Judging by their remarks on the recently passed federal stimulus plan, it’s hard to believe Rep. Denny Rehberg, Republican, and Sen. Jon Tester, Democrat, voted on the same piece of legislation, are in the same profession or work in the same city for that matter.
The two men, in separate interviews at the Beacon last week, were equally convincing in their opposing views of the $789-billion bill. And they differed on much more than just its merits, but also what it does and even how it was passed.
To begin with, let’s look at the latter. When the House version of the bill was first approved on a mostly party line vote, Republicans accused Democrats of muscling through the legislation without giving lawmakers ample time to read it.
According to Rehberg: “The bill was dropped on us [the U.S. House] at 11 o’clock at night. I would have had to read each and every page in that bill in 24 seconds or less. That’s how much time we had.”
Tester, from his view in the Senate, tells an altogether different version. He said rumblings about the bill being rushed are overblown. He added that only amendments were changing as the bill moved closer to vote and all the GOP had to do was read them.
“It’s an ongoing process. It’s not like you have to read the bill every time an amendment is brought up, because the only thing that’s changed is that amendment …”
“The truth is, you pick the bill up when it’s in bill form; wide margins, wide headers, wide footers, big print with big spaces between the font – so it’s not like reading ‘War and Peace.’”
The logistics of passing major legislation is often inside baseball and lawmakers are gifted at simplifying complex procedures to argue over them. But this stimulus bill, belatedly published online, has so divided lawmakers that they can’t even agree on the content of what they are reading.
For his part, Rehberg implied that the stimulus is the beginning of the road to socialism.
His exact words: “There were going to be two avenues to take: Was the president and the majority party going to address the crisis with an economic stimulus package or were they going to use the crisis to do more from a social engineering standpoint? And they took the second approach.”
Tester said the only reason he voted for the stimulus, which he prefers to call the “Jobs Bill,” is because of its heavy oversight and “it’s about job creation here and it’s about supporting the middle class and working families.” Tester, after all, was the only Senate Democrat to vote against both the bank and automobile bailouts.
While cautioning against guarantees, Tester said the bill would provide jobs for the Flathead. “There’s plenty of need up here and I think the Flathead is going to get some projects, but we’ll have to see how it blows out.”
Rehberg countered that it will do next to nothing, that massive spending could trigger inflation and that tax cuts would have done more to stimulate the economy. He pointed out that if Congress suspended the payroll tax for one year it would have cost $1 trillion.
The differences are stark on the costliest piece of legislation Congress has ever passed. The other one-third of Montana’s U.S. delegation, Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, may be best suited to answer concerns about the bill. As chair of the Senate Finance Committee, he wrote much of it. The senior senator was expected to be in the Flathead with his colleagues last week, but he instead flew to Denver to watch President Barack Obama sign the legislation.
The only thing clear about the stimulus is that its success or failure will eventually force our U.S. delegation to answer for their positions. And clearly not everyone will be right.