Politics & Power Quote by Chaka Fattah

It takes a certain political audacity to try to memory-hole an entire decade of governing with one breathless sentence. Chaka Fattah’s line isn’t built to persuade on the merits; it’s built to jam the signal. The stuttered restart (“the-that”) telegraphs the real-time scramble to land a clean partisan punch, and the punch itself is a classic Washington misdirection: swap “responsibility” for “control,” then dare the listener to untangle process.

The intent is blunt: absolve Democrats of fiscal blame by implying they haven’t authored appropriations bills, and therefore haven’t “spent” taxpayers’ money. But the subtext is more revealing than the claim. It leans on a public frustration with spending while betting that most people don’t want a civics lecture about how money actually moves through Congress. Appropriations originate in the House, but they’re negotiated, amended, packaged into omnibus deals, reconciled with the Senate, and signed by a president. Votes are shared. Credit and blame are never cleanly assigned. Fattah’s wording tries to exploit that messiness as cover.

Context matters: this sort of statement lands in the era when Congress increasingly governed through continuing resolutions and giant catch-all bills, precisely because regular-order appropriations had become harder to pass. That breakdown created an opening for a rhetorical trick: if the process is opaque enough, you can pretend it didn’t happen. The line works not because it’s accurate, but because it flatters a weary audience’s suspicion that “they” are always spending “your” money - and then offers a convenient villain-of-the-week to pin it on.