A flag waves at the U.S. Capitol building during a rare Saturday session on Capitol Hill September 27, 2008 in Washington, DC. The US Senate votes Wednesday on a revised 700-billion-dollar Wall Street bailout after the House of Representatives rejected the original package, sending shockwaves through global markets.
Which gives added emphasis to Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's heartfelt summation: "We're in this moment, and if we fail to do the right thing, heaven help us."
Whatever the right thing is — or may someday be.
The White House and congressional leaders already have made up their minds. Confronted with the defeat of an earlier measure in the House this week and increasingly urgent warnings of economic hardship, they've begun rounding up votes the old-fashioned way.
They're buying them.
A revised bailout bill includes tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the middle class, for homeowners who don't itemize their deductions, and for property owners in Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.
Add on the $3 billion funding dollop for rural school programs over the next five years. And another $8 billion over the same period in disaster aid, much of it for Midwestern states. And toss in unrelated legislation, far-reaching in its own right, requiring insurance plans to provide better benefits for mental health.
None of these has any direct bearing on the problem afflicting Wall Street and the entire economy. Yet in the currency of Congress, each is rapidly becoming part of the solution.
On the dominant issue of the presidential campaign, the two major party candidates are in agreement. Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and John McCain, R-Ariz., both flew back to the Capitol to vote for the measure.
Whatever side individual lawmakers come down on, there is little debate about the significance of the issue.
Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., a supporter of the bailout, said in remarks on the Senate floor that he was about to take "what is without question the most important vote and most challenging vote I've ever been asked to cast in 30 years as an elected official."
Not long later, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. said, "As the blood of our young men and women fall on foreign soil in the defense of freedom, our own government appears to be leading our country into the pit of socialism."
For its sweep, the rhetoric is reminiscent of the congressional debate in the days leading up to the vote authorizing the war in Iraq.
"To our friends around the world, I say thank you for standing with us in our time of trial. ... To our enemies who watch this democratic debate and wonder if America speaks with one voice, I say have no doubt," former Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, the House Democratic leader, said at the time as he worked with Bush to secure passage of the measure.
"America did not become the leader of the free world by looking the other way to heinous atrocities and unspeakable evils," said Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., like Gephardt, now gone from Congress.
Yet if the vote on Iraq is any indication, the consequences will be more profound than even the lawmakers understood at the time.
Then, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted that U.S. troops would be hailed by Iraqis as liberators.
Now, six years later, more than 4,000 members of the armed forces have lost their lives in a war that has so far cost taxpayers more than $653 billion. Top military officials concede the Army is overextended, and generals and politicians alike agree that more troops are needed for a companion war in Afghanistan.
For a political precedents, consider Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
In 2002, as a relative newcomer to Congress, the former first lady voted to give Bush the permission he sought to send troops against Saddam Hussein.
But in 2008, as a presidential candidate, she spent months dodging questions from anti-war activists furious about her decision, refusing to apologize for her vote, and blaming Bush for abusing the authority she and others had granted him.
On the other side of the political aisle, Republicans who had voted so eagerly to hand Bush the authority he wanted were swept from power in 2006.
Voters wreaked their revenge where they could, at the ballot box.
Five weeks from this year's election, it's not a lesson lost on anyone, least of all Ryan, who voted for a measure most Republicans opposed.
"Most of us say, 'I want this thing to pass, but I want you to vote for it, not me,'" he said.
Yet public opinion on the issue is so volatile that Republican leaders say it has shifted dramatically in the 48 hours since the House rejected the first bailout measure.
"Calls to members' offices have changed from being 90 percent don't do this; they're at least 50-50, and in some offices they're 90 percent, "You have to do something," Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, the second-ranking Republican leader, said during the day.
In the two days since that vote, the stock market has suffered its largest one-day drop in history. The credit market remains tight, with banks required to pay record interest rates for funds they borrow from other banks.
And in the Internet age, millions of investors can track the losses in their personal investment accounts online.
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