For the third day in a row, President Barack Obama is traveling — if just barely outside the Beltway — to talk up the stimulus package. On Wednesday he will make a stop in Springfield, Va. alongside Gov. Tim Kaine, who is also the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to discuss job creation and infrastructure spending.
As the House and Senate continue the process of reconciling the two versions of the stimulus, The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin and Keith B. Richburg note that when it comes to aid to states, the differences between the two “are potentially enormous”:“The House included $79 billion in direct aid to states, $40 billion more than the Senate, and governors are counting on that money to help balance budgets that are billions in the red.”
After the Senate passed its $838 billion stimulus plan on Tuesday the negotiations with the other chamber began, report The Times’s David M. Herszenhorn and Jeff Zeleny;
In a sign of their determination to reconcile the differences between the Senate bill and the $820 billion House version swiftly, the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and the budget director, Peter R. Orszag, huddled at the Capitol on Tuesday evening with Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada; and other lawmakers.
Participants in the talks said they wanted to reduce the overall price to just under $800 billion.
In the Senate, three Republicans broke with their party to vote for the package, Senators Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine. The Times’s Carl Hulse takes a closer look at why they voted the way they did:
The two Maine senators acknowledged that some of their Republican cohorts might be disenchanted. But they say they are simply doing what the pragmatic and independent people of Maine sent them to Washington to do.
“This crisis is extraordinary, and my constituents don’t expect me to stay on the sidelines,” said Ms. Collins, a onetime Senate aide who easily won re-election last November in a terrible year for Republicans elsewhere. “They expect me to jump in. People don’t want us to be the party that says no, just no.”
Also on Tuesday, the White House described an expanded bank bailout plan that is “far bigger than anyone predicted and envisions a far greater government role in markets and banks than at any time since the 1930s,” according to The Times’s Edmund L. Andrews and Stephen Labator;
Administration officials committed to flood the financial system with as much as $2.5 trillion — $350 billion of that coming from the bailout fund and the rest from private investors and the Federal Reserve, making use of its ability to print money.
But, as the Wall Street Journal’s Deborah Solomon notes: “The limited number of details of the Obama plan so far underscored the tough problems that lie at the heart of the crisis. The administration has ruled out dramatic approaches such as nationalizing the banking system or throwing gushers of cash at banks without conditions.”
And Politico’s Victoria McGrane and Lisa Lerer write that the “generally negative response to the new plan unveiled by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner means the White House will clearly have to invest more time, energy and political capital into explaining the package and selling it to Congress.”
Today the chief executives of major United States banks will testify before Congress about how they used the first round of bailout money. The Associated Press previews the action on Capitol Hill:
In prepared testimony, the banking industry leaders applauded the program for making more loans available and promised to pay their share of the money back to the Treasury over time. Anticipating confrontations over their own compensation, several asserted that none of the government’s money went to bonuses or dividends.
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