Reid: Not Enough Votes for Auto Bailout

This is odd. The execs are traveling the highways via hybrid to make their case tomorrow and Friday and there already aren't enough votes? Chrysler vice chair threatening a depression.

ABC: Imperiled automakers and their union worked feverishly Wednesday to sell a skeptical Congress on a $34 billion aid plan, promising labor concessions and restructuring. The Senate's Democratic leader said there still weren't enough votes to tap the $700 billion federal bailout fund to prop up the foundering Big Three.

One day before the chiefs of the auto companies return to Capitol Hill to make their urgent cases for loans, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the money was unlikely to come from the Wall Street rescue fund.

"I just don't think we have the votes to do that now," Reid told The Associated Press in an interview.

The White House called the timing of his comments "interesting" coming on the eve of high-stakes congressional hearings Democrats demanded.

"It's not hospitable," said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary.

In Capitol Hill meetings, industry officials said the collapse of one or more of the Big Three carmakers could greatly worsen the nation's recession and undermine the companies' ability to survive.

"We're on the brink with the U.S. auto manufacturing industry. We're down to months left," Chrysler's vice chairman, Jim Press, told the AP in a separate interview. "If we have a catastrophic failure of one of these car companies, in this tender environment for the economy, it's a huge blow. It could trigger a depression."