The $838 billion stimulus package senators passed Tuesday will likely be very similar to the bill that President Obama eventually signs, even though House leaders say they will fight for their $819 billion version of the legislation.
The Senate has the upper hand in the negotiations thanks to the slim majority that passed the bill there and the need for cooperation from at least two Republicans.
The Senate on Tuesday passed its stimulus bill with just three Republican senators and not a lot of room to compromise, according to the Democrats’ chief negotiator, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana.
“The final conference report is going to look very similar to the Senate bill because that is where the votes are,” Baucus said as he left the chamber just after the Senate bill passed.
House lawmakers are unhappy with several aspects of the Senate bill, which is a bipartisan compromise devised by Sens. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., and Susan Collins, R-Maine.
The Senate bill is heavier on tax cuts than the House version and it strips out $110 billion in spending Nelson and Collins thought had nothing to do with stimulating the economy, including $16 billion for public school construction, $40 billion in aid to states, $2 billion in spending on college grants and $1 billion from money allocated for Head Start.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is angry about the cuts to education, and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Tuesday the House would blow Obama’s Monday deadline before it simply caves into the Senate on the matter.
But realistically, the House has very little leverage because the bill cannot pass without the agreement of Collins and Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Arlen Specter, R-Pa. Collins said Tuesday she would not reconsider adding the education money back into the bill, particularly the school construction funding.
“I don’t support the establishment of a new federal school construction program because school construction has traditionally been a state and local responsibility,” she said. “There is a major investment in education in this bill.”
Specter’s support is also conditional, he said, and “will require that the Senate compromise bill come back virtually intact including, but not limited to, overall spending, the current ratio of tax cuts to spending, and the $110 billion in cuts.”
And none of the three Republicans needed for the Senate to reach a critical 60-vote threshold will agree to removing from the bill the alternative minimum tax cut that targets some lower- and middle-income earners. Many House Democrats, including the conservative Blue Dog coalition, also believe it does not belong in the stimulus package.
Without much wiggle room, the House can only hope that Obama will somehow be able to intervene on its behalf. And he just might.
In his first prime time news conference Monday night, Obama defended some of the spending cut in the Senate, including the school construction funding that he said is desperately needed in some districts, where broken-down schools clearly inhibit learning.
But Obama knows the bill can’t pass without the three Republicans, and that was apparently reflected in a meeting he held early Tuesday morning with Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, to talk about what the final bill should look like. According to Reid, “His differences with the bill we have here are very, very minimal.”
