MARY CLARE JALONICK Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON
U. S. Rep. Denny Rehberg has voted against a Wall Street bailout expected to cost the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars. The Montana Republican said Monday that he decided the bill would not do enough to help community banks back home or prevent the problem from hapPening again. "Rather than doing this fast and wrong, I made the decision that I was going to roll up my sleeves and do it right," Rehberg said in a conference call with reporters. The House on Monday defeated the bill 228 to 205 despite urgent pleas from President Bush and bipartisan congressional leaders to quickly bail out the staggering financial industry. Rehberg said he received a call from Vice President Dick Cheney urging him to support it. President Bush requested the $700 billion bailout a week ago. Members including Montana Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee negotiated what had appeared to be a final deal in intense negotiations over the weekend. "I hate that we're in this position," Baucus said in a statement after the House vote. "But if the experts are right and we don't do something soon, Montanans will lose their jobs. This crisis is real." U. S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., reiterated comments made last week. "Now isn't the time for partisanship," Tester said in a statement Monday. "It's time to work together to stop the golden parachutes for the executives who got us into this mess and help Main Street, not just Wall Street." Tester, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, said "commonsense regulation" was needed to ensure the situation doesn't happen again. The defeated bill would have let Congress block half the money, giving the government $250 billion immediately and $100 billion more if the president certified it was necessary. In Montana, state investment officials were monitoring the steep decline in the stock market, following Monday's vote in Congress. "It's not good, obviously," said Carroll South, executive director for the Montana Board of Investments. But he said numbers were subject to so much change that "what I say today would be irrelevant. We tend to be longterm investors here." The Board of Investments staff oversees investment of nine state pension funds. South said numbers for the staff to consider will be in a quarterly report ready in mid- October. Gov. Brian Schweitzer said the state has built a surplus to help weather any storm. But he said so far, the economic problems are far from Montana. "The Main Street banks in Montana have never been as strong," Schweitzer said during a candidate debate Monday night. (Associated Press writer Susan Gallagher in Helena, Mont., contributed to this report.)
