Senate Stimu-less? Don’t Buy It
by Tom McClusky
February 7, 2009
Friend from the Hill sends the following:
On Saturday the Senate will be in session from 12:00 – 3:00 pm for members to speak and there will be no roll call votes. Also on Saturday cloture will be filed on the Collins/Nelson amendment and the cloture vote on the amendment will occur on Monday at 5:30 pm. If cloture is invoked on the amendment post cloture time will run until noon on Tuesday. At noon on Tuesday the bill will be subject to another 60 vote hurdle by either waiving a budget point of order or achieving 60 votes on final passage.
The Senate will not be in session on Sunday.
Why is Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the Senate taking so long in building bipartisan support to pass the bill instead of just passing it without Republican support like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the Democrats in the House did? Well one, the Democrats in the Senate do not yet have 60 Members to defeat any filibuster from the Republicans and secondly, as the blog Hot Air points out, a new CBS poll shows “eighty-one percent of Americans say the stimulus bill should be a bipartisan effort. Just 13 percent think it is okay for a bill to be passed with only the backing of the Democratic majority.”
This new bill still has a good chance of passing, especially if liberal spending Republican Senators like Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), Susan Collins (R-Me.) and Olymia Snowe (R-Me.) vote for the bill. So please contact your Senators today. The phones have been lighting up so you might have to try a few times. Many of the problems we have documented (religious institutions, money to ACORN, etc.) remain in the new bill.
Some news reports are calling the new Senate legislation a streamlined bill. Mark Hemmingway over at the Corner has a list of a few of the cuts – however the bill is still full of pork and payoffs. Additionally the Senate Republican Policy Committee have sent around numbers disputing that this bill is more frugal:
Cost of deal: $780 billion
Cost of amendments added on the floor: $47 billion
Total cost of Senate bill: $827 billion
Total estimated cost with interest: $1.2 trillion
Senate bill is $7.5 billion higher than the House bill
Additionally, as Senate Minority Leader Mith McConnell (R-Ky.) points out “According to the figures I’ve been given, the House bill is about $820 billion. The Senate bill, under the compromise, we believe, would be about $827 billion. Bear in mind the interest costs on either of those proposals would be $348 billion. So we’re really talking about a $1.1 trillion pending measure.”
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Comments
Are you also aware of the changings they have in this bill that will damage and take away the control of health care from us the people. Choices that we will no longer have and the rights we will lose. They are buried in this bill. It came out on Fox News this morning.
Then Brennan, you haven’t been paying attention. I don’t recall any Republicans, outside of politicians, who felt the first stimulus package was a good idea.
An Open Letter to President Barack Obama
Mr. President:
At the outset of your administration you went to great lengths to align yourself with one of our nations’ greatest presidents Mr. Abraham Lincoln. You praised Mr. Lincoln in speeches; as well you should, and went as far as retracing his historic train trip stop for stop to his inauguration. I’m sure these things were calculated to give the impression that you honor and admire the former president but the conduct of your office thus far belies that position. You ask congress to vote now and read later after the Stimulus bill is passed. Only after the fact will the country fully know the extent that you have dishonored Mr. Lincoln. How does this contribute to the most open and transparent administration in history? If your administration has nothing to hide then why is it so important to pass this bill without anyone actually reading it? Is it to give your party a case for plausible deniability when the details are finally known and the liberals have established a socialist state without even a debate in either house of Congress? Do you think that will save the Democratic Party?
Mr. Lincoln was a great man and a true statesman. His faith in God, as that of the framers of the United States Constitution, was absolute and it sustained him throughout his lifetime. I would like to refer to a speech Abraham Lincoln gave on August 17, 1858 in Lewistown, Illinois. I will not quote the text here but it is readily available to anyone interested in reading it and I highly recommend it (Google a few words from the enclosed quote). It clearly depicts a man of honor, a man of conscience, a man of character. In this speech he made clear that all human life is sacred and that each life is endowed by our creator with inherent dignity and basic rights such as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He also makes the point that the framers of the Constitution chose this specific language to show to the world that the concept is universal without regard to time or place. After making an eloquent case for abolishing slavery, he says of the framers ‘In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity.’
There is no doubt that man was created in the image and likeness of God. God says so in those exact words. How then, is it right to kill human babies for birth control or for scientific research? You with your cabinet and judgeship appointees can’t wait to expand abortion rights and do away with all rights of conscience for health care workers opposed to abortion. Together, you will pave the way to use taxpayer funds to do what is unthinkable for the majority of the American people. I’m not sure how the forcible socialization of the United States will help the Democrats retain their influence once it is known. The special interests they serve cannot by themselves deliver anything like the coalition that you put together in order to be elected. Once your true agenda is seen for what it is that coalition will fall apart and you will be left without support just as president Bush was before you. He failed to do what was right you will succeed in doing what is not right. Neither is in any way justifiable. I will make the prediction that nothing good will come of this.
Ultimately, you control the policies of your cabinet and strongly influence the legislation coming out of Congress during your tenure. The responsibility is yours but the backlash from deceit on this scale will likely damage your party for years to come. The part played by Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic block is well known. These things are nothing other than your real agenda. I wonder how the electorate will feel about a president compromised by his allegiance to special interest groups. Will he be able to govern the land or will he be simply a puppet for the death mongers and those elite who feel that they have the right to force their views on the nation? They cannot work openly through the legislature because they do not have the support of the people. They work instead by getting judges to legislate from the bench which is an unconstitutional abuse of power and a violation of separation of powers. Now, through the largest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people you hope to codify their entire agenda in a single stroke and without a single real debate! Perhaps you were indeed brought to the White House for just such a time as this. You may be the catalyst, the spark that lights the fuse of rebellion and finally brings the nation to the point that it rises up and says enough-there will be no more abomination in the name of tolerance, no more violence and destruction done to the precious freedoms that our forefathers fought so hard to give us! We may return to a state where a man’s worth is not judged by the color of his skin but by the content of his character and the unborn are considered the precious treasures that they are.
Prayerfully,
Donald R. Calder
Donald R. Calder
By: Brennan | February 7, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I enjoy the new outrage of this site and other Republicans. Can you point me to the outrage on the total spending in Iraq, or maybe the first of the bailout bills?
I think this bill should be called the “Bush cleanup bill”. What a disaster!