Congress Starts to Map Talks on Stimulus

WASHINGTON — Congressional aides worked Sunday to identify differences between the House and Senate economic stimulus packages in advance of final negotiations scheduled to begin after the Senate’s anticipated approval of its measure on Tuesday.

With Congressional leaders hoping to deliver legislation to President Obama by next Monday, which is Presidents’ Day, staff workers for the appropriations and tax writing committees in both chambers were not waiting for the Senate to act before comparing the two measures. Formal talks will not begin before the Senate passes its $827 billion version of the plan; the House bill costs about $819 billion.

The Senate agreement on a scaled-down bill was reached on Friday when three Republicans signaled that they would back the legislation. Their support would give the Democratic majority the 60 votes needed to clear a procedural hurdle. But Congressional Democrats and the White House were still hoping to pick up more Republicans.

Mr. Obama is to travel to Indiana and Florida this week to rally public support for the plan, and the White House has begun emphasizing the endorsement of the proposal by business and industry groups.

Once the Senate votes, aides said, the first order of business in the bicameral talks will be to set an overall dollar figure and then begin to sort out the differences in spending and tax changes in the two measures.

“The overlap is 90-plus percent,” Lawrence H. Summers, a top economic adviser to Mr. Obama, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We’ve got to work through the differences, find the best bill we possibly can, and get it in place as quickly as possible to contain what is a very damaging and potentially deflationary spiral.”

While the bills have many of the same elements, the exact amounts spent on similar items and programs vary. The House version provides $40 billion more in aid to local governments and is slightly more generous with a middle-class tax credit, while the Senate bill offers tax incentives for home and car purchases.

“Everyone is going to have to give a little,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said on “State of the Union” on CNN.

House Democrats are unhappy with aspects of the Senate bill, particularly cuts in state aid, education and law enforcement, and Mr. Schumer said he favored the House approach. But all sides expect a final agreement to come together quickly, given the state of the economy and the fact that the measure is the top priority of the new president.

Most Republicans remain strongly opposed to the bills, arguing that they represent grossly excessive spending and do not get at the root causes of the economic crisis.

“We’re going down a road to disaster,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, who appeared on CNN with Mr. Schumer. “We’ve never seen this kind of spending, ever, and there is a lot more to come.”

Mr. Shelby also took a swipe at the three Republican senators who have endorsed the measure — Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine — saying that if Republicans had remained united, they could have forced a more acceptable bill.

The three senators, though, were being praised in weekend radio advertisements by a labor-affiliated advocacy group.

The group, Americans United for Change, bought airtime in Maine and Pennsylvania for commercials commending the breakaway Republicans and urging voters to call and thank them. “Tell them to keep fighting for a plan to get our economy moving again,” the advertisement said.

A similar commercial was running in Nebraska, the home state of Senator Ben Nelson, a Democrat who helped broker the compromise that brought the three Republicans on board.

By : Carl Hulse

A version of this article appeared in print on February 9, 2009, on page A11 of the New York edition.

Re-Published By : The Author