The largely partisan vote was a rebuke to Obama, who campaigned on a pledge to bridge the divide between parties. In his early days in office, he wooed Republican members of Congress at the White House and on Capitol Hill, an effort that didn't produce votes last week.
While Obama pushed for bipartisanship, Republicans honed their opposition to the bill. GOP lawmakers are nearly united in their view that the measure is loaded with pork-barrel spending and will be ineffective in creating jobs. They also complain that the measure was crafted behind closed doors with no Republican input, despite promises of transparency.
House Republican Leader John Boehner, R.-Ohio, said last week that not one House member had read the bill, which came in at more than 1,000 pages.
On Tuesday, Rep. Boehner called the bill "a missed opportunity, one for which our children and grandchildren will pay a hefty price. It's a raw deal for American families."
Despite the party-line passage of the bill, President Obama painted it as a broad victory: "It is a rare thing in Washington for people with such different viewpoints to come together and support the same bill," he said.
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