PARTISAN RIFTS

    The Senate and House originally passed different versions of the bill. The votes Friday are on the compromise version of the measure.

    The differences were reconciled after a furious day of private negotiations which involved House and Senate leaders, Obama administration officials and three moderate Republican Senators, who give the key support for the stimulus package.

    However, many Republican lawmakers strongly slammed the bill, saying it was more a spending bill and was a colossal waste of money.

    House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Dave Camp, a Republican, said Wednesday that the stimulus could create a short-term boon, but a long-term drag on the economy.

    "Just so everybody knows, in 10 years the economy will be worse off, with less jobs," he said.

    "This is not the smart approach," echoed Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "The taxpayers of today and tomorrow will be left to clean up the mess."

    To rally more public support to push the stimulus package through the Congress, Obama even returned to campaign tactics by speak directly to the recession-weary American people.

    In an address in Fort Myers, Florida, a city suffering a lot from the economic crisis, Obama stressed it is only government that can "break the vicious cycle," where lost jobs lead to people spending less money, which leads to even more layoffs.

    The Labor Department reported last week that the unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent in January, the highest level since 1992,as employers slashed 598,000 jobs.

    The U.S. economy has lost a staggering 3.6 million jobs since December 2007, when the recession began. And about one-half of this decline occurred in the past three months.

    "What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives, action that's swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis," a clearly frustrated Obama wrote in last week's Washington Post.

    He charged Republicans with promoting a failed theory: "the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive."

    A statement released by Republican Senator Charles Grassley saying that the bill would put future generations in debt, also angered Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

    "No one needs to lecture me or us on deficits, because you invented them," Reid said to Republicans on Wednesday, invoking the Bush years and the war in Iraq.