Bond

WASHINGTON — With the Senate due to take up the massive economic recovery bill this afternoon, Republicans like Missouri Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond are in the crosshairs.

That’s because unlike the House – where not a single GOPer supported the $800 billion-plus plan — Senate Democrats need a few Republicans to reach 60 votes and in so doing avoid a filibuster from foes.

Bond has signaled that he’ll play ball with Democrats, but mostly he’s been critical of the proposals as written. How critical?

“I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony,” he said this morning. “There are so many targets, I don’t know which ones to attack first.”

One of the problems, in Bond’s view, is a “Buy American” provision that would require the use of American-made steel in tens of billions of dollars worth of road, bridge and building construction projects.

That’s bill language that hundreds of laid-off steelworkers at Granite City Steel and elsewhere are cheering given the pressure on their industry from cheaply made and government subsidized Chinese steel.

Bond, who has been working to cultivate trade with China, sees matters differently.

“The problem is you can make the infrastructure jobs more expensive and, at the same time, you … threaten the jobs of all the people who are in the export business,” Bond said this afternoon while being interviewed on CNBC.

“We’ve got more export jobs than we’ve got steel jobs in Missouri. But beyond that, we depend upon the farm economy. You saw with the Asian crisis, the Asian contagion, that when exports of farm goods dropped off, we had a recession, almost a depression,” Bond added.

Bond also took issue with Sen. Claire McCaskill’s new proposal to limit the salary of executives at companies receiving federal bailout money to no more than what the president of the United States makes — $400,000 a-year.

“The worst thing we can do is tell businesses how to run themselves. Congress has a pretty bad track record. If you you look at our collective jdugement, all 535 of us in our wisdom can’t run government very well. (We) sure can’t run business.

“As far as capping CEO pay for people who really loused up, we ought to fire them. We’re not going to fire them, but the boards of directors ought to fire them; that’s what they did in Sweden. They need to get rid of these people, not cap their pay at $400,000. They aren’t worth that. Bring in people who can do the job.”