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| Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
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Jon-David talks to Congressman Michael Burgess at 5:35P CT TODAY!!!!
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: December 20, 2011
WASHINGTON —
House Republicans on Tuesday soundly rejected a bill approved by the Senate
that would have extended the payroll
taxcut for most Americans beyond the end of the year and allowed
millions of unemployed people to continue receiving jobless benefits.
The House vote, which passed 229 to 193,
also calls for establishing a negotiating committee so the two chambers can
resolve their differences. Seven Republicans joined Democrats in
opposition.
But the Senate has left town for the year, and
Democrats say they do not intend to call it back, putting continuation of the
tax cut in jeopardy and leaving a shadow over many unemployed Americans as the
holidays near.
It was far from clear whether the two sides
would be able to bridge the gap by year’s end. If they fail to do so, payroll
taxes for 160 million Americans will rise to 6.2 percent, from 4.2
percent, in January, for an average annual increase of roughly $1,000.
Republicans said the two-month extensions
provided by the Senate bill left too much uncertainty at a time of deep
economic vulnerability and would leave Congress facing the same thorny issues
early in the new year. They said it was a deeply inadequate half-measure that
represented the old ways of Congress.
Immediately after the vote, Speaker John A.
Boehner released a letter to the president, saying that he agreed with Mr.
Obama on the need for a full-year extension of the tax cut and unemployment
benefits.
“There are still 11 days before the end of the
year, and with so many Americans struggling, there is no reason they should be
wasted,” Mr. Boehner wrote. “You have said many times that Congress must do its
work before taking vacation. Because we agree, our negotiators and the
House stand ready to work through the holidays. I ask you to call on the
Senate to return to appoint negotiators so that we can provide the American
people the economic certainty they need.”
But in a surprise appearance in the White House
briefing room immediately after the vote, President Obama called on House
Republican leaders to approve the Senate bill, saying that it was the only way
forward. Without such action, the president said, not only would taxes go
up and millions of Americans would lose their unemployment benefits, but the
economy would suffer as paychecks shrunk.
“Right now, the bipartisan compromise that was
reached on Saturday is the only viable way to prevent a tax hike on Jan. 1 —
it’s the only one,” Mr. Obama said.
Speaking with somber intensity, Mr. Obama, who
had just returned from a ceremony at Andrews Air Base marking the end of the Iraq war, said
that the stakes for Americans were high. “This is not poker, this is not a
game, this shouldn’t be politics as usual,” he said.
“The recovery is fragile but it is moving in
the right direction,” Mr. Obama said, adding that failure to act quickly “could
have an effect on the economy as a whole.”
“The clock is ticking, time is running out,
and if House Republicans refuse to vote for the Senate bill or even
allow it to come up for a vote, taxes will go up in 11 days,” the president
said.
Rather than have a straight up-or-down vote,
the House on Tuesday implemented a procedural maneuver in which it “rejected”
the Senate bill while requesting to go to conference with members of that
chamber in a single measure, protecting House members from having to actually
cast a politically unpopular vote against extending a payroll tax cut.
Before the vote, Representative Jeb Hensarling
of Texas, a
member of the House Republican leadership, said on CNN that “House Republicans
stand ready to work over the holidays, like many other Americans have to do, to
get this done.”
Democrats, seeming to feel the political wind
at their back, said the other party had missed its best chance to protect the
economic interests of the middle class.
The bill that the Senate passed on Saturday,
in an 89-to-10 vote, would also prevent a sharp cut in the fees paid to doctors
who accept Medicare. Some Republican senators, including Senator Scott
P. Brown of Massachusetts and Senator Richard
G. Lugar of Indiana,
have called on their counterparts in the House to support that vote.
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California,
the House Democratic leader, blaming “the extreme Tea Party element of the Republicans in the House,” noted
during the floor debate that Republicans had said a two-month extension was too
short. “They’ve never wanted a tax cut, and now they’re saying the tax cut for
middle-income people is too small,” she said. “So what is it?”
With tempers growing short and pressure rising
for a deal, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican
leader, seemed to strike a particularly conciliatory tone.
“We need to come together in a responsible
manner to find common ground where we can accomplish everyone’s goal of a
year-long payroll tax extension,” Mr. Cantor said during the floor debate. “Mr.
Speaker, there is no reason why the House, the Senate and the president cannot
spend next two weeks working to get that done. America will be waiting.”
Senate Democrats, however, have said they
would not return to the Capitol to negotiate further until the House passed the
short-term bill, one that Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, negotiated
and voted for, along with 38 other Republican senators on Saturday.
The House had been planning to vote on the
two-month payroll tax bill on Monday night. But after a two-hour meeting of
their caucus, House Republican leaders postponed the floor debate and the vote
to Tuesday.
During the conference meeting among Republican
members, some members expressed concern about effectively voting for a tax
increase on the eve of an election year, said some who attended.
The standoff leaves Mr. Boehner ending the
year exactly where he began, in the middle of a nasty fiscal fight with Senate
Democrats and his conservative freshmen in revolt, making it difficult to find
a middle ground between mollifying his conference and coming up with
legislation to avert disaster. But Mr. Boehner said repeatedly on Monday that he
believed a deal for a one-year extension could still be struck, even with the
Senate essentially adjourned for the year and the tax break set to expire on
Jan. 1.
“I don’t believe the differences are that
significant that we can’t do this for a whole year,” Mr. Boehner said. “Why
punt this until the end of February when we can just do this now and get it
over with?”
Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and
majority leader, urged Mr. Boehner to allow an up-or-down vote. ”With millions
of Americans struggling to make ends meet, it would be unconscionable for
Speaker Boehner to block a bipartisan agreement that would protect middle-class
families from the thousand-dollar tax increase looming on January first,” Mr.
Reid said in a statement.
Jennifer Steinhauer
and Robert Pear contributed reporting.
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