If you think Pres. Obama and his White House staff didn't know Reid was going to pull this stunt, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you. In fact they probably secretly advised him to do it.
I guess this is Reid's way of appealing to the Democrats' Progressive base.
This proves Democrats don't really want Bi-Partisanship, they just want to control Republican leaders.
Reid's About-Face stuns Dems, White House
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led colleagues and the White House to believe he supported a bipartisan jobs bill — only to scuttle the plan as soon as it was released Thursday over concerns it could be used to batter Democratic incumbents, according to Senate sources.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) worked for weeks with Reid's blessing and frequent involvement to craft an $85 billion jobs bill, a measure that seemed destined to break the partisan logjam that has ground the Senate to a halt.
But as Baucus, Grassley and President Barack Obama were preparing to celebrate a rare moment of bipartisan Kumbaya on Thursday, Reid stunned a meeting of Senate Democrats by announcing he was scrapping Baucus-Grassley, replacing it with a much cheaper, more narrowly crafted, $15 billion version.
"Grassley and three to four Republicans would have voted for it, but all the other Republicans would have beaten the living s—t out of us [during the 2010 midterms], claiming the bill was too bloated," said a Democrat who supported Reid's decision, explaining the leader's logic.
Few felt as good about the decision: Republicans say the about-face will only add to an already poisonous partisan atmosphere, liberal Democrats think the bill is too small to do much good and the powerful negotiators of the bipartisan package were left embarrassed, demoralized and befuddled.
Aides to Baucus and Grassley said their bosses didn't know of Reid's decision when they unveiled their bill early Thursday – and expected it to have the leader's support.
"Sen. Reid's announcement sends a message that he wants to go partisan and blame Republicans," Grassley spokesperson Jill Kozeny said in a statement.
Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who supported the bipartisan effort, said her boss was “deeply disappointed that the majority leader has abandoned a genuine bipartisan compromise only hours after it was unveiled in favor of business-as-usual, partisan gamesmanship.”
The White House also appeared to be caught off guard.
Moments before Reid announced his decision, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs released a statement, saying, "The draft bill released today by Sens. Baucus and Grassley includes several of the president's top priorities for job creation. [T]he president is hopeful that the draft language presented today will lead to a bipartisan Senate bill."
An unapologetic Reid told reporters Thursday that he'd made his decision before walking into the Democrats' Thursday lunch at the Capitol — a lunch that began just as the White House sent out Gibbs’s message.
"I made the decision before I came to the caucus," Reid said. "I just wanted to make sure that [members of the caucus] were supportive of what I was doing, and they are very supportive."
Reid spokesman Jim Manley later said that Reid had decided Thursday morning to push his package and had entered the lunch meeting with the intention of offering those gathered a choice between Baucus-Grassley and his own stripped-down bill.
"In the end, this is the direction the caucus decided to go," said Manley, who emphasized that many of the elements stripped from the bipartisan measure will be appended to later bills.
But people who were in the room painted a somewhat different picture, saying Reid's proposal was met with a mixture of confusion and outrage from senators upset about having their pet projects redacted – even after Reid promised to include their proposals in subsequent jobs bills.
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she'd like more provisions increasing lending to small business and fewer tax cuts. And Iowa Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin argued passionately that, if lawmakers plan to extend corporate tax breaks, they should also extend employment insurance.
"[Reid's] trying to keep it simple," Harkin said emerging from the meeting, "but what I think ought to be in the package is unemployment insurance for one year."
And Baucus seemed puzzled by the change in course, particularly Reid’s decision to drop a package of tax extenders from the bill – a piece with strong bipartisan backing.
"Every senator has a different idea," said Baucus, emerging from the meeting. "There's been no decisions made."
But aides said that Reid was tired of constant lobbying from Democrats who wanted a bigger package and a long list of specific provisions included in the bill. Reid complained that the various requests had "watered down" the Democrats' job-creation message and wanted to present voters with a more streamlined bill.
Staffers added that the Nevada Democrat, fighting an uphill reelection battle, was frustrated that Republicans leaders, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), weren't fully committed to the bill.
In what appeared to be an attempt to isolate the majority leader, McConnell pushed to offer the Baucus-Grassley plan on the floor Thursday night, saying it would allow the Senate to work on unemployment insurance -- something left out of Reid's plan.
Aides involved in the negotiations say that Republicans in leadership and on Baucus's Finance Committee emerged from a meeting Tuesday saying they were close to agreement on the Baucus-Grassley bill -and that McConnell just needed to brief his caucus before signing on, a process slowed by a week of crippling snow storms.
"They came out and said we are in a good place we are just making sure we are talking to people," said a Republican aide. "All sides wouldn't have worked this long and this hard on this unless they were committed to making this happen."
Deal on Jobs Shows Limits of Push for Bi-partisanship
Key Democrats and Republicans in the Senate reached a rare bipartisan agreement on Thursday on steps to spur job creation. But Democratic leaders said they would move ahead on only some elements as the two parties maneuvered to address both the struggling economy and voter unrest over gridlock in Washington.
Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said he would take four core job-creating initiatives from the bipartisan proposal — including tax breaks for businesses that hire unemployed workers and increased public works spending — and seek to move those rapidly through the Senate.
“We feel that the American people need a message,” Mr. Reid said. “The message that they need is that we’re doing something about jobs.”
Yet his decision to embrace only portions of the bipartisan plan developed by Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, caught some lawmakers by surprise and threatened to undermine Republican support for the proposal even as members of Congress and the White House sought ways of working together across party lines after months of deep partisan division.
The White House projected Thursday that unemployment would fall this year by only a little, if at all, and would remain well over 6 percent until 2015.
While Mr. Reid stripped out of the bipartisan bill some tax breaks and other provisions intended to win Republican support, as well as special-interest provisions to win the backing of specific senators, the scaled-back package retained a combination of tax cuts and spending with the potential to win support from both parties.
The centerpiece is a payroll tax holiday that would waive the 6.2 percent Social Security tax for any employer who hires a worker who has been out of a job for at least 60 days. In addition, the bill would provide a $1,000 income tax credit for every new employee retained for at least 52 weeks.
It would also extend a tax break that would allow businesses to write off up to $250,000 in capital investments in 2010 rather than depreciating the costs over time, and reauthorize spending on road and transit programs through the end of the year. And it would allow state and local governments to receive a federal subsidy for a portion of the interest paid on bonds that finance public works projects.
The cost of the package laid out by Mr. Reid would be at least $15 billion over the next decade.
Hours before Mr. Reid’s announcement, Mr. Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, and Mr. Grassley, the senior Republican on the panel, had unveiled a broader, $85 billion agreement that also included an array of other provisions intended to generate support. They included extended unemployment benefits and health care for the unemployed as well as the renewal of an array of tax breaks that are due to expire.
That proposal had drawn backing from top Republicans and Democrats as well as the White House. Some of the authors of its provisions, including Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said they were left perplexed by Mr. Reid’s decision to scale it back and were now unsure they could support any bill.
“Needless to say, Senator Hatch is deeply disappointed that the majority leader has abandoned a genuine bipartisan compromise only hours after it was unveiled in favor of business-as-usual, partisan gamesmanship,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Mr. Hatch, who helped write a provision suspending the payroll tax for companies that hire out-of-work people.
Democrats said Mr. Reid’s hand was forced by objections from rank-and-file Democrats that the measure was not focused tightly enough on job creation and included too many corporate tax breaks they viewed as concessions to Republicans.
At the same time, they said, Republican leaders had made no firm commitment to support the measure and they feared they could face conservative attacks for extraneous provisions like disaster aid for Arkansas and Mississippi.
“I would prefer a jobs bill that simply focuses on some specific job-creating initiatives,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.
The dust-up over the jobs bill reflects the difficulties the parties are finding in working together even as lawmakers from both sides realize that voters want to see more cooperation and less confrontation. And both sides are making overtures.
Also on Thursday, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking Committee, and Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, said they would cooperate in trying to overhaul regulation of the financial services industry after earlier bipartisan talks seemed to falter.
The administration also continues to work to find Republican support for Mr. Obama’s plan to create a bipartisan commission to rein in the budget deficit. In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week published Thursday, the president said he would set no preconditions on steps the commission might propose to bring the budget back toward balance, even if it meant consideration of tax increases on the middle class — a step Mr. Obama vowed during the 2008 presidential campaign not to support.
At the White House, Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, encouraged lawmakers to find a way to work together.
“The American people want to see Washington put aside partisan differences and make progress on jobs,” Mr. Gibbs said.
Republicans were more receptive to the bipartisan jobs proposal than they have been to Democratic initiatives this year, but the leadership had not pledged its backing on the floor. On Thursday, before Mr. Reid pared back the bill, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called it a work in progress.
The hesitation by top Republicans and the prospect that they would want to propose politically charged amendments made Democrats question whether the opposition was serious about cooperating and reminded them of Republican overtures on health care that later fell through.
Some Democrats noted that Mr. Baucus had spent months negotiating with Mr. Grassley on health care legislation only to come away empty-handed, ultimately costing the Senate valuable time on the issue.
Mr. Reid said he still hoped to win some Republican backing for the trimmed-down jobs measure since they had professed to support the individual provisions.
“Republicans are going to have to make a choice,” he said.
But Republicans said that it was Mr. Reid who had made a choice, the wrong one.
“The majority leader pulled the rug out from work to build broad-based support for tax relief and other efforts to help the private sector recover from the economic crisis,” said Jill Kozeny, a spokeswoman for Mr. Grassley.
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Sources: Politico, NY Times, Google Maps
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