GOP to America: Drop Dead! ‘They had better do it, and decrease the surplus (labor) population’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Did you hear that the U.S. Senate passed the American Jobs Act on a vote of 51-49 last night? No?

That is because under the antiquated rules of the U.S. Senate that allows a minority — often only one senator — to block legislation, the Tea-Publicans invoked cloture and mounted a filibuster against the bill, requiring 60 votes to break their filibuster.

Americans are desperate and are demanding that Congress take action on creating jobs, and the GOP said to America "Drop Dead!" (reminiscent of the infamous New York Daily News cover in 1974). "They had better do it, and decrease the surplus (labor) population,'" in their tribute to Ebenezer Scrooge.

Two conservadems, Jim Webb (VA) and, of course, Ben Nelson (NE), voted with the Tea-Publicans. Buh-Bye boys, you are done.

Steve Benen writes at the Political Animal – GOP kills jobs bill despite majority support:

What mattered, though, was the margin and the roll call. And last night, the White House and Democratic senators reached their target.

President Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan foundered in the Senate on Tuesday night, as a unified Republican caucus and a pair of Democrats joined to deny the proposal the 60 votes needed to allow it to proceed to full consideration.

Obama will now use Republican opposition as part of a campaign to paint the GOP as obstructionists blocking his efforts to improve the economy while offering no alternative to create jobs.

After the vote, President Obama said in a statement, “Tonight, a majority of United States Senators voted to advance the American Jobs Act. But even though this bill contains the kind of proposals Republicans have supported in the past, their party obstructed the Senate from moving forward on this jobs bill.”

* * *

In the end, the American Jobs Act got 51 votes, and only two Dems — Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Montana’s Jon Tester — sided with Republicans. (The official final tally was 50 to 49, but that’s only because Reid had to switch his vote for procedural reasons.)

Ultimately, this became a fight over which side would be able to make its argument, and to that extent, Dems got what they wanted.

* * *

What matters most is that Senate Republicans, in the midst of a jobs crisis and intense public demand for congressional action, killed a credible jobs bill for no apparent reason. Most Americans support the American Jobs Act’s provisions; it enjoys strong support from economists; it includes ideas from both parties; and the CBO found it will even lower the deficit over the next decade.

And despite all of this, literally every Republican in the Senate — including the alleged “moderates” — not only rejected the popular jobs bill, they refused to even let the chamber vote on it at all. That should be the front-page story nationwide this morning.

Of course, it was not the front-page headline today. Well, except in the Weeper of The House, John Boehner's hometown newspaper.

Why is this? Our corporate media villagers have internalized GOP obstructionism as "normal" if not "acceptable." It is not. Steve Benen explains. Political Animal – There’s no need to obscure obstructionism:

There were no references to Republicans, the GOP, or obstructionism. A casual reader might not even realize that a majority of the Senate actually supported advancing the bill.

James Fallows sees a problem with this.

We have gone so far in recent years toward routinizing the once-rare requirement for a 60-vote Senate “supermajority” into an obstacle for every nomination and every bill that our leading newspaper can say that a measure “fails” when it gets more Yes than No votes. […]

Again, the subhead and story make the real situation clear. So how about a headline that says plainly what happened: “Obama’s Job Bill Blocked by GOP in Procedural Move”

It would fit. And it would help offset the mounting mis-impression that the Constitution dictates a 60-vote margin for getting anything done. 

Quite right. It seems that much of the political establishment sees the current breakdown of the American political process as somehow routine — Republicans block Democratic plans; Dems block Republican plans; this is just how the game is played.

Except it’s not. The legislative branch wasn’t designed to work this way, and for generations, it didn’t. Mandatory super-majorities to even have a debate on an important piece of legislation is wholly at odds with American norms and institutional practices. The Senate used to go decades without a cloture vote — now Republicans impose multiple filibusters on nearly every piece of legislation.

As Eric Boehlert put it a while back, “The Beltway press has mostly turned a blind, non-judgmental eye while the GOP has re-written the rules for governing from the minority. Yes, the press covers many of the votes that Republicans stymie. But there’s little or no media debate about what the Republican Party is actually doing, which is practicing obstructionism on a massive and previously unseen scale.”

The public almost certainly has no idea that this is happening, in large part because the media treats the status quo as a normal way of operating, rather than an unprecedented abuse that undermines American policymaking at a fundamental level.

So what comes next? Democrats will make the Tea-Publicans vote on every piece of the American Jobs Act separately, building a record of GOP votes against any job creation that Americans are demanding from Congress. Political Animal – Moving to Phase 2 on the jobs fight:

It’s not a bad approach. One of the underlying points of White House’s public relations campaign is to make Republicans pay a political price for rejecting a credible, popular, bipartisan jobs bill during an unemployment crisis. After last night’s vote, the new priority is apparently to make the GOP pay a political price more than once.

It’s one thing to reject a package deal; it’s intended to be even more damaging to force Republicans to vote against popular ideas, over and over again — no to infrastructure investments, no to small business tax cuts, no to saving teachers’ jobs, no to rebuilding schools, no to the jobs-for-veterans tax break, etc. The goal would be to get Republicans on record opposing every good idea on jobs.

* * *

The Dems’ strategy will, however, make the distinctions between the parties that much more striking in advance of an election year, and help President Obama argue that if Americans are looking for someone to blame for the weak economy, they can start with the party that kills jobs bills.

For months, GOP leaders have sought to avoid “co-ownership” of the economy. The Democratic approach is intended to put Republican names on the title.

"Mr. Boehner, where are the jobs?"will be the 2012 bumper sticker.

UPDATE: President Obama: "I will not take no for an answer."