Marred by a week-long cycle of bad press and Cabinet defections, President Obama’s $787 Billion stimulus package passed both houses of Congress last night, despite the rigid partisan-divide.

Clearly emboldened by their unanimous “No” votes on the first version, House Republicans, masterfully corralled by Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA), held the line yet again. Three Senate Republicans – Arlen Spector (R-PA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME) – broke rank and voted for the President’s stimulus package for fear the situation would become “much worse without this bill.”

Obama’s crusade to saddle future generations of Americans with $1 trillion in debts, notwithstanding stagflation, will result in nothing more than supplementing their paychecks with a disgraceful $8 a week pat on the back.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 equals 5.7% of America’s Gross Domestic Product (GPD), whereas President Roosevelt’s New Deal, at its height of fiscally irresponsible, equaled approximately 2%. The gross spending called for by bill – mandated by Congressional Democrats and President Obama – is equal to or larger than the GDP of 157 nations – all but 14 countries listed in the International Monetary Fund’s database for 2007. Among those countries dwarfed by the unprecedented spending are United Arab Emirates, Dominican Republic, Iran, Taiwan, and Israel.

President Obama, by his own admission, owns this recovery bill, the largest of its kind in US history. “Congress has passed my economic recovery plan –- an ambitious plan at a time we badly need it,” he said in his weekly address this morning. Like FDR’s socially-transformative welfare policies, the implications of this bill’s sheer size and scope will likely not be known for several years, if not decades. But as Americans wake to the sobering reality that we’re now indebted to China, Saudi Arabia, and other hostile foreign creditors for trillions all for naught, Republicans would do well to remember just whose “economic recovery plan” this was.

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Wasting no time, President Obama began quickly overturning standing Bush executive orders in an effort to end nearly a decade of, what President Obama called on the campaign trail, “Bush cronyism.” Among his first moves were orders to freeze senior White House staffer’s pay and to toughen ethics and lobbying rules. As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is fond of saying, Barack Obama has instituted the strictest ethics policy in the history of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Unfortunately for those voters who took Obama at his word, “strict” has an increasingly loose definition for the Obama-campaign-staffer-turned-White-House-spokesmen and his boss.

Obama’s message of “transparency” and “reform,” it seems, was nothing more than focus-group tested campaign rhetoric, and his new executive orders are nothing more than a frustrating extension of the like.

The revolving-door of politics, the junior senator from Illinois frequently crowed, would end in his administration. Lobbyists, he added, “won’t find a job in my White House.” His bold opposition to Washington’s entrenched interests took Beltway-apathetic voters by storm, but now, as the difficult realities of elected office greet Obama in the Oval Office, the President has failed to truly deliver the clean break from the last 8 years.

In the two weeks since his inauguration, Obama has issued a staggering seventeen exceptions to his short-lived no-lobbyist dicta. Despite the campaign rhetoric and present hedging, President Obama and his Cabinet-level officials have surrounded themselves with corrupt lobbyists, all of whom are all too willing to sell short the promise of America.

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