Even Jimmy Dean would be offended by the offal Congress is ramming through without so much consideration and deliberation as one should expect on a bill that is expected to cost over $1 trillion when all is said and done.
The fact is that no one even knows what the final tally is for the bill. The House version was passed with $819 billion. The Senate version claims to spend $780 billion. The media reports that a "bipartisan group" managed to "cut" more than $100 billion in add-ons to the bill that Senators added, but that group was mostly Republicans who wanted to cut the amount by hundreds of billions below the House level; they failed miserably given that there is so much pork and so little stimulus in this bill.
In fact, all the money being peeled off the bill now will likely be reinserted in the conference version once the Senate passes its version of the porkfest. In other words, the bill will grow from the House version.
Make no doubt, the Democrats have the votes to pass this without the need for a single Republican. They want Republican cover so they can claim bipartisanship, but the 60 votes they claim necessary is only to avoid a filibuster on a vote of cloture to bring the bill up for a vote on the floor. That's the only weapon the GOP has left to stem the tide on this mess, and I don't see them doing it, even though it would be prudent of them to do so if only to go line by line and delete hundreds of billions of pork and unwarranted add-ons that should rightfully belong in standard appropriations bills.
Yet, that cloture vote is so close that they need to get Ted Kennedy off his sickbed to cast what could be the deciding ballot.
The Congressional Budget Office figures that this bill is a porkfest that will lead to much woe down the road, but it is a stimulus package. It's a government stimulus package, since government will grow by leaps and bounds while the private sector continues to shrink under the weight the government.
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