I, too, must respectfully dissent. The proper question at this moment, it seems to me, is why so many Republicans thought it necessary to vote for a horrible piece of legislation, not how to assign the “blame” for its bipartisan defeat. I’d like to see more discussion of where to assign credit for the defeat.

There are plenty of better ways to respond to the nation’s financial woes, some already outlined here on the Corner, others available elsewhere. There remained good reasons to doubt whether the $700 billion debt-purchase scheme would truly resolve the underlying capital problem, and excellent reasons to doubt its constitutionality (shouldn’t that matter?) and fear it as a precedent for a future Obama, Clinton, or Warner administration.

But as Mark Levin argued earlier, you can either have a complex, detailed critique of why it was an unwise bill, drafted by panicky people who desperately need to take a breather and respect the traditions of deliberative republicanism, or you can make it simple: taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to purchase the bad debts of poorly managed banks. Thousands of Americans share a detailed understanding of the problem and why giving hundreds of billions of tax dollars to the next treasury secretary — whoever he or she may be — to make discretionary debt plays is not the right answer. But millions of Americans know instinctively that it is wrong to force them to bail out Wall Street. They screamed bloody murder. A majority of the members of the U.S. House heard them.

For that, we are expected to criticize Mike Pence and lionize Roy Blunt?

Count me out.