Senate Rejects Obama's Jobs Plan

UPDATED: As expected, the Senate rejected President Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan Tuesday, ending its legislative life as an assembled package. 

The bill fell well short of the 60 votes needed to proceed, garnering support from only 50 members while 49 members opposed it. 

Sens. Bob Nelson (D-Neb.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) joined Republicans in opposing the bill, but centrist Democratic Sens. Jim Web and Joe Lieberman, who voted in favor of debating the bill, said they’d vote against the bill in a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ situation. 

Obama’s jobs plan may be dead as a unified deal, but Democrats will continue to push to pass the bill piece by piece. A proposal to extend payroll tax cuts could be the first among many smaller provisions to be passed. 

The Senate is also expected Wednesday to pass three lingering trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia that have been touted by both Republicans and Democrats as job creators. 

This story was updated at 8:21a.m. EST…

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has hit the road in recent weeks, using more than a dozen public appearances to push Congress to vote on and pass his American Jobs Act as a whole. 

The Senate will be the first body to act on the president’s jobs bill, with a vote expected Tuesday evening. However, the effort led by Obama to label congressional Republicans as obstructionists could put vulnerable Democrats facing tough reelections in a bind. 

Sen. Chuck Schumer tiptoed around questions from NBC’s Chuck Todd over the amount of Democratic support the bill would receive in the upper chamber, only saying that “you are going to see the overwhelming majority of Democrats vote for a jobs bill.”

The third-ranking Senate Democrat expressed little optimism on the jobs bill’s chances of surviving a Senate vote.

“We are not going to get their votes today,” Schumer said of a number of moderate Senate Republicans.

President Obama indicated late last week in a news conference with reporters that he would pursue a piece-by-piece approach to getting his jobs bill through Congress should Tuesday’s vote be shot down. It seems as though Democrats in the Senate have taken that notion to heart as rumors of a “Plan B,” which breaks the bill into smaller provisions with a higher probability of garnering bipartisan support, have already begun taking shape. 

Meanwhile, labor leaders are literally praying for the bill to pass. A small group of labor leaders, including members of the Service Employees International Union, are expected to hold a prayer vigil on Capitol Hill just before senators are expected to vote. 

Unemployment Rate Unwavered By Uptick In Jobs Numbers

The United States exceeded economists’ expectations by adding 103,000 jobs to the nation’s workforce in September, but the uptick did little to shake an idle unemployment rate as it sits unchanged at 9.1 percent, according to the Labor Department.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics credits the expansion in employment to the 45,000 disgruntled Verizon employees previously on strike who have returned to work, accounting for nearly half of all job creation last month.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus took the opportunity to blast the president’s jobs bill, calling it “Stimulus 2.0” and denouncing its touted potential impact on the country’s economy.

“Today’s disappointing jobs report underscores why President Obama’s Stimulus 2.0 is not the answer to put Americans back to work. After putting $825 billion on the nation’s credit card only to have 32 straight months of unemployment at 8 percent or above, it is remarkable that the President would double down on the same policies at the tune of nearly half a trillion dollars in more ‘stimulus’ spending,” said Priebus.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was even less than enthusiastic about September’s “sad numbers” saying Democrats “need to stop campaigning, start listening and start working,” a likely rollover from Thursday’s Obama’s-thrown-in-the-towel jab.

“Our unemployment rate has been higher than eight percent for more than two-and-a-half years, far above what [Obama] promised with the ‘stimulus,’” Boehner said in a statement.

Katherine Abraham, a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, also acknowledged that the stagnant 9.1 percent unemployment rate was “unacceptably high” and promoted the American Jobs Act as a means to expedite the economic recovery process.

“Clearly, we need faster economic growth to put Americans back to work,” Abraham said, but she reminded that September’s jobs numbers be taken with a grain of salt.

“The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision,” she said. “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.”

Boehner: Obama Has Given Up Governing

Speaker of the House John Boehner accused President Obama of having “thrown in the towel” on governing to turn his focus to campaigning for reelection at a Washington Ideas Forum Thursday.

“Mr. President, why have you given up on the country and decided to campaign full-time?” Boehner asked.

Disappointed with the summer’s negotiations on the debt ceiling limit, the Speaker said he continues to be willing to “sit down with the President any day, any time to seek common ground” and even put revenues on the table as long as the President agrees to address entitlement reform.

“It takes two to tango, and the President never said ‘yes,’” Boehner said.

A couple topics where Boehner and Obama can agree on, however, are Afghanistan and the Chinese currency manipulation bill.

Boehner reinforced his argument against passing the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Bill that would punish countries like China for manipulating their currency, something he says the President agrees with.

“For the Congress to pass legislation to force the Chinese to do what is arguably very difficult to do I think is wrong, is dangerous and could start a trade war,” he said.

The Speaker is also supportive of Obama’s decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan saying Obama “has done just fine” in continuing to take on the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

As for the super committee he helped create to find $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, Boehner said he is “firmly committed to ensuring that the [committee] come to an outcome,” emphasizing that no one wants automatic spending cuts to happen.

Boehner also commented on the Republican presidential campaign supporting Sarah Palin’s decision not to run for president in 2012. 

“She made the right decision for herself,” he said, but added that he hopes Palin will campaign for other Republican candidates.

Dems, Labor Groups Team To Reject Trade Deals

By Lisa Kellman

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) called for “Main street not Wall street” at an AFL-CIO rally today to oppose three new free trade agreements (FTAs) Congress is set to vote on.

Union members and leaders joined federal lawmakers to criticize the trio of agreements with Colombia, Korea and Panama sent by the Obama administration yesterday to Congress.

Tom Buffenbarger, President of IAM, argued that 159,000 Americans will lose their jobs to South Korea and that all three countries lacked proper human rights and labor provisions.

Former President George W Bush negotiated these agreements, which were initially opposed by President Obama. Despite changes made to the agreements, Rep. Mike Michaud (D-Maine) claimed that they mirror the NAFTA accord reached years ago, which he called dangerous.

Congress may believe that the agreements will help businesses by “export(ing) more products overseas, but the only thing that they are going to be exporting is American jobs,” Michaud said.

While free trade agreements like NAFTA have been created for better relations with other nations and with the promise of more American jobs, better business projections and higher standards of living, “NAFTA failed style agreements” Buffenbarger said “cost our nation millions of jobs.” 

Buffenbarger and Michaud were joined by United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, and Democrats Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Jan Schakowky (D-Ill.) who all called for attendees to talk to their representatives about voting no on the free trade agreements.

“Congress is run by Wall Street, K Street, and by money but there is one thing that congress pays attention to and that is the voters in their district,” said Michaud.

Dems React To Boehner's Resistance On China Bill

By Adrianna McGinley

House Republicans must schedule a vote on a bill addressing Chinese currency manipulation, said Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) and other House Democrats on Tuesday.

The House Ways and Means Committee ranking Democrat and other supporters of the bill said the legislation would create jobs in the U.S.

“There’s been no jobs legislation that has come out of the Republican majority here,” Levin said. “This is a jobs bill, and it is coming over most certainly from the Senate, and so the question will be whether the House leadership will let us vote on it. They know if it comes up for a vote, it will pass.”

Democrats who spoke took issue with House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) assertion that the bill would be “dangerous” for Congress to take up.

“This is a message from the Republican party, from Speaker Boehner, to all those small and medium size manufacturers all across the industrial Midwest that your help…is dead on arrival,” said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio). “The Republican party no longer represents the small and medium size manufacturer.”

Levin said his years of experience in trade dismiss concerns from critics who say the bill could lead to a “trade war” with China. Levin said American businesses are already on an uneven playing field with the industrial powerhouse.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) heavily criticized Republicans for not acting on the bill, saying they are inhibiting economic recovery.

“They don’t want Barack Obama to have one bit of success,” said the ranking member of the House Trade Subcommittee. “They will do anything to our economy in order to prevent him from having any lessening of the unemployment rate in this country.”

Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) agreed, saying Congress not only needs to act on this bill, but also on the president’s jobs bill, and he urged reporters to ask Republicans “why won’t you take up the job creation bills?”