The next step is the House/Senate committee, where they will haggle over the actual price of the final version of the bill. Rest assured, though, that the bill will come out with a lower price tag than when it goes in. Or, at least, that's what they're telling us. Too bad it's another lie...
Here’s just a taste of the new special-interest goodies about to be crammed into the final bill:
General Motors Corp. may win protection from a tax liability of as much as $7 billion when Senate stimulus legislation moves to a conference committee, Senator Carl Levin said.
“There’s some strong feeling that it ought to be included in the conference report,” Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said of the protection in comments to reporters today. “There’s strong support for it.”
The $838 billion stimulus measure the Senate approved today doesn’t include the tax provision for GM, nor does the House version. A “technical change” that won’t increase the cost of the legislation could be added in the House-Senate conference committee before the proposal is voted on again in both chambers, Levin said.
Oh, and transparency, schmansparency:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) this morning predicted that the House-Senate conference on the economic stimulus package could stretch well into next week, though he pledged that negotiations would begin almost immediately this afternoon after the Senate passes its version of the bill.
Hoyer said the two chambers would take “such time as we need” to get the bill right, suggesting the process could go on at least until Thursday of next week, when Congress is nominally supposed to be off for the Presidents’ Day recess.
He said the House would appoint its conferees this afternoon. As for the transparency of those proceedings, Hoyer said they would likely be open to the public but, as is usually the case with major legislation, much of the real negotiating will take place during pre-conference discussions.
“I don’t have any reason to believe the conference won’t be open,” Hoyer said. “I do have reason to believe that given the time frame available to us, once the Senate passes the bill I’m sure there will be a lot of discussions very quickly.
Um...aren't you supposed to deliberate, debate, and discuss in order to 'get the bill right' before you vote on it?? Anyway, once they haggle out the final bill, it'll go back for a final vote in the House and Senate, and then to the White House. The only hope of stopping this disaster is to get those three RINOs to switch their vote to NO, or to peel away a couple of Democrats. We may have to ramp up the phone calls again...I'll keep you posted.
Here are some reactions to this passage in the Senate:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell --- “America is in the midst of a serious economic crisis. At some point, however, we will all have to face an even larger crisis: We have a $1.2 trillion deficit. The national debt is approaching $11 trillion. Soon we’ll be voting on an Omnibus Appropriations bill that will cost another $400 billion. This week, Secretary Geithner is expected to propose another round of bank bailouts that could cost up to $2 trillion. Including interest, the bill before us will cost $1.2 trillion.
“Americans are asking themselves ‘Where does it end?’ They want to know how we’re going to pay for all this. They’re worried. And they should be worried about a bill so big that it’s equivalent to spending more than $1 million dollars a day for more than three thousand years. This is an enormous amount of money.
“The President was right to call for a stimulus, but this bill misses the mark. It’s full of waste. We have no assurance it will create jobs or revive the economy. The only thing we know for sure is that it increases our debt and locks in bigger and bigger interest payments every year. In short, we’re taking an enormous risk with other people’s money.
House Minority Leader John Boehner: ---“The fact is, this trillion-dollar spending plan is not much different than the one House Democrats passed two weeks ago. It is more costly, is loaded with slow-moving Washington spending, opens the door to scores of pet projects that taxpayers cannot afford, and is not focused on creating more jobs for families and small businesses. Even worse, its authors are trying to take advantage of the crisis in our economy to enact a series of liberal policy proposals that have nothing to do with job creation, such as reversing welfare reform and letting government ration out health care options to America families and seniors. While time is running out to get this plan right, Republicans continue to believe we can work together in a bipartisan way to let families, small businesses, job-seekers, and home-owners keep more of what they earn to create more jobs and get our economy moving again.”
Mary Katharine Ham --- As Obama might say, the American people "reject the false choice between" doing something and doing nothing. For that matter, so does Congress. As Ed Morrissey notes today, Obama's allegedly intractable Republican opponents got past their "ideological blockage" long enough to offer at least two alternatives to the Democrats' plan. Undoubtedly, those plans were more tax cuts and less spending than Obama desired, but they don't constitute an overwhelming desire to do "nothing," as the president so disingenuously suggests.
The House and Senate Democrats did fail. They shut House Republicans out of the deal-making while they stuffed the bill full of things even 11 of their own couldn't countenance. They voted down almost every single Republican amendment in the Senate, most of which were designed to cut wasteful spending or offer further tax relief, without regard to whether supporting one or two might have lured a few more Republican votes. And, Obama failed to control the process. As he is wont to do, he stood back and looked cool, thereby preserving his own approval numbers, but failing to lead. The stimulus package will almost certainly pass, but the road to passage has been so bruising for the new president, that there's a palpable sense of frustration among Democrats.
John Lott --- Why Doesn't Obama Propose the Stimulus He Actually Campaigned On?Bait and switch. He promised a much more sensible stimulus with more tax cuts -- and costing only $174 billion -- as Candidate Obama.
As President Obama, he is ramming an $1.3 trillion porkfest on us and claiming the "people have spoken" and have endorsed this plan through their votes.
Patterico ---Obama yesterday:Boy, it's getting crowded under there!So there’s going to be a whole range of approaches that we have to take for dealing with the economy. My bottom line is to make sure that we are saving or creating 4 million jobs, we are making sure that the financial system is working again, that homeowners are getting some relief.
And I’m happy to get good ideas from across the political spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans.
What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. And that’s part of what the election in November was all about.
The election was about incurring $800 billion dollars of government debt? Allow me to remind you of your previous position — the one suckers believed when they voted for you. Under a headline titled “Restore Fiscal Discipline to Washington” you said:
Obama and Biden believe that a critical step in restoring fiscal discipline is enforcing pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budgeting rules which require new spending commitments or tax changes to be paid for by cuts to other programs or new revenue.
Another promise under the bus.
There's my two cents.
Sources:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/10/behind-closed-doors-conferees-re-lard-up-the-porkulus/
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YmUwMTNlZmVmNWJjY2M0ZmYwNDJhZmQ0MWQ4MmU5NTc
http://johnboehner.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=110635
http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/02/obamas_false_choice_between_do.asp
http://minx.cc/?post=282693
http://patterico.com/2009/02/10/obama-going-800-billion-further-in-debt-is-part-of-what-this-election-was-all-about/
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