James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
ROBERT GIBBS: All right. Just a couple of quick things before we get started. The President will make a couple of calls to foreign leaders later this afternoon: to Prime Minister Rudd in Australia and to President Uribe in Colombia. The President is also pleased that the House has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Bill, and we'll have some more information -- I'm finally prepared to do the week ahead schedule; better late than never, right? (Laughter.)
[REPORTER]: Which week? (Laughter.)
GIBBS: I can tell you the inaugural is the 20th. (Laughter.) We'll go back and do some of that toward the end of this.
[REPORTER]: The bill signing -- you'll let us know when -- is what you're trying to say --
GIBBS: You're getting a little ahead of me -- but (inaudible) said, thank you, yes.
I don't have any more announcements, so I'm happy to dive in and take some of your questions. Yes.
[REPORTER]: A couple of different ways to get at these meetings today. Did the President come away with any specific reason to think that the Republicans will support the stimulus package? And the flip side of that, was there anything specific that he agreed to put in the bill to help bring along more support, or at the request of Republicans?
GIBBS: Well, let me take the second part first. I know that throughout both meetings -- first on the House, and then on the Senate -- the Senate side -- the President listened to a number of proposals, members of Congress had envelopes with ideas in them that they talked about and gave to both the President and to Larry Summers, who was with us at the meetings.
I do think there is a genuine sense of cooperation that was involved in the meetings. I think we will have Republican support for this bill; I think you'll have some when the House passes this bill hopefully on Wednesday. But again, I think this is a process that will wind its way through. I don't think today was the beginning or the end, but just part of that process.
The message that the President brought today, and the same message I think that Republicans have when they met -- we all see the statistics that come out once a month about where the employment numbers are or consumer confidence which is low or housing numbers that while slightly better are still far different than they were just a year ago, and we can get caught up into acronyms and all that kind of stuff.
But I think yesterday was a day that crystallized how important this economic crisis is. Just yesterday, 20,000 people -- announced 20,000 layoffs at Caterpillar; 8,000 at Sprint Nextel; 8,000 at Microsoft; 8,000 as a result of the merger between Pfizer and Wyeth; 7,000 at Home Depot; 3,400 from Texas Instruments; and 2,000 from General Motors -- just yesterday. The President's message both yesterday and today is that we cannot sit idly by, we have to act, and that that action should not become part of what Washington always does best, which is play politics.
And the President asked each member of the House and the Senate caucus to simply evaluate his plan and his proposal not through a political lens, but simply through a "what works" economic lens. And I think as members look through that economic "what works" lens, they'll understand that this plan is unique among legislation that Congress considers, in terms of openness and transparency; spending projects will be on the -- on a website so people can evaluate what happening; that there is a mix, an appropriate mix of tax cuts that will put money back into people's pockets, into the pockets of small business owners, as well as direct federal spending that creates jobs; that all of those together, that the economic team and Congress has put together, a balanced package that will put people back to work.
[REPORTER]: Let me just follow up, then. Based on the description you just gave of the discussion, it doesn't sound like a brass tacks discussion. It sounds like what the President was doing was making an argument for the existing bill, not making an argument for how can we change this bill.
GIBBS: Well, the President started -- well, let me describe what actually happened. The President started each of the meetings by letting folks know the decisions that he'd gone through, the process that he'd gone through in talking to economists and economic thinkers, both left and right, both Democrat and Republican, both people that had supported him in the campaign and people who had supported his opponent, in putting together what he believed was not an ideologically driven package but a package that he and the economic team felt was best needed at this moment in time to put people back to work.