WASHINGTON • Anger, blame and smoke-and-mirrors oratory today on the U.S. House floor belied the arrival of the holiday season and the harmony that supposedly goes with it.
Holiday or not, this was a movie members have seen before, and one question now is how the latest high-stakes brinksmanship will play with a public weary of dysfunction in Washington.
House Republicans proceeded this afternoon with a series of procedural votes rejecting the Senate's weekend compromise that would have extended the year-old payroll tax break for 160 million American workers for another two months.
The House is demanding that the Senate end its three-day old holiday break and return to Washington for a conference to take up a year-long tax break along with a series of House-drawn proposals.
There's considerably more to this debate than extending a tax cut that works out to $1,000 per family next year, members of Congress from the St. Louis region acknowledged this afternoon.
It's about additional red tape for businesses that a two-month extension would create. It's about the additional fees that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charge mortgage lenders for providing a guarantee against the loans, which would pay for this extension.
It's about continuing unemployment checks for workers who need them the most and delaying a cut in Medicare reimbursement for doctors treating seniors.
And a lot of this debate is about national energy policy, over which Republicans have had little control despite holding the House for nearly a year.
GOP members scuttling the Senate compromise today are demanding more certainty about the controversial Keystone XL pipeline than a mere provision requiring the White House to make a decision in 60 days, which the Senate deal calls for.
"We want that project to go forward," Rep. Todd Akin, R-Wildwood said this afternoon.
Akin also said he wants to sit down with the Senate to continue pressing for the House-drawn provision that would allow states to perform drug tests as a condition for receiving unemployment.
"We don't really want our unemployment benefits going for drugs because people on drugs aren't easily employed," he said.
Akin added: "We have taken a look at a series of serious problems that are affecting the econony and we have solutions that will improve the economy. But we feel that the Senate has essentially made a decision not to make a decision."
Meanwhile, Democrats seemed confounded by the absence of unity between GOP members in the House and Senate, where the payroll tax extension passed 89-10 last weekend with the full support of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ken., and most Republicans.
While the battle over the payroll tax extension might yet resolve itself by Dec. 31, Democrats seem content at present to reap political gains they see coming from the GOP disarray and refusal to endorse the Senate-drawn tax break deal.
Analysts are interpreting President Barack Obama's improved standing in two national surveys released today as fallout from perceptions that the GOP is to blame for Americans being on the verge of a tax increase, and Democrats signaled that they intend to press that political argument.
"The only thing standing between 160 million Americans and the payroll tax extension is another temper tantrum from Tea Party House Republicans who insist on rejecting bipartisan compromises," said Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-St. Louis.
Clay said recently he believed the popularity of Congress had dipped to the lowest point he had seen. He corrected that assertion this morning: "We're about to hit rock bottom," he said.
Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-St. Elizabeth, said that the House is responding in part to the conclusion by a number of business organizations that programming and paperwork in shifting payroll deductions based on a two-month tax break would be difficult as well as expensive.
"Nobody wants to go through these last-minute, 11th hour facedowns time after time after time," he said. "But both sides believe in principle and believe that they are right. And the Constitution allows for situations like this in which we must come to a meeting of the minds, which is going to have to happen here."
Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis, said Monday night he believes that the impasse "further damages what people already think about Congress, which already is approaching the lowest levels. Folks I talk to back home, the loudest, clearest message is that they want people to work together here to create jobs for the good of the country."
Carnahan added in a statement today that if the dispute is not resolved by year's end, 2.5 million would be cut off from unemployment benefits.
"I call on my colleagues to keep working until we get this done," he said.
Rep. Tim Johnson, an Illinois congressman whose new redrawn district would encompass portions of Metro-East, was among few Republicans to break from his party today.
"To laden this measure down with political agendas and extraneous, irrelevant riders is simply unacceptable," Johnson said afterward. "Unfortunately, this is part of business-as-usual inside the beltway politics and I refuse to be part of that misplaced strategy."
