WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite a campaign-style push
this week by President Barack Obama, the Senate on Thursday scuttled pared-back
jobs legislation aimed at helping state and local governments avoid layoffs of
teachers and firefighters.
Obama's three-day bus tour through North Carolina
and Virginia — states crucial to his re-election race next year — didn't change
any minds among Senate Republicans, who filibustered Obama's latest jobs
measure to death just as they killed his broader $447 billion jobs plan last
week.
The 50-50 vote came in relation to a motion to
simply take up the bill and fell well short of the 60 needed to break a
filibuster. Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and
Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut broke with Obama on the vote. Two
Democrats who voted with the president, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and
Jon Tester of Montana, however, said they couldn't support the underlying Obama
plan unless it's changed.
Thursday's $35 billion measure combined $30 billion
for state and local governments to hire teachers and other school workers with
$5 billion to help pay the salaries of police officers, firefighters and other
first responders. The White House says the measure would "support"
almost 400,000 education jobs for one year. Republicans call that a temporary
"sugar high" for the economy.
Obama and his Democratic allies are acting like
they've found a winning issue in repeatedly pressing popular ideas such as
infrastructure spending and boosting hiring of police officers and
firefighters. The sluggish economy and lower tax revenues have caused many
teachers' jobs to be cut over the past several years.
"For the second time in two weeks, every
single Republican in the United States Senate has chosen to obstruct a bill
that would create jobs and get our economy going again," Obama said in a
statement after the vote. "Every American deserves an explanation as to
why Republicans refuse to step up to the plate and do what's necessary to
create jobs and grow the economy right now."
"We cannot afford to be bailing out local
governments, and we can't afford stimulus 2.0," countered Sen. Marco
Rubio, R-Fla.
After the failure of the jobs measure last week,
Democrats vowed to try to resurrect it on a piece by piece basis, even though
the strategy doesn't seem to have any better chance of success. But Democrats
are trying to win a political advantage through repeated votes.
They're also pressing for passage of a poll-tested
financing mechanism — a surcharge on income exceeding $1 million.
An AP-GfK poll taken Oct. 13-17 found 62 percent of
respondents favoring the surcharge as a way to pay for jobs initiatives. Just
26 percent opposed the idea.
"Protecting millionaires and defeating
President Obama are more important to my Republican colleagues than creating
jobs and getting our economy back on track," Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid, D-Nev., said.
Republicans say the president is more interested in
picking political fights with them than seeking compromise. Still, they don't
seem to be afraid of a politically weakened Obama. Not a single Republican
backed the president in last week's vote
At the same time, several Democrats opposed the
underlying measure, even though they voted in favor of at least allowing debate
to begin.
"This bill fails to give taxpayers any
guarantee that this money would actually be used to hire teachers and invest in
our schools," Tester said. "States would get loads of money with
little guidance that they spend the money on teachers."
According to the AP-GfK poll, Obama's party has
lost the faith of the public on handling the economy. In the new poll, only 38
percent said they trust Democrats to do a better job than Republicans in
handling the economy, the first time Democrats have fallen below 40 percent in
the poll. Some 43 percent trust the Republicans more.
Immediately after the vote on Obama's plan,
Democrats turned the tables and filibustered Republican-backed legislation that
would prevent the government from withholding 3 percent of payments to
government contractors. The legislation failed to get the 60 votes needed to
end the filibuster on a 57-43 vote, even though 10 Democrats voted to advance
it.
Many Democrats and President Barack Obama support
the idea but opposed it Thursday because it would be paid for with $30 billion
in cuts from domestic agency spending. Advocates of repealing the withholding
requirement say it will help create jobs, especially from contractors on large
projects with smaller profit margins.
The withholding law was passed in 2006 by a
GOP-controlled Congress. Then, the idea then was to make sure contractors
couldn't duck their taxes and was imposed after government investigators found
that thousands of federal contractors owed taxes.
The GOP-controlled House is likely to pass the
measure next week and Reid promised that the Senate would revisit the issue,
though there's likely to be a split between the House and Senate over how to
pay for the cost of repealing the withholding rule.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, speaking
the day after Obama returned from bus tour, said the president's jobs plan has
the advantage of providing an immediate kick to the economy.
"The Republicans don't have proposals that
would help the economy grow or help it create jobs now," Carney said.
"That's the comparison."
Republicans also want to roll back government
regulations that they say choke job growth. They backed free-trade pacts with
South Korea, Colombia and Panama that were ratified this month. They also back
extending tax breaks for businesses that buy new equipment and favor offering a
$4,800 tax credit to companies that hire veterans.
Democrats and the White House, meanwhile, are
confident that other elements of Obama's larger jobs bill, including extending
cuts in Social Security payroll taxes, will pass. A 2 percentage point payroll
tax cut enacted last year expires at the end of the year. Obama has proposed
cutting it by an additional percentage point and extending the cut to the first
$5 million of a company's payroll.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
