GOP leaders balk at stimulus

Object to specifics, size of Obama's $825b package

WASHINGTON - Leading Republicans yesterday said they were unlikely to support President Obama's economic stimulus package in its current form, girding their party to confront the popular new president on a major, early initiative he had hoped would pass with broad, bipartisan support.

"Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all of the spending in this package, we don't think it's going to work," the House minority leader, John Boehner, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "And so, if it's the plan that I see today, put me down in the 'no' column."

A vote could come in the House on Wednesday, and the measure is expected to pass, but if the vote were to fall largely along party lines it would be an early setback to Obama's pledge to bring a new consensus to governing.

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden portrayed the legislation as already a bipartisan compromise that he said would earn a "fairly strong vote across the board."

"If you notice, roughly 40 percent of this entire package is tax cuts," Biden said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "That's not what the Democrats wanted. And 60 percent of it is spending, economic stimulus. That's not what the Republicans wanted. But we've come a pretty long way already. So there will be, I'm sure, more compromise."

Over the last week, some Republicans have intensified their criticism of the $825 billion package as too big, too slow, and too wasteful to pull the country out of recession.

"There should be an endpoint to all of this spending - say, two years," Senator John McCain, the party's 2008 presidential nominee, said in an interview on "Fox News Sunday." He vowed to vote against the bill in its current form.

"We need to have a commitment that after a couple of quarters of GDP growth, we will embark on a path to reduce spending . . . to get our budget in balance," McCain said.

With diminished minorities in both chambers, Republicans are unlikely to find the votes to block the bill. In the House, there are enough Democrats to pass it without any additional support. In the Senate, Republicans could derail the bill, but only if united; two Republicans crossing over to support Obama would allow Democratic leaders to thwart a filibuster.

"Most of the Republican caucus has acquiesced to the political reality that the stimulus is going to happen," said strategist Phil Musser, who has advised Republicans in both the House and Senate. "The question is how much political support it's going to happen with."

In a speech on Friday, the Senate's Republican leader sounded less inclined than his House counterpart to marshal forces in opposition to the stimulus bill even as he pushed for his party's voice to be heard on the matter.

"There's widespread consensus here," the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said Friday at the National Press Club. "Everybody believes that government action is necessary, and this is coming out of the mouth of somebody who doesn't normally advocate government action as the first resort."

"There's widespread agreement that the government needs to step up here to do something significant - pretty interesting and good debate about what, but not much debate about whether," McConnell said.

Republicans trumpeted a report released last week by the Congressional Budget Office that concludes only $136 billion of the $355 billion of discretionary spending in the House bill - primarily the infrastructure projects that Obama has described as central to his job-creation efforts - will actually be spent in the next year and a half.

"There's an awful lot of fluff in there, as far as I've heard," said Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, suggesting that the $825 billion proposal introduced last week in the House could balloon to more than $1 trillion.

Republican leaders have been using the stimulus debate to reclaim the party's credibility as fiscal conservatives after McCain declared repeatedly last year that Republicans had "lost our way" on spending.

"They're trying to balance that in the face of a president who has been elected with a clear mandate for change," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster. "How do you rebuild your identity as fiscally responsible while signing off on a bill that has you spend like a drunken sailor?"

Republicans have scoured the Democratic plans to isolate what they say are costly expansions of government masquerading as stimulus, from maintenance of the National Mall to an expansion of federal matching funds for states offering contraceptives through Medicaid.

"How you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?" Boehner asked after meeting with Obama on Friday.

The meeting was scheduled after Republican leaders said that Democrats, bolstered by congressional majorities, had ignored their views on how to assemble the stimulus bill. Republicans presented their own "economic recovery" plan including cuts in income tax rates and new deductions for small businesses that Boehner has called "fast-acting tax relief, not slow-moving and wasteful government spending."

"I know that it is a heavy lift," Obama said at Friday's meeting, noting that "some differences" remained between the parties.

Obama and his circle have engaged in an ambitious campaign to win over congressional Republicans, including what many describe as more direct outreach from the president than they ever received under the Bush administration. This week, Obama plans to address House and Senate Republicans at their regular caucus luncheons.

Democrats also said yesterday that Congress may have to expand its commitment to a financial-services bailout past the $700 billion that was approved after the sector's collapse in September. "Some increased investment" may be required, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.