Tea-Publican filibusters prevent the Senate from even discussing job creation

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

After President Barack Obama's $447 billion American Jobs Act was filibustered in the U.S. Senate by Tea-Publicans, a key component of his jobs plan that would provide $35 billion to cash strapped states to hire and retain teachers and first responders was also filibusterd by Tea-Publicans late Thursday night. Tea-Publican filibusters are preventing the Senate from even discussing job creation. Tea-Publicans are sabotaging the American economy for partisan political ends. Political Animal – Republicans 1, Teachers and First Responders 0:

The proposal on the table seemed like a no-brainer. The public sector has been hemorrhaging jobs, dragging down the economy, and undermining the quality of public services. The White House and congressional Democrats came up with a pretty straightforward solution: direct $35 billion to states in order to protect/create 400,000 jobs for school teachers, police officers, and firefighters.

Sensitive to budget constraints, Dems agreed the bill shouldn’t increase the deficit at all, so they agreed to finance the plan with a 0.5% surtax that would only affect millionaires and billionaires — and even that wouldn’t kick in until 2013.

The public is demanding Washington act on the jobs crisis, and this proposal enjoyed very strong support from the American mainstream. A CNN poll released this week found that 75% of the public — and 63% of self-identified Republican voters — endorsed this jobs proposal, and 76% agreed with the financing plan.

In these divisive times, 75% of Americans don’t agree on much, but they all wanted Congress to pass this bill.

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And yet, here we are.

For the second time in 10 days, the Senate on Thursday rejected Democratic efforts to take up a jobs bill championed by President Obama.

The vote to advance the bill was 50 to 50. Democrats needed 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. 

Keep in mind, the GOP’s filibuster last night was on the motion to proceed — they blocked the Senate’s ability to even discuss the jobs bill.

How many Republicans broke ranks and agreed that the proposal deserved an up-or-down vote? Zero. Not even one alleged “moderate” mustered the courage to give a wildly popular jobs bill a chance to get a vote.

Three conservative members of the Democratic caucus — Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Mark Pryor — sided with Republicans.

The outcome didn’t come as a surprise, which is probably why it isn’t a bigger story in the media, but that shouldn’t make the developments any less scandalous. Do conservative senators not realize there’s a jobs crisis in America? Or is it more likely they’re aware of the problem and simply prefer not to act?

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Something has gone terribly wrong. There is no “tempo of urgency.” I don’t know who Republicans are talking to, but they need to talk to the average person and explain why they care more about preventing a tiny tax increase on the wealthiest of the wealthy — an extra half a penny on the dollar for millionaires and billionaires — than hundreds of thousands of jobs for teachers and first responders.

Steve Benen writes ‘They’ve turned the world inside out’:

Republicans aren’t just prepared to filibuster job-creation efforts, they’re also going to filibuster the Senate’s ability to discuss job-creation efforts.

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It doesn’t matter if Americans overwhelmingly love the idea. It doesn’t even matter that Republican voters love the idea. The GOP doesn’t care.

Michael Tomasky explains today how this would have worked “in normal times.”

In an earlier time, in normal times, when legislators used to behave the way legislators are supposed to behave, the minority’s leaders would have brought the price tag down, made the majority and the White House agree to something they wanted — peeling back one of those EPA regulations the Republicans hate — and we’d have had a deal. The minority would never have confronted the very premise. It was a priority of the president, which used to matter, at least sometimes, and more persuasively than that, the minority would have actually paid a bit of attention to those polls showing the American people backed this.

Poof — all that is long gone. The Republican Party’s posture to the American people is this. Your opinion on issues like teachers and taxes doesn’t matter a whit to us. True, if you happened to agree with us, we’d use that to our advantage, but since you don’t, we really don’t care. 

What Tomasky is describing is the traditional congressional process. If there was a jobs crisis and Americans were demanding action, Dems would present a plan, Republicans would haggle the price down, wavering members would get a new highway expansion or some comparable sweetner, and leaders would cobble together a simple majority in an up-or-down vote.

The very idea that the minority would filibuster the debate itself, then filibuster the bill, then reject any effort at compromises, then refuse to offer a credible alternative, then rule out the possibility of creating any jobs at all during a jobs crisis would have seemed genuinely insane for much of American history. And yet, in 2011, the entire political world finds this routine and unsurprising.

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Tomasky concluded, “I have trouble keeping lunch down when I read these jeremiads about how sad and mysterious it is that our institutions of government are failing. It’s not a mystery. One side wants them to fail. And there’s very little the other side can do about it, besides point it out, which the president has started doing — and now he’s the one being divisive! They’ve turned the world inside out.”

Yes, they have. If Americans aren’t satisfied with this, they’re going to have to speak up about it.

And vote out of office every Tea-Publican and "conservadem" corporate Democrat.