THE OBAMA administration has scored a small victory for bipartisanship and the battle against unemployment by securing limited Republican support for a $15 billion (€11 billion) jobs Bill that is scheduled to be passed in the US Senate today.
Republicans used the threat of a filibuster to force a cloture vote, a device to shut down debate, on Monday afternoon. Five Republican senators sided with the Democrats in voting to close the debate. The motion was passed by 62 votes to 30.
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, said representatives in the lower chamber may pass the Senate Bill without any changes. That would leave a much larger, $154 billion jobs Bill in abeyance.
The first Republican to cast a vote for cloture was Scott Brown from Massachusetts. Ironically, it was his election that deprived the Democrats of their 60-strong filibuster-proof majority.
Mr Brown became the poster boy for American conservatives when he unexpectedly won the late Ted Kennedy’s seat last month, after campaigning against healthcare reform.
“I came to Washington to be an independent voice, to put politics aside and to do everything in my power to help create jobs for Massachusetts families,” Mr Brown explained after the vote. “This Senate jobs Bill is not perfect . . . but it contains measures that will help put people back to work.”
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Bill will create 234,000 jobs. It will exempt employers who hire the jobless from paying the 6.2 per cent Social Security tax in 2010. A further tax credit of $1,000 will be paid for each employee who is kept for more than one year. The Bill also extends a tax break for small businesses who invest in new equipment, and expands government works projects, mainly highways.
The original draft legislation, proposed by the Democratic senator Max Baucus and the Republican senator Charles Grassley, would have cost $85 billion, including $31 billion in corporate tax breaks sought by Republicans. It looked like sour grapes when all but five Republican senators voted No to the stripped-down Bill, the substance of which was in the original bipartisan Bill.
Only one Democrat, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted No, perhaps because the White House axed the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback” intended for his state from the healthcare plan it published on Monday.
President Barack Obama praised the Senate vote, saying, “The American people want to see Washington put aside partisan differences and make progress on jobs, and today the Senate took one important step forward in doing that.”
By passing a stripped-down jobs Bill, focused mainly on the Social Security tax exemption, Harry Reid struck a blow for incrementalists in Congress who argue that achieving consensus on small, step-by-step measures is the only way to carry out reform in highly polarised US politics.
“I hope this is a beginning of a new day here in the Senate,” Mr Reid said after the vote. Mr Reid believes Congress should work through a “jobs agenda” over time, passing successive pieces of legislation that will gradually adopt measures abandoned in the bigger draft Bills.
Some of Mr Obama’s own Democratic allies argue that he should have pursued healthcare reform in a similar fashion. For example, there is broad consensus that insurance companies should not be able to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions.
It remains to be seen whether Monday’s break in the Republicans’ filibuster siege can be repeated.
Until recently, the filibuster was a weapon used sparingly by the opposition. But over the past year, Republicans systematically used the mere threat of a filibuster to block legislation.
Liberal Democrats criticise Harry Reid for caving in each time the Democrats were short of the 60 votes required for cloture, rather than forcing the Republicans to make a spectacle of themselves reading from telephone directories or the Bible to stall legislation.