Congress and Obama spar over stimulus

What happened

President Obama this week pressed lawmakers from both parties to compromise on a massive stimulus package designed to help pull America out of a deepening recession. The negotiations came after the House of Representatives passed an $820 billion version of the plan without a single Republican vote. Conservatives denounced the bill

as a liberal wish list, pointing to $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $400 million for global-warming studies, and $248 billion in aid to states to help them cover Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment costs. “Our obsessive borrowing has fully mortgaged my kids and my grandkids,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.).

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With Obama pressing Senate Democrats to listen to Republican objections, Vice President Joe Biden predicted that the bill would “get better” and draw Republican votes. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised to open the floor to any proposed amendments, rather than using the Democratic majority to cut off debate. Republicans said they hoped to provide funds to directly address the nation’s mortgage crisis and protect more taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, moved to add more money for building roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. Overall, the cost of the package ballooned to $900 billion.

What the editorials said

Kudos to the House Republicans for raising the alarm about the Democrats’ “grab bag of favors to liberal special interests,” said The San Diego Union-Tribune. Handing out money to environmentalists, college students, day-care programs, and the National Endowment for the Arts “has too little to do with short-term stimulus and too much to do with advancing the traditional big-government liberal agenda.”

Obama deserves credit for maintaining a respectful dialogue with Republicans during this process, said The Washington Post. But he erred in letting congressional Democrats actually draft the bill. They got carried away and he was forced to step in and mediate. As a result, Obama “wound up zigzagging between the two parties rather than herding them together.” Obama should use his clout, and strong approval ratings, to bully Congress into giving him “a stimulus plan that is not only big but coherent and, most of all, effective.”

What the columnists said

It’s easy to see what Democrats were thinking, said David Brooks in The New York Times. In a rare moment when Americans are clamoring to spend money without concern for deficits, it’s politically tempting to pad the stimulus package with money for programs like Head Start that are genuinely worthy but perpetually underfunded. But if a stimulus package is going to work, it must be “targeted, timely, and temporary.” Much of the money in the House bill goes to programs that won’t create jobs. One-third of it won’t even be spent for more than a year and a half. And once in the budget, it will never come out.

The items conservatives want removed aren’t extraneous, they’re essential, said Robert Reich in The Washington Post. They make the difference between a shortsighted package that tries to halt our current slide so we can return to business as usual and a package that is “the first step toward addressing deep structural flaws in the economy.” If we don’t invest now in health care, renewable energy, education, and productivity, “we’ll face deeper and more prolonged recessions, followed by ever more anemic upturns.”

Conservatives can’t simply complain that Democrats are using the stimulus package to promote a liberal agenda, said Matthew Continetti in The Weekly Standard. We need to propose an alternative that promotes conservative goals. Money for defense contractors would create jobs and strengthen our military. A payroll tax cut would put money in people’s pockets and ease the cost of doing business. Close the “endless tax loopholes” for green energy, and pump up unemployment benefits instead. These are the bold ideas that will “put the Democrats on the spot.”

What next?

President Obama has set a deadline of Feb. 13 for Congress to present him with a final bill. Some Republicans this week questioned the need for that. “I do think it is so important that we slow this bill down in order to do it right,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas). But Harry Reid said the Senate could meet the deadline with a “long, hard slog” and a lot of “late nights.”