During last night's consideration of the food safety bill, the Senate took up two rival amendments, both aimed at repealing a provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires businesses to file 1099 forms with the IRS for every expenditure over $600 paid to their vendors.
No, that's not a typo. It was during the food safety bill, and the tax provision on vendor payments was in the health insurance reform bill.
The provision is pretty much universally viewed -- in hindsight, anyway -- as overly burdensome on business. Excuse me, on "Small Businesses, the Backbone of America!!!TM" But it's figured to be worth a couple billion dollars a years, since it captures more transactions and makes more of the income businesses take in actually taxable. And that's why it was in the bill. To help pay for it.
Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE), however, considers the provision to be stinky poo-poo yucky, and wants it repealed. And because he's a stand-up guy, he's included an offset for the $19 billion or so that repeal could cost the federal treasury. Specifically, he wants to authorize the rescission (fancy-pants talk for "taking back") $39 billion in as-yet-unspent stimulus funding.
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), on the other hand, wanted to simply repeal the thing and be done with it. He offered no offset.
The outcome: 44 votes for the Baucus amendment; 61 for Johanns. And just for fun, since we're so often discussing Senate rules arcana, let's note that both amendments failed.
That's not a typo, either. Johanns got 61 votes and failed. Why? Because he was offering an amendment after cloture had already been invoked on a complete substitute for the bill, which essentially means that the books had been closed on amendments. In order for Johanns to get his amendment considered after that, he had to move to suspend the rules that normally prohibit such amendments, which means he needed a 2/3 vote to win. That's 67 votes, and he only got 61. So all that stuff you've heard about how you need 60 votes to get anything done in the Senate is yet another story with an asterisk attached to it. Like all stories about how the Senate works.
Anyway, back to the point of the story. Did you notice that the Baucus amendment -- the one that didn't have the offset to pay for the repeal -- only got 44 votes? Do you know why? Well, part of the reason is... it wasn't paid for. And you know that Republicans hate stuff that's not paid for. Only Scott Brown (R-MA) and newly-minted Senator of the Year Mark Kirk (R-IL) voted for Baucus' amendment.
Only here's the thing: Remember that this amendment would have repealed a provision of law requiring that businesses report more transactions, and pay $19 billion more in taxes. So the repeal is essentially a $19 billion tax cut.
And tax cuts, Republicans are constantly claiming (when the tax cuts are designed for bazillionaires), do not have to be "paid for."
But this one does, of course! Why? Because... uh... well, because F you, Kenya Muslim Obama Hitler Socialism, that's why.
So, what did we learn? We learned that Republicans almost universally will abandon their principles in pursuit of setting up a poison pill vote for Democrats. Every Republican present voted for the Johanns repeal plus offset package, and only two of them voted for the Baucus repeal, even though they swear every other day of the year that tax cuts don't need to be paid for, and the repeal could have passed with 82 votes had they adhered to that position and really been in favor of "working together to get something done." Here were Congressional Democrats and the White House, willing to meet them halfway on declaring a provision of the health insurance reform bill to be the mistake and misstep that Republicans said it was, and to do so on terms that Republicans demand every day with respect to tax cuts, and they walked away from it, just so Democrats wouldn't be able to participate in doing something Republicans said would be the right thing to do.
But hey, good luck finding bipartisan compromise with them on, you know, everything else!