Senate advances stimulus package 61-36 roll call vote

Source: Politico
Senate advances stimulus package
By DAVID ROGERS 2/9/09 6:16 PM EST Text Size:
Spurred on by President Barack Obama, an $838 billion economic recovery plan advanced in the Senate Monday, clearing a last procedural hurdle with the help of three Republicans and the return of Sen. Edward Kennedy, ill with cancer.
The 61-36 roll call vote – with Republicans Sens. Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter voting yes — set the stage for passage Tuesday. And it capped a day in which Obama grabbed hold of the presidential microphone as never before, campaigning in the industrial Midwest and then preparing to host a primetime televised press conference back at the White House.
With Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner scheduled to speak Tuesday on the banking and foreclosure crisis, the administration seems intent on conveying a greater urgency—and more human face—to a complex agenda that can seem a maze of frightening numbers to nervous voters.
“We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression,” the president said at a town hall appearance in Elkhart, Ind. “Economists from across the spectrum have warned that, if we don't act immediately, millions of more jobs will be lost…And our nation will sink into a crisis that at some point we may be unable to reverse.”
Geithner’s Treasury speech is confined to the second half of a $700 billion financial markets rescue fund already approved by Congress last fall. But with banks teetering near insolvency, the government will almost certainly need much more soon and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested the White House was “trying to kind of slow walk the cumulative effect of quite a lot of spending.”
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