Tax cut vote win for Dems
WASHINGTON — Barely beating Santa’s sleigh, Congress delivered a last-minute holiday tax-cut extension to 160 million American wage-earners on Friday, just when it looked like they and millions of unemployed workers were going to be left with coal in their stockings.
It was a major year-end political victory for President Barack Obama, a big slice of humble pie for House Republicans and a blow to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who’ll have an angry band of tea party lawmakers to deal with when Congress returns to Washington next month.
Back-to-back voice vote approvals of the two-month special measure by the Senate and House came in mere seconds with no debate, just days after House Republican leaders had insisted that reopening negotiations on a full-year bill was the only way to persuade them to prevent a tax increase on Jan. 1.
Obama immediately signed the bill into law.
“I said it was critical for Congress not to go home without preventing a tax increase on 160 million working Americans and I’m pleased to say that they got it done,” a buoyant looking Obama said at the White House before dashing off for his delayed holiday vacation to his home state of Hawaii.
Actually most lawmakers were long gone. A token few showed up to make approval official.
The legislation buys time for talks early next year on how to finance the yearlong extensions — negotiations that promise to be contentious, especially if Democrats continue to use Obama’s jobs agenda to seek a political edge in the 2012 presidential and congressional campaigns.
The measure will keep in place a 2 percentage point cut in the Social Security payroll tax — worth about $20 a week for a typical worker making $50,000 a year — and prevent almost 2 million unemployed people from losing jobless benefits averaging $300 a week. Doctors will win a reprieve from a 27 percent reduction in their Medicare payments, the product of a 1997 cut that Congress has been unable to permanently fix.
Republicans did claim a major victory, winning a provision that would require Obama to make a swift decision on whether to approve construction of the Canada-to-Texas Keystone XL oil pipeline, which could generate thousands of construction jobs. To stop construction, Obama, who had wanted to put the decision off until after the 2012 election, would have to declare it was not in the nation’s interest.
Boehner had been open to the Senate’s version of the legislation a week ago, even though it would have punted the issue into February and given Democrats a proven political issue. But tea party forces and some in his own leadership revolted, insisting on picking a holiday fight with Democrats.
A full-year extension of the tax cut had been embraced by virtually every lawmaker in both the House and Senate but had been derailed in a quarrel over demands by House Republicans. Senate leaders of both parties sought their own yearlong agreement a week ago but failed, instead agreeing upon a 60-day measure and talks next year.
House GOP arguments about the legislative process and what the “uncertainty” of a two-month extension would mean for businesses seemed lame to many people when compared to the consequences of raising taxes and cutting off jobless benefits in the middle of the holiday season, and Obama and the Democrats were hard on the offensive. House Republicans finally resorted to a technical fix and the fact that Reid would name negotiators on the GOP’s yearlong measure as reasons to reverse course and embrace the Senate measure.
