Former Congressman Pat Toomey, who now heads the Club for Growth, narrowly lost to Sen. Arlen Specter in the 2004 Republican primary in Pennsylvania. How different things would be today if Toomey had knocked off Specter.

Writing in National Review Online, Toomey said the surrender of three "liberal Republicans" to the Democratic stimulus plan not only cost the party, but will damage the nation.

From Toomey's column:

If Senate Republicans had united as their counterparts in the House did, President Obama would have had no choice but to include Republican proposals to cut income-tax rates, along with taxes on businesses and investment. These measures would have encouraged workers to be more productive, freed American businesses currently laboring under one of the highest corporate-tax rates in the world, and encouraged investors to support our ailing financial markets.

To be sure, Republicans would have been forced to accept a large dose of spending, but Democrats would have been similarly forced to accept tax cuts they refused to include in the current bill. That is what a real bipartisan compromise would have looked like — not this $800 billion–plus spending spree that tosses a couple of crumbs to Specter, Collins, and Snowe.

The Senate's compromise bill is as fundamentally flawed as the original version. While its supporters claim it will create millions of jobs, they neglect to mention all the jobs it will destroy. The money for the bill has to come from somewhere — and that will be straight out of the private sector, where it could have been invested far more efficiently and productively, creating jobs in the process. The subsidies for "green jobs" will, perversely, end up destroying jobs as the country is forced to waste money producing overpriced, inefficient energy.

Read the full column, "A Capitulation, Not a Compromise," at National Review Online.