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Dems’ payroll-tax-cut extension goes down again in Senate
Senate Republicans blocked the latest installment of President Obama’s jobs plan — a bill to extend the payroll-tax cut — for the second week in a row Thursday.
The bill, titled the Middle Class Tax Cut Act, was shot down 50-48. It would have cut the payroll tax paid by employees to 3.1 percent from the current 4.2 percent while funding itself by imposing a surtax on millionaires.
Senate leadership and the White House spent much of the week assailing Republicans over their opposition to the plan. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) sought to once again place Republicans in the awkward position of having to vote against a tax cut.
"Republicans in Congress dismiss our plan at their own peril," he warned on Monday.
Democrats also decided to shrink the price tag on the legislation in hopes of attracting Republican defections and to frame the new piece of legislation as “a compromise.”
Republicans, however, showed themselves unwilling to swallow the tax hike on the rich, and some, like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), scoffed at the idea that it represented a serious compromise.
“The majority leader has yet to introduce legislation that can actually pass the Senate or the House,” McConnell said Tuesday.
Republicans last week answered Democratic accusations that they opposed a tax cut by proposing their own plan to extend the payroll tax cut. Republicans proposed paying for their cut by reducing the size of the federal workforce through attrition and freezing federal employee pay for three more years. That plan, penned by Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), garnered just 20 votes last week.
The Republicans brought the same bill to the floor Thursday, and it gathered only 22 votes.
Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) complained that the GOP was wasting the Senate’s time.
“This is an exercise in futility, to vote on this again,” he said. “We should move beyond this measure that got 20 votes last week.”
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