After a frenzied month of legislating, the House and Senate produced an economic stimulus bill estimated Friday to cost $787 billion, combining tax cuts with one-time spending on infrastructure investments, expanded unemployment benefits and other programs.

It passed both chambers on a largely party-line vote, winning the support of no Republicans in the House and only three in the Senate.

The outcome amounted to the first significant fruits of November's Democratic victory, in which Obama handily won the presidency while his party expanded its congressional majorities. For the first time in 14 years, Democrats have the power to legislate without serious Republican interference, and Friday they reveled in what many described as a new dawn for liberalism.

Democrats claimed a mandate to beef up the federal government's role in areas including transportation, alternative energy and school construction - and to take on whopping deficits to do so - citing a shift in popular opinion provoked by some of the most vexing domestic problems the country has encountered in decades.

"The bottom line is: With this downturned economy, there is no place to turn but government," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat who headed his party's Senate campaign efforts last fall. "Most of the Republicans are resisting that, but they're just out of touch with the times."

The Senate passed the bill after keeping the vote open for hours late into the night, to allow Sen. Sherrod Brown to return from his native Ohio, where he had spent the day marking his mother's recent death.

Brown, who was hustled back on a White House-provided plane, represented the Democrats' 60th and decisive vote in favor of the bill about 10:45 p.m EDT. Sixty votes were required because the bill would increase the federal deficit.

While Democrats said the bill offered hope to millions of struggling Americans, Republicans called it a historic - and expensive - mistake.

The stimulus votes expose a "stark divide between the Democratic party and the American people," said Rep. Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who said he expects that colleagues supporting the plan will hear from angry constituents upon returning to their districts this weekend.

The White House said Obama would probably sign the bill early next week when he kicks off a tour of Western states to pitch proposals that a spokesman said are designed to protect homeowners by preventing foreclosures.

Obama told a business group Friday that passing the stimulus is "a critical step. But as important as it is, it's only the beginning of what we must do to turn our economy around."

Although the dimensions of the final bill closely match a template presented by Obama after his election, the particulars were drafted by House Democratic leaders at the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who invoked special rules to streamline its passage to a final vote.

Many Republicans described the 1,071-page bill as an act of "generational theft" that would dangerously increase federal deficits, saying Pelosi's maneuvers had limited their ability to influence its contents. The fact that Obama was able to enact such a sweeping expansion of government's role with little of their cooperation betrayed much of his campaign-year rhetoric about seeking bipartisan consensus, several said.

"The people spoke, and I don't think this is what they had in mind," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

The few concessions to minority views came at the hands of three Republican senators - Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter - and a handful of centrist Democrats who drove negotiations that helped shrink the size of the legislation and keep a substantial portion of it devoted to tax cuts.

House Democratic leaders had worked to include greater public investments as part of the package, and several of them grumbled Friday that they expected the Senate's effective requirement of 60 votes for passage of major legislation would continue to remain the strongest check on the party's governing ambitions.

"We had to do what we wanted to do and sell it to those three senators," said Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.

In California: Poor and disabled students are in line to get more fed help. B1

This article appeared on page A - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle