$787b stimulus bill approved
WASHINGTON - Less than one month after President Obama took office, Congress last night passed his flagship proposal, an unprecedented collection of tax cuts and new spending that Democrats say offers the country its best hope to stave off an impending depression.
After a frenzied month of legislating, the House and Senate produced an economic stimulus bill estimated yesterday to cost $787 billion, with $281 billion in new tax cuts and the remainder in one-time spending on infrastructure investments, expanded unemployment benefits, and other programs.
It passed both chambers on a largely party-line vote, winning the support of no Republicans in the House and three in the Senate.
The outcome amounted to the first significant fruits of November's Democratic landslide, in which Obama handily won the presidency while his party expanded its congressional majorities. For the first time in 14 years, Democrats have been empowered to legislate without serious Republican interference, and yesterday reveled in what many described as a new dawn for liberalism.
Democrats claimed a mandate to beef up the federal government's role in areas including transportation, alternative energy, and school construction - and to take on whopping deficits to do so - citing a shift in popular opinion provoked by some of the most vexing domestic problems the country has encountered in decades.
"The bottom line is: with this downturned economy, there is no place to turn but government," said Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat who headed his party's Senate campaign efforts last fall. "Most of the Republicans are resisting that, but they're just out of touch with the times."
The Senate passed the bill after keeping the vote open for hours late into the night, to allow Senator Sherrod Brown to return from his native Ohio, where he had spent the day marking his mother's recent death.
Brown, who was hustled back on a White House-provided plane, represented the Democrats' 60th and decisive vote in favor of the bill at about 10:45 p.m. Sixty votes were required because the bill would increase the federal deficit.
The vote tally was one fewer than the bill received upon first clearing the Senate earlier this week because Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts did not vote yesterday, having returned to Florida, where he is resting and being treated for brain cancer.
While Democrats said the bill offered hope to millions of struggling Americans, Republicans called it a historic - and expensive - mistake.
The stimulus votes exposed a "stark divide between the Democratic party and the American people," said Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who said he expects that colleagues supporting the plan will hear from angry constituents upon returning to their districts this weekend.
"This is a massive liberal spending bill being passed under the guise of stimulus," said Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference. "President Obama talks about the tired ideas of the past. The ideas people are tired of is reckless federal spending."
The White House said Obama would probably sign the bill early next week, when he kicks off a tour of Western states to pitch new proposals in excess of $50 billion that a spokesman said were designed to protect homeowners by preventing foreclosures.
Obama told a business group yesterday that passing the stimulus was "a critical step. But as important as it is, it's only the beginning of what we must do to turn our economy around."
Obama's allies said the passage of the stimulus plan - which they had rushed through as an emergency measure - would make way for them to take on other major, if narrower, items on their agenda, including overhauls of healthcare, energy policy, and financial regulations.
"There are legitimate philosophical differences, and elections should be about them," said Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Although the dimensions of the final bill closely matched a template presented by Obama after his election, the particulars were drafted by House Democratic leaders at the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who invoked special rules to streamline its passage to a final vote.
Many Republicans yesterday described the 1,071-page bill as an act of "generational theft" that would dangerously increase federal deficits, saying Pelosi's maneuvers had limited their ability to influence its contents. The fact that Obama was able to enact such a sweeping expansion of government's role with little of their cooperation betrayed much of his campaign-year rhetoric about seeking bipartisan consensus, several said.
"The people spoke, and I don't think this is what they had in mind," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and close ally of GOP presidential nominee John McCain. "We lost the rhetoric of the campaign. The process clearly did not live up to the hopes and aspirations that people had."
The few concessions to minority views came at the hands of three Republican senators - Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter - and a handful of centrist Democrats who drove negotiations that helped shrink the size of the legislation and keep about 40 percent of it devoted to tax cuts.
House Democratic leaders had worked to include greater public investments as part of the package, and several of them grumbled yesterday that they expected the Senate's effective requirement of 60 votes for passage of major legislation would continue to remain the strongest check on the party's governing ambitions.
"We had to do what we wanted to do and sell it to those three senators," said Representative George Miller of California, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
The ranks of House Democrats opposing the plan shrunk, from 11 on the Jan. 28 vote on their initial $819 billion plan, to seven yesterday, mostly from rural and southern districts. A leader of the party's fiscally conservative Blue Dog faction said that he only reluctantly switched his vote to support Obama yesterday, and remained critical of the way that his party's leadership handled the legislation.
"It's not what I would have written, but this was an emergency measure early in the administration, and I hope this procedure will never be tried again," said Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee. "It reflects the need to stimulate the economy, and the caucus is still very divided."
Democrats conceded some tactical missteps in their handling of the bill, including Obama's public focus on earning bipartisan support - and his decision to endorse tax cuts popular with Republicans before securing their votes. One scholar said that the process created less a monument to liberal principles than a gawky hybrid of both party's priorities.
"I think the stimulus plan recapitulates the history of the federal government's attempts spanning the last 60 years to stimulate economic growth: spending and tax cuts," said Kathleen Frydl, a University of California-Berkeley historian and author of a new book about the GI Bill after World War II.
"I wish I could add that I believe this amalgamation represents a genuine step forward and an elegant resolution of competing economic theories," Frydl added. "Unfortunately, I think it rather represents confusion and hesitation."
Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com. 