According to the Drudge Report:

Rep. John Culberson, TX claims the “stimulus” bill must be urgently voted on today — because Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leaving at 6:00 PM for an 8 day trip to Europe! …

Pelosi is hoping to lead a delegation to Europe; there’s a meeting with the Pope and an award from an Italian legislative group.

Who cares if nobody has actually gotten a chance to read the 1,073-page bill, which was only released to Members of Congress at 11:00 last night?

Clearly folks like Rep. Pelosi (D-CA) and President Barack “We don’t have a moment to spare” Obama (D-IL) are utterly incapable of grasping the magnitude of what they are voting, and pressuring others into voting, to do here. Borrowing $800 billion dollars — an amount that alone would stand as the 15th largest economy on the planet — and immediately spending it (not to mention frittering it away on pet pork projects) is not an action that should be taken lightly, or done without serious thought, study, and explanation.

Unfortunately, we have clearly been cursed with executive and legislative leaders in this country who have no understanding whatsoever about what a massive real-world effect their actions in Washington have on the nation they were elected to govern, as well as on the rest of the world.

Pelosi, by the way, abstained from casting a ballot either way on the unanimously-passed resolution to provide 48 hours of public access to the “stimulus” bill before a final vote.

Update by Jeff: A good question raised by the Catholics among the RS contributorship: is Pelosi rushing this terrible bill through so she can hurry over to Rome, just to be publicly slapped down by the Pope for her pro-abortion advocacy? This could be doubly embarrassing for Her Speakership….

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) released the following statement about the “stimulus” and the floor action schedule for tomorrow:

The House is scheduled to meet at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and is expected to proceed directly to consideration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment conference report. The conference report text will be filed this evening, giving members enough time to review the conference report before voting on it tomorrow afternoon.

Let’s pretend the conference report is to be distributed right now — 5:30pm EST — to House members (in reality, it likely won’t be until later tonight). That would leave 15 1/2 hours, or 930 minutes, for consideration of the 1,434-page conference report before floor action on the bill commences — one and a half pages a minute from now until the morning, with no stops for any reason whatsoever.

Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that the House — including Hoyer himself — unanimously voted in favor of a 48-hour review period for the porkulus before action was taken on it. Is one night really enough time to read for the first time and consider a bill that would borrow and spend an amount of money that, if it were GDP, would make it the fifteenth largest economy in the world?

Of course not. Unfortunately, this type of a move from the supposedly transparency-loving Democrats isn’t exactly unprecedented.

Yesterday, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, submitted a motion that would have instructed members of the House/Senate conference finalizing the “stimulus” bill to make the final conference agreement available online “in an electronic, searchable, and downloadable form for at least 48 hours” before the House and Senate took their final votes on the borrow-and-spend monstrosity.

236 Democrats voted in favor of the motion. Not one voted against it.

Despite this, House Democrats are preparing to ignore the motion they voted for in order to pass this spending bill as quickly as possible.

A House contact told me via email:

[The motion to instruct] is not legally binding – motions to instruct are often ignored by Democratic conferees – but that is primarily because they believe they can get away with doing so in the court of public opinion.

The bottom line is that they all voted for it yesterday, and if they opt to ignore it today by refusing to allow a 48-hour online review before a vote, it is because they are betting that their duplicity will not be noticed by their constituents.

That sounds about right for this crowd.

He’s a member of the President’s economic advisory team (h/t mjm1 in the comments of my earlier post on the subject). According to the Peoria Journal-Star:

Caterpillar Inc. Chairman Jim Owens…on Friday was named to a team of economic advisers who will advise President Barack Obama on ways to boost the economy and help the country out of the recession.

Owens was one of 16 business leaders named to the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which will be headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Owens and the others were introduced at a ceremony at the White House on Friday, after which Owens was able to speak with the president for a few minutes. It’s unknown what they spoke about.

Or it was unknown, until President Obama bragged to the AP today that Owens allegedly promised to rehire “some” laid off Caterpillar workers if the “stimulus” bill Obama so desperately wants is passed into law — a claim that made it into every top-of-the-hour news update I heard on the radio all day.

Convenient, isn’t it, that a member of Obama’s own economic board — though the AP is not identifying him as such (surprise!) — is allegedly endorsing his spending plan.

Read More →

Glenn Reynolds asks a good question: WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR LAST BIG “INFRASTRUCTURE” BILL?

Everyone seems to have forgotten that just three years ago, in August 2005, Congress enacted the biggest federal public works program in American history, spending a massive $286.4 billion on the 2005 highway bill. At that time, President Bush and congressional leaders from both parties told us that the new highway bill was needed to fix our infrastructure problems.

Read More →