According to The Hill, Harry Reid says it's coming this week, and will have bipartisan support.
“As of last night, there will be Republican support for this bill,” Reid told reporters.
He added that he doesn’t foresee changes to the bill that would cause it to lose Republican support.
Reid also said the jobs bill would include a renewal of the highway trust fund through December. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who spoke to reporters separately, acknowledged that Republicans don’t want the trust fund included in the bill.
That's not, however, the message coming from the other side.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., told reporters after the White House meeting that there is “a chance” that his party could get behind the tax-related provisions, but he called it “kind of a work in progress” and said most Republicans hadn’t seen it yet.
“Frankly, it’s not ready yet . . . We’re certainly open to it. There’s a chance we can move this forward on a bipartisan basis,” McConnell said.
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md., was more circumspect, saying not much progress had been made in the White House talks. He also indicated House Democrats wanted to study the effectiveness of a tax credit for hiring.
The House has a right to some skeptism. They've watched their $154 billion jobs bill whittled down nearly by half, to what's expected to be about $80 billion, an amount that isn't enough to make a dent in the unemployment problem.
The current Democratic legislative approach, Hill observers say, is to divide job creation into a few smaller bills, but none, in total, will have the scope that progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute and others say is needed to revive the economy and bring back the millions of lost jobs. The $400 billion EPI proposal would create 4.5 million jobs in its first year, but the Senate is only considering an $80 billion bill, at best, even smaller than the House's $154 billion version.
Both the Obama administration and Senate liberals are falling down in responding to the magnitude of the crisis, according to Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, and other progressive critics. "The first $700 billion stimulus was way too small," he says, and "this time there's tiny little tax breaks for small businesses and other so-called help for the middle class," citing such people-pleasers as tax credits for child care and college tuition. "The Senate seems to be stuck in a very low level of willingness to spend and invest in job creation," he points out, "and there's an assumption that the economy is on the mend -- an assumption most unemployed Americans don't share."
If everything else is going to be put on hold while the White House and Congress focus on jobs, they need to maximize the effort. Atrios says it best: "It's the actual jobs that matter, not the trying to look like you're doing something on jobs."