? House Republicans should brag: “We killed President Bush’s lousy corporate welfare bill, and now we’re going to pass something that’s better for the taxpayer.” Why not take credit for forcing the House to consider a better bill — a bill that shows more respect for responsible investors and homeowners? A bill that offers less padding for those who made bad financial decisions on Wall Street? Instead of lamenting the death of this bill, even the Republican leaders who voted for it can acknowledge that the “noes” had legitimate concerns that must be addressed. We should be hearing about how House conservatives led a truly bipartisan coalition that included such genuine left-wing Democrats as Reps. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Ciro Rodriguez (Tex.) and Elijah Cummings (Md.), in order to tell Wall Street that the party really is over. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted Monday after the bailout package failed. But as jittery as investors may be right now, it is completely inconceivable that Congress will actually do nothing. They will remain in town through the end of the week if that’s what it takes. A three-day delay in House passage is not likely to cause an economic collapse — if it happens this week, it will probably have been inevitable anyway. Perhaps the resulting bill will be better — a bit less Paulson and a bit more Cantor. That is to say, it could contain a smaller slush fund than Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would like, and perhaps stricter limits on what sort of assets the government can actually purchase. For long-term mortgage-backed assets that are still performing, a better bill would eschew the “bailout” framework altogether and offer Wall Street only one choice — a privately funded insurance program, along the lines of the FDIC, as proposed by Rep. Eric Cantor (R., Va.). The bill could also ease the burden on many banks’ ledgers by explicitly suspending mark-to-market accounting rules for these better assets. The new bill will not be ideal for believers in the free market, but a better bill is a better bill. And people who stand up against bad bills and win get to take credit when better bills pass. It is absolutely true that Democrats control Congress and could pass their own bailout bill if they wanted to. It is also true that they will not do so, because they don’t want to bear that kind of responsibility alone. With yesterday’s vote, they showed that they do not have what it takes to lead. But Republicans cannot expect to win sympathy from the electorate merely by playing an obscure insiders’ blame game over who hurt whose feelings. Instead of pointing the finger at the other guy, they should boldly make the case to the American people that they have just acted to protect the voiceless taxpayers — that, for once, someone stood up, took a risk, and showed some leadership in Washington on their behalf.

– David Freddoso is an NRO staff reporter.