Brown-Waite Votes Against Bailout Bill

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite couldn't see much difference between the financial rescue bill she rejected Monday and the one that came to the House floor Friday morning.

The Brooksville Republican joined 171 other House members - 108 Republicans and 63 Democrats - who voted against the House version of bill passed Wednesday by the Senate.

The House version passed Friday afternoon with 263 votes, a comfortable cushion over the 218 votes required. The first version died Monday on a 205-228 vote.

The Senate's decision to add a package of tax breaks worth some $108 billion next year for businesses and families likely attracted Republican votes, but Brown-Waite said such "sweeteners" were not enough to make her swallow the bitter taste of a bill that she contends still had the same flaws.

"America hated this bill at $700 billion, today they despise it at $850 billion," Brown-Waite said during debate on the House floor Friday morning.

The Senate, she said, "sent us the same exact bill that the House rejected but added another $150 billion."

"That is what people believe is business as usual here in Washington," Brown-Waite said.

U.S. Rep. John Boehner of Ohio acknowledged during the debate Friday that the bill wasn't perfect, but was the result of bipartisan efforts and "it's a much better bill than when it started."

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt said the bill was "not about Wall Street, but about Main Street."

Brown-Waite, who had called Monday's version "stomach turning and embarrassing," said in an interview after the vote Friday that the new version includes some "good things," such as increasing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. limit for banks to $250,000 and putting a "patch" on the alternative minimum tax that is increasingly affecting middle-class households.

But she couldn't accept a bill that "still bails out foreign banks and still raises the debt limit $1 trillion."

Brown-Waite said she also is uncomfortable with how the bill gives the Treasury secretary the power to decide which bad mortgage securities will be purchased.

Supporters of the bill lauded it as a way for taxpayers to become investors who could enjoy a return when the market improves. But Brown-Waite said she and other opponents tried unsuccessfully to insert a clause that would have required at least some of that return to go toward paying down the debt.

She also pushed to active a clause in the FDIC Improvement Act of 1991 that would allow the FDIC to provide aid to banks in the case of an emergency and with certification by the president, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "was not open to a lot of suggestions," she said.

Brown-Waite said constituents who contacted her office were overwhelmingly against the bailout.

John Russell, Brown-Waite's Democratic opponent in the Nov. 4 general election, said he would not have voted for the bill, either, calling it worse than the previous version."

Russell he would have proposed a system that would have mortgage firms sell off their bad assets "for whatever the market would give them," and then the taxpayers "inject liquidity in return for senior preferred stock."

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed Friday down 157.47 points, or 1.5 percent, after rising more than 310 points earlier in the day.

How much is $850 billion?

• Enough to give about $2,784 to every man, woman and child in America.

• Enough to give about $708,000 to each of the roughly 1.2 million homeowners that had gone into foreclosure by the second quarter of this year.

• Enough to buy 4.25 million homes at a price of $200,000.

Sources: U.S Census Bureau; Mortgage Bankers Association.