September 27, 2011 10:16 PM UTC

Gardner and Solyndra=hypocrisy and blame games

• 8 Comments
• by: JeffcoBlue

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have been making hay over the recent bankruptcy of California-based solar electric panel manufacturer Solyndra, including Colorado’s freshman Rep. Cory Gardner who serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

http://gardner.house.gov/press…

“The Solyndra story is one of greed, mismanagement, and incompetence. Emails and documents made available by DOE and OMB as a result of our subcommittee’s subpoena make a clear case that staff was pressured to complete review of this project in order to fit an artificial timeline intended to help the Administration politically. Despite the concerns of multiple staffers at DOE and OMB, this loan guarantee was rammed through to become the signature project of the loan guarantee program under The President’s stimulus plan…”

You’ve heard the stories about Solyndra, or at least the condensed version. Solyndra has gone bankrupt, leaving taxpayers on the hook for about $500 million in federal loan guarantees – to say nothing of the $1 billion in private investment that has been lost.

But according to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, Republicans attempting to pin Solyndra on the Obama administration is like blaming the captain of a sinking ship for the storm that sank it, hoping you forget how they helped send them on their way:

Since the solar-energy company went belly-up a few weeks ago – leaving taxpayers on the hook for $535 million in loan guarantees – a business that was once the poster child for President Obama’s green-jobs initiative has instead become a tool for Republicans to discredit most everything the administration seeks to do.

[…]

What McConnell neglected to mention is that Solyndra was cleared to participate in this loan-guarantee program by President George W. Bush’s administration. He also did not mention that the legislation creating the loan-guarantee program, approved by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2005, received yes votes from – wait for it – DeMint, Hatch and McConnell.

This doesn’t mean that Bush is to blame for Solyndra or that the Obama administration should be absolved. Obama, whose administration gave the company the loan guarantee, deserves the black eye that Republicans have given him over the half a billion dollars squandered on the company. But the Republican paternity of the program that birthed Solyndra suggests some skepticism is in order when many of those same Republicans use Solyndra as an example of all that is wrong with Obama’s governance.

“Loan guarantees aim to stimulate investment and commercialization of clean energy technologies to reduce our nation’s reliance on foreign sources of energy,” Bush’s energy secretary, Sam Bodman, announced in a press release on Oct. 4, 2007. The release said the Energy Department had received 143 pre-applications for the guarantees and narrowed the list down to 16 finalists – including Solyndra.

It’s amazing what you discover when you keep reading past the shallow Republican propaganda on Solyndra. First off, Republicans don’t tell the Solyndra story in a way that involves the Bush administration at all (see Gardner’s statement), but Republicans created the loan guarantee program in question as part of Dick Cheney’s Energy Policy Act of 2005! To which Republicans respond, “yeah well Bush REJECTED the Solyndra loan.” But that’s just not true: the Bush administration sent the application back for more information, and anticipated approval of the loan to Solyndra in March of 2009. They were approved right on schedule.

And here’s the best part: the SAME panel who requested more information during the Bush administration approved it just after Obama took office. The same people.

The partisan nonsense goes on: the private investors in Solyndra included some Democrats, but also the Walton Family (Wal-Mart), one of the nation’s biggest GOP donors. How then was this a partisan cash cow or a reward to supporters of the President? The emails from Obama administration officials warning that Solyndra’s deal was “not ready for prime time” are apparently as misinterpreted as the “ClimateGate” emails infamously were. When the loans were made, there was no reason to believe that Solyndra was in trouble, any more than the rest of the economy. That was the conclusion of civil servants who had served in both administrations.

From everything I have read, the #1 cause of the Solyndra bankruptcy appears to be the flooding of the solar panel market with low cost panels manufactured in China, combined with a tough climate caused by the worst economy since the Depression.

But that’s not enough for Republicans bent on scandalizing Obama. Republicans have to push it. They have to make it a scandal, even if it means lies and omissions that would change the whole story. The truth is, Republicans are “complicit” in Solyndra’s losses to taxpayers as much as Obama or anyone else. Solyndra’s bankruptcy was the result of market forces and undercutting of the industry by cheap foreign labor. And Gardner’s only role is hypocrisy, misinformation, and blame-game politics that depend on you not knowing the whole story.