Thursday, January 29, 2009

Will the Senate Republicans Hold the Line?   [Mark Hemingway]

That's the question on everyone's mind after yesterday's impressive showing by the Republican House leadership who threw up a big doughnut on the scoreboard regarding the stimulus bill.

Aside from more conventional arguments against the bill (it's bloated, partisan, and insufficiently stimulating; the Democrats will be in the difficult position of justifying the bill in retrospect, i.e. arguing that however bad the economy gets that it would have been worse if not for the stimulus), there's another interesting sub-plot here: campaign cash.

Especially in the midst of a recession, there's only so much of it to go around. Thus Republicans in the Senate have been arguing behind closed doors that they deserve the lion's share of the GOP campaign funds available over the House. The argument is that the House is essentially a lost cause for the time being and that it's more important that the Senate preserve their precarious filibuster and expand the number of votes there. But if the Republican leadership in the Senate can't either manage a filibuster of the stimulus package or at the very least wrangle nearly all of their 41 votes against it, it will be much harder to justify giving money to them over the House where the leadership just proved itself in a big way. A lot can happen between now and when the Senate votes but, somewhat perversely, the Senate Republicans have at least one big incentive to come out against the stimulus.

01/29 03:35 PMShare