At that point it really wasn't about how left-wing or right-wing you were, or how big a fan of handouts to the wealthy. No doubt if Obama had in fact been president, he'd have done the same thing - any president would have. You could almost compare it to America being attacked by a foreign nation - regardless of what your policy as president is or what your priorities are, the first thing you do is making the necessary calls to defend the American people in the short term against this threat.

With the situation as it was then, there wasn't much debate that the banks had to be bailed out in the short term. Letting the banks fail would have wiped out all or much of the savings of millions of Americans, in addition to a domino effect throwing the entire world economy into recession (much worse than the one we actually got). The blame, as Roland mentioned, should be focused on what happened afterwards, the way the bankers were allowed to worm their way out from the consequences of that crisis.

Agreed that 7 million is a perfectly reasonable amount to spend on something like this. And I've always had a good impression of Trey Gowdy, although in moondog's defense, Kevin McCarthy was then and still is Republican Majority Leader, the second most important Republican in the House after the Speaker and the same rank as Nancy Pelosi, so even if he wasn't on the committee himself, obviously his word did carry weight. Still doesn't mean that his view of the matter was also Gowdy's view, though.