Agreement by Congressional Leaders is Less than Either House or Senate Price Tag
Put down the face-paint and Mohawk feathers and refrain from ransacking the first shipload of tea you can find. Despite the questionable sense of the stimulus package, Congressional leadership appears to overcome their chronic tin-earitis and agreed on a compromise bill amounting to $789 billion, as reported by CNN.com. You heard it, double-digit billions less than either of the bills that were passed through the Senate and House.
Thanks for the compromise go primarily to Senators Joe Lieberman (D-VT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) for brokering the deal and avoiding the typical pig pile that ensues when bills head into committee before moving along to the President.
Thanks for creating the environment of public pressure that the shaving of dollars politically unavoidable goes to: Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Michael Medved, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer (among many, many others) and the thousands of bloggers and commenters sticking to this issue over the past two weeks.
There is every reason to believe that internal polling by the DNC may have been at the basis for taking the machete to the spending in both bills to slash as much pork as possible. A stimulus signed into law at greater than $1 trillion, with the Congressional Budget Office and many economists predicting little or no impact on the economy, would have been a very potent campaign hammer for GOP candidates in 2010, one that Michael Steele.
Lesson learned: We the People still have a voice, and there are indications that the country has not swung radically to the left, as some Dems may have hoped.
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