Senate pares stimulus for GOP votes

UPDATED:

Senators from both parties worked feverishly Thursday to cut up to $100 billion from President Obama’s economic recovery package, seeking to win over Republican lawmakers and a public increasingly pained by what it sees as a bloated spending bill short on stimulus.

The Senate labored into the night debating and voting on more than a dozen amendments, as it awaited the results of a bipartisan effort to whittle between $50 billion and $100 billion of controversial spending from the plan.

About 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans, led by Sens. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, and Sen. Ben Nelson, Nebraska Democrat, were working to eliminate such items as $198 million for payments to Filipino veterans of World War II, $122.5 million for new and renovated Coast Guard polar-class icebreaker vessels, and $61 million for State Department diplomatic and consular programs.

Even without the finished product, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats already have secured just enough votes to pass the more than $900 billion bill.

“I think we have the two [Republican] votes necessary to pass the bill,” the Nevada Democrat said, adding that he still wanted broader bipartisan support.

“But our number one goal is to pass this bill. And so as I’ve explained to people within that group, they cannot hold the president of the United States hostage,” Mr. Reid said.

The Nevadan announced Thursday night that the talks remained shy of agreement and that the senators would return to the task Friday. Democratic leaders want a stimulus bill on the president’s desk by Feb. 13, when Congress takes a weeklong recess.

Mr. Obama traveled to Williamsburg to rally House Democrats, who are on a three-day retreat, to stick with him as the bill gets revised.

Setting aside his prepared remarks and ad-libbing for about 10 minutes, Mr. Obama took turns praising Republicans for scrubbing the bill and bashing them for what he called “false theories of the past.”

“Come on, we are not going to get relief by turning back to the very same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy in a tailspin,” he told House Democrats.

Although he valued “the constructive criticism and the healthy debate,” he said, it is time for Congress to pass a balanced bill.

However, public distrust has swelled as Republican opposition solidified in recent days over criticism the bill was too expensive and lavished spending on a “Democrat wish list” of projects that would do little to boost the economy.

Mr. Obama personally intervened to wrest support among Republicans, appealing to key centrists such as Mrs. Collins and her counterpart from Maine, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe.

Upon the bill’s passage in the Senate, it still would need to be reconciled with the $819 billion version approved by the House, where there are signs of a brewing insurrection by the chamber’s conservative Democrats over runaway spending.

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