Bipartisanship

[HappySqurriel]

akuma587 said:

1) The main reason the bill was 33% tax cuts in the first place was because that is what Republicans wanted (no rational person would have thought they would ever get more than 50%, or even that this would be a wise percentage of tax cuts).
2) The bill was discussed with Republicans before the bill left committee.
3) Changes were made to the bill before it left the House because of Republicans.
4) Drastic changes were made while consulting with Republicans in the Senate, which the House accepted when the final bill was passed.

I guess those don't count though.

 

1) "Obama is asking that tax cuts make up 40% of a stimulus package, the officials say." ( http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-stimulus-details5-2009jan05,0,4983185.story ) I doubt that the Republicans had nearly the weight on producing tax cuts that Obama did.

2) Simply being discussed is not the same as being a bipartisan effort

3+4) Can you name these changes and show evidence that they actually exist, and were done in a bipartisan effort?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gdDrWnoMueqVFI-Uo1ClxVZur22AD96B48G80

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faced a different task — finding enough GOP moderates to give him the 60 votes needed to surmount a variety of procedural hurdles. To do that, he and the White House agreed to trim billions in spending from the original $820 billion House-passed bill, enough to obtain the backing of GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that makes it sound more like the Democrats were less interested in bipartisanship than making a couple of deals so they didn't have to make the bill more appealing to republicans on the whole.