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A Minority of Senators Block Economic Relief Bill—What Else Is New?

Last night the Senate held several votes, including a vote on a payroll tax holiday that would provide some much-needed relief to working families and small businesses. The bill would have extended and expanded the payroll tax holiday from this year, resulting in an average of about $1,500 of savings to nearly every household.

You don’t really need us to explain what happened—you can probably guess.

Democrats sought to extend and expand the break, while paying for it with a 3.25 percent surtax on incomes over $1 million. Just one Senate Republican, Maine’s Susan Collins, voted for the middle class break, which died 51 to 49 in an unsuccessful effort to end a Republican filibuster.

Continuing an ongoing trend, a mostly-Republican minority has once again blocked a portion of President Obama’s American Jobs Act. Showing their priorities, they chose to let over 100 million working families’ taxes go up rather than pass a small tax increase on just over 300,000 millionaires.

(Grover Norquist, the right-wing Washington D.C. power broker who invented the “no tax hikes” pledge, has officially told Republican Senators that allowing the holiday to lapse, increasing in taxes on millions of middle-class working people, doesn’t count as raising taxes. Wonder if he would hold the set-to-expire Bush-era income tax rates to the same standard?)

The Republicans offered a substitute version of the bill—a smaller tax cut, paid for not by asking the rich to contribute a little bit more but by cuts in federal programs, including the elimination of 200,000 federal jobs. Note the logic here: to pay for a temporary tax holiday aimed at shoring up an economy struggling with low demand, Mitch McConnell thought that the right thing to do was permanently taking away paychecks from 200,000 people and putting them back into the sputtering job market.

That version of the bill went down by a 78-20 margin, not even getting a majority of Republican votes.

So where do we go from here? It’s clear that the economy is still in need of assistance, and the key to that is making sure working families have a little more in their pockets to spend. We need to continue the payroll tax holiday and, in particular, we need to extend unemployment insurance for the millions still jobless.

And yes, Senate Dems promise there’ll be another vote on the payroll tax cut. It’s another opportunity to figure out where our elected leaders’ priorities lie—and the sponsors should hold firm on their popular, common-sense funding proposal.

Tags: Jobs, Senate