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Senate struggles on stimulus in nighttime session
Associated Press
Issue date: 2/5/09 Section: News
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With partisan tensions rising, several Republican attempts to remake the bill - with higher tax cuts, lower spending and relief for homeowners - failed on party-line votes.
"The time for talk is over. The time for action is now," declared Obama as the Senate plodded through a fourth day of debate on the legislation at the heart of his economic recovery plan. He implored lawmakers in both parties to "rise to this moment."
Obama added he would "love to see additional improvements" in the bill, a gesture to the moderates from both parties who were at work trying to trim the $920 billion price tag.
Increasingly, the events that mattered most were not the long roll calls on the Senate floor, but the private conversations in which the White House and Democratic leaders sought - either with the support of a large group of centrist lawmakers or without them - to clear the bill at the heart of the president's recovery program.
"As I have explained to people in that group, they cannot hold the president of the United States hostage," said Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "If they think they're going to rewrite this bill and Barack Obama is going to walk away from what he is trying to do for the American people, they've got another thought coming."
Republicans countered that neither the president nor Democratic congressional leaders have been willing to seek common ground on the first major bill of the new administration.
"We're not having meaningful negotiations. ... It's a bad way to start," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was Obama's opponent in last fall's presidential campaign.
In an Associated Press interview, he said Obama "gave the Democrats the leeway to basically shut out Republicans starting with the House and now here in the Senate, and I don't think that's good."
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