Just talked to a very clued-in Republican on the Hill. This person wouldn’t predict a unanimous Republican vote against the Democratic stimulus package, but said there would be “minimal” GOP support of the bill. “I don’t know if it will be unanimous, but Democrats are not going to have the kind of bipartisan support the president was trying to get,” he told me. An “overwhelming” number of Republicans will vote no, he predicted.
House Republicans are very happy with recent coverage of the bill, not just Drudge’s “$335,000,000 for STD Prevention” headline, but also articles (like this and this) in the New York Times pointing out the enormous amount of social, non-stimulative spending in the proposal, and in the Washington Post, highlighting some Democratic qualms about the bill. “This is finally penetrating all those headlines that said this is necessary for the economy and that it’s all infrastructure and tax relief,” my source told me. “It finally gets the idea out that this is just a really, really big omnibus spending bill.”
It’s also clear that Republicans, battered after big losses in 2006 and even bigger losses in 2008, are finding their feet on this issue. The House leadership is running hard on this, trying to make sure every Republican knows what is in the 647-page bill, and handing out individual analyses to each GOP member of what the bill, if passed, would cost his or her particular congressional district. At the same time, Republicans are looking for any signs of Democratic nervousness about the proposal. They see a few, but there’s no doubt that Democrats, with 256 members (to 178 Republicans) are going to push the bill through. They have to; anything other than the passage of the bill as currently written would be an enormous defeat for the new president, and Democrats simply will not allow that to happen. They won the election, they’ve got the numbers, and they’re going to get their bill. And Republicans, finally, have something to be united about.