Newscoma

It sounds like John Tanner is pissed.

In trying to woo wavering Republicans with a revised version of the bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Senate counterparts risked souring the moderate Democrats she can’t afford to lose. The bill the Senate passed included a $100 billion extension of unrelated tax benefits — provisions like tax breaks for business R&D and alternative energy and money to prevent more Americans from being hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax — that the Blue Dogs have fought for years. This increasingly powerful bunch of Democrats isn’t opposed to tax cuts, but they are against passing them without offsetting the costs with spending cuts.

Not surprisingly, the Blue Dogs aren’t too happy about being put in such an awkward position. “I am so thoroughly disgusted with the Senate this morning,” said Rep. John Tanner, chairman of the Blue Dogs, who originally voted for the bailout but now is undecided on the package. “It is just breathtakingly hypocritical for them, particularly the minority leader in the Senate, to claim that this is their finest hour and they’re sending us the bill here and we’ve got to make some tough decisions.”

When Tanner talks about financial crises, he means not just the credit crunch on Wall Street but the massive deficits breaking the back of the federal government. For Blue Dogs, if there’s a silver lining to the crisis that has shaken the financial markets, it’s that it has highlighted problems they have been warning about for several years; their gripe is that the supposed solution now includes the same out-of-control pork barrel spending that they have been decrying. “The way I see it, the bailout forced us to go into the flooded basement and pump out the water,” says Rep. Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Blue Dog, “and while we’re down there we see there’s termites everywhere.”

He voted for it. Now he’s undecided.

Let’s see how this is going to play out.