This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 1st, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The failure of the financial bailout bill was forged by the odd coalition of strongly left-leaning Democrats and strongly right-leaning Republicans.

But what drove two-thirds of Republicans to their position, pre-market sentiment, populism,

anger at Wall Street, or just lawmakers responsive to the needs of their

constituents.

Ito Institute Senior Fellow Mike Tanner comments.

Look, this is probably all of the above and only time will tell whether this means that the Republicans in

Congress have finally recaptured some semblance of conservative principles or

whether this is a one-hit wonder.

But at least for one day, the Republicans in Congress were willing to say no to bigger government.

After eight years of going along with whatever big government proposal the Bush administration

came up with, the biggest increase in domestic discretionary spending since the great society

a massive new entitlement program 7,000 pages of new regulations

the federal government's centralization of authority over education.

All of these things took place with barely a peep out of Congress.

And now suddenly we have found a big government program that is too big for even them to swallow.

You know, the flames of Reagan Goldwater limited government conservatism 40% of House Democrats and 2 thirds of House Republicans doing what their

leadership told them precisely not to do. And this added up to a majority of

the US House.

There's 133 Republicans who defied a Republican president, their own leadership in the

House, the unanimous opinion of the mainstream media, and even the

...