Automotive News reports that General Motors is strong-arming dealers into signing a statement opposing congressional legislation that would reverse the company’s decision to close more than a thousand of its dealerships. AN quotes a letter Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa sent to GM CEO Fritz Henderson as saying “It’s alarming to have GM corporate leaders force dealers — some who are losing everything they worked hard to build — to take an active stand against it.”

The bills would restore the eliminated dealerships of GM and Chrysler, forcing the companies to work through state courts rather than the U.S. Bankruptcy court to close the dealerships. Complaints have come in all across the country of GM district offices pressuring the surviving dealerships to sign the statement. It’s not really surprising that GM is playing hardball with its remaining dealers, and maybe they should back off a little.

To me, the bigger problem is that such legislation exists in the first place. It’s hard to see this as little more than a purely political move on par with Rush Limbaugh’s ludicrous call to boycott GM altogether. Partisanship in Congress and across the nation has reached such a fever pitch that opponents of the GM bailout would rather see the company fail — and have absolutely no prospect of recovering any of the bailout money, which is supposed to be repaid by 2015 — than have it succeed and have a manufacturing giant restored to at least some of its former glory. A strong manufacturing base is critical to the U.S. economy, and it has been slipping away for decades. Are short-term political goals more important than the long-term health of one of our major industries? At the very least, isn’t it worth it for the company to be successful enough to repay its debt to American taxpayers?

In all honesty, I’ve been on the fence about this whole bailout thing from the beginning, unsure if throwing billions of dollars at a company with such deeply ingrained problems was a good idea. However, what’s done is done, and it seems to me as though voices calling for the failure of the GM bailout are similar in tenor to those on the left who hoped the U.S. effort in Iraq would fail just because it would make Bush look bad. I’ll leave the hard-core political punditry to those on the left and right who have much more practice than I do. Instead, I’ll just see this legislation for what it is: Opposition for the sake of opposition, rather than an attempt to actually do any good.