Senate Republicans, with an assist from everyone's favorite traitor, are likely to
kill the jobs bill in a vote today.
In making the case for the bill, the White House cites economists like Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, who predicts that the measure would add 2 percentage points of growth to the economy, add 1.9 million payroll jobs, and reduce unemployment by a percentage point. But Republicans point to optimistic predictions about the 2009 measure that didn't come to pass; unemployment hovers just above 9 percent nationwide.
Republicans say the 2009 stimulus measure was an expensive failure and that the current plan is just like it.[...] "It's not a jobs bill. In our view, it's another stimulus bill," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Fox News last week. "I don't think it'll pass and I don't think it should." House GOP leaders say they won't bring the measure to the floor.
What Republicans are not saying out loud is that they are rooting for more economic failure as their key to a disgruntled populace voting against President Obama and House Democrats in 2012. So Democrats are figuring out Plan B for job creation, breaking up the bill into its component pieces and trying to pass them individually.
Behind the scenes, Senate Democrats are trying to develop a Plan B: a series of smaller bills that actually have a chance of passing a badly divided Congress.
For instance, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has been quietly courting some Senate Republicans and Democrats to see whether there is any appetite for merging a GOP-backed idea—a tax holiday for corporations to bring home their overseas profits—with a Democratic-supported plan of creating a national infrastructure bank. At the same time, Democrats are weighing whether to push ahead with other individual pieces of the president's jobs plan, like its extension of the payroll tax cut.[...]
Schumer has won over some liberals in his caucus like Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. And he plans to add to the infrastructure bank an incentive for Democrats skeptical of the repatriation holiday: a proposal backed by labor unions ensuring that contractors pay a prevailing wage to workers as specified under the Davis-Bacon Act.
Obama's jobs plan includes an infrastructure bank with an initial $10 billion investment that would identify major projects—such as for wastewater treatment, energy production and rehabbing roads and bridges—that need funding in order to serve the public's interests.
The repatriation tax holiday is a less than popular idea for good reason, it's a tax giveaway to large corporations which in the past have responded by cutting jobs. It's not a proven job creator, but Schumer likes it, so he's going to try to sweeten this bitter pill for Democrats who hate the idea (including Sen. Kent Conrad, hardly a liberal, who says "Repatriation was a complete and utter failure at job generation; in fact, if you go back and look at those firms that were the biggest beneficiary of repatriation, they reduced employment in the United States.")
It's questionable if this will work, both because it depends on Republican promises that maybe they'll think about voting for some component (the football about to be snatched back) and the time it would take to consider and pass multiple bills when the Congress has major budget deadlines looming. What a series of failed jobs votes would do, however, is solidify politically the message that Republicans are keeping American unemployed.