Senate Rejects Obama's Jobs Plan
Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 8:21AMUPDATED: 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.
Democrats Downplay Special Election Implications
DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D-Fla.) downplayed the GOP upset in a conference call with reporters Wednesday, saying that pundits should not draw predictions on the 2012 presidential election based on the results from Tuesday’s special elections.
“If you’re looking for predictions like that, you should really be looking at the president’s standing against the Republican candidates in the battleground states, not the results of two House special elections; one of which was in a ruby red district which the Republicans carried even in 2008,” Wasserman Shultz said.
“The other seat opened up under what can best be called unusual circumstances,” the DNC chair said of former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s departure.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who also served New York’s ninth congressional district for 18 years, said that the district’s demographics have changed since he served in the ’80s and ’90s and that it should not be classified as a bellwether district. Schumer said the district’s Orthodox Jewish population has become more prominent and has created a more conservative base.
“The bottom line is it’s not a bellwether district,” Schumer said. “Anybody who tries to extrapolate between what’s happened in [NY-9] and what would happen in New York City, New York state or the country is making a big mistake.”