Economy

Senate Passes Recovery Bill

Only the Snowe-Collins-Specter triumvirate voted for it.

Grover Norquist summed up the Republican position:

This is the bill that the Republican Party will be running against in 2010 and 2012 and 2014.

Every Republican 'no' vote was cast with the hope that the bill doesn't work. And even if it does, they'll claim that the economy was going to recover anyway.

But here's the hitch with the Republican "the economy was improving anyway" position. Apart from other ways to measure the effects of the bill, governors of both parties can absolutely quantify the impact of the spending. Today, the states are going bankrupt. After money begins to flow from the recovery bill, the states will be able to pay their people, provide their services and the situation with the states begins to improve.

So as we've seen with Charlie Crist for example, what the congressional Republicans have overlooked are a lineup of governors who will debunk the Republican attacks by showing how the money turned things around.