Senate Dems May Not Support Obama's Porkulus Bill

The bill that passed the House without a single GOP vote may be dead on arrival in the Senate:

An influential Senate Democrat said Friday that it's unclear whether President Obama's $819 economic stimulus bill will win enough support to pass in the Senate.
"I don't even know how many Democrats will vote for it, as it stands today," Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., told FOX News.

Nelson, a moderate Democrat, is famous for gathering lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in a so-called "Gang of 14" to avert a shutdown of the Senate over judicial nominations. He is seeking a similar bipartisan effort to improve the stimulus bill.

Lawmakers are unhappy that the bill, passed by the House on Wednesday, contains billions of dollars for programs that arguably won't spark much job growth.

"What I'm hoping to do is bring together a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats and offer changes that will attract others and improve the bill," he told FOX News. "People want this to succeed."

Asked how many Republicans he can get to vote for the bill, Nelson said he didn't even know how many Democrats would vote for it.

The longer this thing takes, the more pork is revealed and publicized. Any delays in this process are very much welcomed, and who knows, they might actually end up with a stimulus bill instead of a porkulus bill that they have now.

How bad is the current bill? Just ask Charles Krauthammer:

Had it been written in the White House, we might have had a clean bill. Instead, it was written by the House, by Pelosi, and it is one of the ugliest ever produced by an American legislature.

It has got pork. It is a 40-year wish list. It has all the stuff that you heard about. It's novel length-a late Norman Mailer novel long. You throw a dart at it and you will have on any page six items which are outrageous.

Now, what's ironic about all this is that Obama ran as the man who would redo our politics, who would eliminate the lobbying and the special interests and the earmarks.

This is the largest earmark bill - earmark, but without stealth, just out in the open—of special interests, favors, parochial interests, in American history. And it is under his aegis.

I think it contradicts his idea of the new politics, but he's stuck with it. And all he can do now is strip out the stuff that's in it.

But I think it's impossible. It's—more than half of it is all of this small stuff.

If a stimulus is needed (and there are those that argue that it's not), they should start this process over with a blank page and stick strickly to items with proven stimulus value and get rid of all the special interest giveaways and payoffs to liberal support groups.