Democrats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee told President Obama they have "profound disappointment" that he called for a short-term extension of the current transportation bill instead of backing a more comprehensive overhaul this year.

Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), the committee's chairman, and 42 other Democrats wrote a letter to Obama Thursday pressing him to consider their $500 billion proposal to fund new road and rail projects for the next six years.

The White House has said it wants to extend the current bill for at least 18 months.

"Your proposal fails to acknowledge the severity and urgency of the challenges facing the nation's surface transportation system at this critical time," the House members wrote. "It will lock us into the discredited policies of the past and prevent us from moving toward the transporation system of the future."

(Read the whole letter here.)

The expiring bill, passed in 2005, runs out at the end of September.

Oberstar and other public transit advocates want new legislation that put more emphasis on mass transportation and a comprehensive approach to making travel safer and more efficient.

Surface transportation bills in the past have been derided as vehicles for earmarks and have been criticized for lacking a coherent plan to address failing infrastructure and increased traffic.

The current transportation bill, which cost nearly $300 billion over more than four years, raised tensions between the previous administration and lawmakers. President George W. Bush in 2005 had called on Congress to cut down on spending in the bill, while many members were willing to fight earmarks sending more money back to their districts.

The resulting standoff between Bush and Congress lasted until July 2005, months after the previous legislation it was supposed to replace was set to expire.

The independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that President Obama's policies will do more to boost the economy over the next five years than current policies, but Obama's plans would do less to help the economy in the years after.

The president's policies would increase GDP by as much as 1 percent more than the baseline policy from 2010 to 2014. But the baseline policy would boost GDP more than Obama's proposals by anywhere from 0.3 percent to 1.9 percent from 2015 to 2019.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, however, noted that the CBO's economic models aren't "well-suited" to projecting the effects of policy changes beyond five years.

The estimates came in a paper released Tuesday that slightly revised the budget office's deficit projections.

The deficit under Obama will reach $1.8 trillion this year and $1.4 trillion next year. It will fall to $633 billion in 2013, but will then rise in the years beyond, CBO's latest projections said. The CBO
said that the deficits over 10 years will add up to $9.1 trillion in debt, though that number is approximately $130 billion lower than the estimate the office gave in March.

Read the whole CBO study here.

A study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) suggests that tax rebates pushed by the Bush administration and lawmakers as a stimulus boosted the economy at first but then helped it contract.

In a survey of studies on the stimulus, the CBO said that most people used the rebates to pay down debt and that most of the rebates weren't spent immediately.

The CBO, which provides official economic projections to lawmakers, estimated that U.S. consumption increased by 2.3 percent in the second quarter of because of the rebates, but it increased by just 0.2 percent in the third quarter. The rebates actually caused consumption to fall by 1 percent in the last quarter of 2008.

The $152 billion stimulus package was made up mostly of rebate checks sent straight to taxpayers. Individuals received checks for as much as $600 and couples received checks as large as $1,200.

The stimulus was a compromise between Democrats in Congress, who wanted public works spending, more unemployment aid and increased funding for food stamps, and the Bush administration, which had sought bigger rebates for middle- and upper-middle class Americans. Both sides, however, agreed that the stimulus was needed to help jolt the economy, which had begun to weaken due to the housing crisis. > Read More

Rush Limbaugh all but predicted 12 years ago that Sonia Sotomayor was headed to the Supreme Court.

In 1997, when President Bill Clinton nominated Sotomayor to become a U.S. Circuit Court judge, Limbaugh urged Senate Republicans to block her confirmation.

The conservative radio host said, on the day of Sotomayor's confirmation hearing, Sept. 30, 1997, that she was extremely liberal and was on a "rocket ship" to the high court, according to a 1998 New York Times story on GOP efforts to stop her confirmation.

The Times suggested that Limbaugh's Supreme Court warning was a key reason why GOP senators delayed a floor vote on her nomination for months even after several Republicans on the Judiciary Committee supported her.

Sotomayor was confirmed later in 1998. She received backing from 25 Senate Republicans, including seven who are still serving.

Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) is lunching Tuesday with the Senate Democratic conference, a group that he hopes to join in 2011.

Hodes, a two-term House member, is running for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R).

"I'm introducing myself to the senators," Hodes told The Hill outside the lunch in the Capitol.

Hodes is one of the top recruits of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its chairman, Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.). The Granite State's other House member, Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, had considered running against Hodes for the Democratic nomination for Senate, but she later said she would seek another House term.

One possible general election opponent for Hodes is former Rep. Charlie Bass (R), whom Hodes defeated in a 2006 House race. Bass, a centrist who once tried to spark a GOP revolt against powerful House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), is mulling a Senate run and a bid to recapture his old House seat.

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) puts the number of socialists in the House at 17.

"Some of the men and women I work with in Congress are socialists," Bachus told local government leaders on Thursday, according to the Birmingham News.

Bachus gave the specific number of House socialists when pressed later by a reporter.

He made the comments during a breakfast in Birmingham in which he praised President Obama. Bachus said that Obama is a better listener than President Bush, but that Obama was being steered to the left by Congress.

"He tries to get ideas from people," Bachus said. He added that he has "some hope" for the new president.

Bachus, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, actually voted for last fall's bank bailout that other Republicans had opposed and criticized as socialism. Bachus, however, has been critical of the way the bailout has been conducted and has called on the Treasury Department to be more transparent in how they make decisions.

Top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, asked whether he has second thoughts about economic policies he oversaw in the 1990s, said the current crisis requires him to take a new approach.

"Look, I think the world has changed in very profound ways since the 1990s," said Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. He spoke Thursday at The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

"Credit default swaps were a blip in the financial system at the end of the 1990s," Summers continued. "The scale of derivative transactions has increased, probably not quite by an order of magnitude, but close since the end of the 1990s. And I think it's fair to say that very, very few people predicted or fully foresaw some of the structural weaknesses laid bare by the events of the last couple of years."

Summers said that policies should be decided on an issue-by-issue basis, a point he underscored by retelling the response by economist John Maynard Keynes to someone who questioned a shift in his views.

"When new information arrives I change my mind," Keynes told the questioner, according to Summers. "And you?"

Summers earlier in his interview Thursday said he thought he was able to make the world a better place in the 1990s, when he served as President Clinton's Treasury secretary.

"I think I'm proud to have played a role in the economic success in the 1990s," he said. "Part of the reason I went into economics and part of the reason I went into macroeonomics was that I realized that managing all of this stuff — budgets, banks, flows of capital, interest rates — for better or worse, really did touch the lives of millions of people in very important ways. And I think in the 1990s we were fortunate that we were able to manage those policies in relatively successful ways and I think it really affected the lives of a very large number of people in ways that made those lives better."

Summers, known for his intelligence and blunt demeanor, also joked about why he entered economics, a field his family has already excelled in.

"I saw what some of the real hot-shot mathematicians and physicists at MIT were like and I decided that perhaps another direction might be optimal sort of an experience," he said to laughter.

A couple of pink-clad bailout protestors crashed a interview Thursday by top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, calling on him to resign and on the Obama administration to stop giving money to corporations.

The protestors, one man in a pink shirt and tie and one woman, carried a pink sign that read "We Want Our $$$ Back!" Summers, director of the National Economic Council, was answering questions Thursday from The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. at the downtown J.W. Marriott Hotel.

"That's right, Larry, you should resign," the woman yelled out to Summers while standing behind him. "Obama deserves a leader."

After about a minute, the two protestors were ushered off the stage to applause. As they gave the stage back to Summers and his interviewer, the woman yelled out, "Thank you."

Code Pink protestors have become staples at congressional hearings on the Iraq war and on federal bailouts, where they have called on lawmakers to stop them. They drew the ire of House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) during a hearing on bonuses for AIG executives last month.

A handful of Republican House members supported the Republican Study Committee (RSC) budget alternative instead of the slightly less conservative House GOP budget.

Reps. Joe Barton (Texas), Gus Bilirakis (Fla.), Michael Burgess (Texas), Connie Mack (Fla.), Ron Paul (Texas) and Bill Young (Fla.) all supported the RSC proposal, which would have balanced the budget, and voted against the Republican proposal, which was pushed by House Budget Committee ranking member Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and House Republican leaders.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) supported the RSC plan and didn't cast a vote on the GOP budget.

Aides to Burgess and Barton said that the deficits in the GOP plan, which would have produced deficits smaller than those of the approved Democratic budget but ones larger than $500 billion, were too big.

"[Burgess] supported the Republican Study Committee because he wanted to support the idea of a balanced budget," said a Burgess aide. "With the Ryan budget, he certainly appreciated the Republican budget, but was a little bit worried about the spending and healthcare policies, a bit worried they hadn't been properly vetted."

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Texas), who was the RSC chairman during the last Congress, told The Hill that he couldn't see how any RSC member wouldn't vote for the GOP plan once the RSC budget didn't pass. The main Republican budget "was a very, very serious budget that contains a lot of serious reforms," he said.

"Every RSC member I hope would be for passing it," he said.

Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) voted "present" Thursday on the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) instead of backing it as he has done in the past.

Davis, a CBC member, voted only for the main Democratic budget that passed and that had less spending for healthcare, education and transportation.

"While Congressman Davis agreed with some of its specific principles, the alternative budget proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus conflicted with his views in too many significant areas to garner his full support," said Davis's spokesman, Alex Goepfert.

Davis voted for the CBC plan in 2007 and 2008.

Davis, a close ally of President Obama and a fellow Harvard Law graduate, is running for Alabama governor in 2010. A second candidate for the Democratic nomination, state Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks, announced his bid Friday.