Last night, two important things happened: One, the economic stimulus legislation is set to come out of the Senate today following a 61-36 vote on cloture, with Sen. Arlen Specter saying he would only support a bill that came back from the conference committee "virtually intact." Where are you, Sen. Al Franken?
The second thing that happened was, of course, the president's prime-time press conference. Obama did well to define this legislative effort as a jobs bill, to make his case on several different and specific provisions within the bill, and to clarify the ways he should be judged on the success of his policies: Whether or not the economic stimulus plan creates or saves jobs, whether the credit markets start lending again, and whether or not the housing market becomes stable. Noam Scheiber has an excellent analysis of the politics of the piece:
Here's what I'd guess is likely to happen over the next few days: The conference committee tasked with ironing out differences between the House and Senate stimulus bills will undo most of the roughly $65 billion in cuts to state aid, education, and health care spending the Senate centrists negotiated. To pay for it, they'll junk the $70-billion in Alternative Minimum Tax relief the Senate showered on the upper-middle class.
Republicans will protest that Obama and Congressional Democrats have trampled on the Senate compromise and unilaterally re-imposed their liberal priorities. They'll sprinkle in a collection of shopworn clichés, like “behind closed doors,” and “dead of night.” But, in the end, it won't matter. The media, having already proclaimed Obama the Beltway's only bona fide bipartisan, is hardly going to rewrite the narrative at this late stage. And no senator who voted for the bill in the first time around is going to want to explain why he or she suddenly became “anti-job.”
I think Noam is right about a lot of this, but I don't think the AMT fix is coming out of this bill, because it's not just congressional Republicans who want it but the Democratic Senate leadership as well -- especially Schumer. I do think we'll see some of the funding priorities re-upped, especially state fiscal aid (and hopefully some of the real bad policy taken out), to get a bill that is roughly the same size as it is now. The House will clear it, but the Senate will once again be where the rubber hits the road: Will Specter, Snowe, and Collins hold things up? I'm guessing no.
-- Tim Fernholz
