President Obama talks about seeking bipartisan accord … and he reaches out to GOP senators … but how many Republicans are even open to the need for fixing the economy through government spending?
As The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel points out, that question seems to have been answered in a Senate vote last night. When Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) offered an alternative stimulus plan that would replace all government spending in the stimulus with a series of tax cuts, 36 Republican senators voted for it.
To emphasize the point, that means all but four GOPers were perfectly happy with scrapping the core assumption of the president’s plan. Here, then, are the four Republican senators whom Obama has the best shot at working with: Susan Collins (ME), George Voinovich (OH), Arlen Specter (PA), and Olympia Snowe (ME).
