Main Street

Republican Sado-Economics Prevails in the Senate

The tyranny of the Republican minority in the Senate was on display again Thursday as they continued to block a vote on a bill to extend unemployment insurance, provide aid to states for Medicaid and jobs, and remove some of the gaping loopholes that let wealthy hedge fund managers and corporations avoid paying a fair share in taxes.

By a vote of 57 to 41 Republicans succeeded in blocking an actual vote on yet another revision of H.R. 4213, the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. Forty Republicans voted “No”, as did Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE). Fifty-six Democrats voted “Yes”, and were joined this time by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and the aging Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) did not vote, although Byrd had indicated he would have voted “Yes” if his vote were needed to get to 60 votes.

Watching the vote on C-SPAN2, it appeared at the end that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) changed his vote to “No” so as to keep the bill alive, but that is not reflected in the posted roll call.

While it is not clear what happens next in the Senate, early indications are that Democrats are not giving up and that work will resume to get the bill passed.

Before the vote we noted it had been 23 days since Congress let the federal extended unemployment insurance programs lapse. Now it’s 27 days — with no end in sight. An estimated 40,000 long-term jobless workers a day are now joining the nearly 1 million who have already had their unemployment insurance benefits stop completely.

It’s not like there isn’t a consensus in the Senate in favor of the bill. Democrats have a clear majority to pass the bill. What they don’t have is the 60 votes needed to end the Republican-led filibuster and allow a simple up or down majority vote on the bill. That is the tyranny of the Republican minority, and it is not only threatening the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans, it also threatens to drive the economy as a whole back into an even deeper and longer-term recession.

While it is infuriating, it is also instructive to review what has transpired in the course of the effort to pass this bill.

Beginning last December, the effort was initiated, through this bill, to extend unemployment and other Recovery Act programs through the end of 2010, to help provide some underpinning to a recovery and strengthen supports for struggling families and those seeking new employment. Republicans continuously blocked those efforts, forcing lengthy legislative battles to simply extend the programs for temporary one-month and two-month periods.

With the last of those stopgap measures set to expire this June 2nd, Democrats presented a new version of the extension bill. They presented more paid-for provisions by including measures to eliminate many tax-avoidance schemes and loopholes that give tax breaks to wealth investment managers, to corporations that ship jobs overseas and to big oil companies.

Republicans said “No” and blocked the bill from coming to a vote.
Readers can reference all of our recent coverage through the tag here, but I’ll try to summarize.

All along, Democrats have sought the votes to pass the bill by reducing its scale and scope and granting concessions on some aspects of the tax loophole provisions. They agreed to reduce the unemployment extension by a month, from the end of December to the end of November.

In the House, they stripped out all of the critically-needed aid to state Medicaid programs as well as the federal COBRA insurance subsidy for eligible unemployment workers.

The Senate has tried to restore those provisions, first by including the state Medicaid support, and offering an amendment to restore COBRA. Republicans continued to block that version. Democrats then agreed to modify some of the tax loophole provisions to protect more of the income of wealthy hedge fund and other investment managers — hoping to attract some Republican support. That didn’t work either.

Democrats then eliminated the provision that adds $25 a week to all state and federal unemployment insurance benefits. Republicans still said “No.”

Then, in the latest version of the bill, Democrats cut the aid to states by nearly half, and reduced future food stamp benefits by more than $9 billion. Currently, more than 40 million Americans rely on the food stamp program to help feed their families.

But, as Thursday’s vote proved, all of that was not enough. Maine’s two Republican Senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, still voted to block the bill. So did Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown and Ohio’s George Voinovich, and every other Republican.

What is clear is that the Republicans want to protect the wealthy and the powerful special interests. And they do not care if it inflicts pain on average Americans, working families and the unemployed. Worse, it appears that, having driven the economy into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, they are now intent on knocking the legs out from under any recovery and sending the economy careening back into an ever-deeper recession.

And they want to then blame it on President Obama and the Democrats.

With Senate Republicans, it’s sado-economics meets sado-politics.

Tags: filibuster, HR 4213, Jobs, unemployment