Despite a rousing, psych-you-up speech from President Obama last night, the Senate is still facing the same core dilemma on the economic recovery bill.
Call it the Goldilocks problem. The 15 centrist senators still in talks on slicing about $100 billion from the bill have yet to hit on a package of spending cuts that’s not too hot, not too cold, but just right to get the stimulus to 60 votes.
If they don’t figure it out by day’s end, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will do what I suspected he’d ultimately have to — move to cut off debate on the bill entirely, setting up a Sunday vote that will test all this talk of resistance from centrists on both sides.
One thing that bears repeating throughout today’s Senate drama: This debate over trimming the stimulus is spending little time on what it means to cut as much as $13 billion in state education aid and $5.5 billion in surface transportation funding. The process is just moving too fast.
“It’s very hard to get your case made in a fully substantive way,” Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), one of the dozen-plus negotiators, admitted last night. (He had just finished asserting that “substance matters here, what’s in the package matters a lot.”)
So by all means, call your senator and holler if you saw something on the list of potential cuts that concerns you.
