Earlier today, the Senate held a cloture vote on a bill to extend the payroll tax cuts to 160 million Americans and assess a new tax on income over $1 million to help pay for it. On January 1, 2012 working families will see their taxes go UP by as much as $1000.00, if the payroll tax holiday is not extended. The final vote was 50-48.
Republicans, who fight tooth and nail to lower taxes on the wealthy, aka the 1 percent, showed no problems with voting to raise taxes on everyone else.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) released the following statement after today’s vote:
“Republicans showed yet again that they are more interested in passing tax cuts for millionaires than tax cuts for the middle class. Senate Republicans rejected two proposals to give middle-class families a tax cut. And House Republican leaders had to entice their members into supporting their proposal by weighing it down with a laundry list of policies whose sole purpose are scoring points against President Obama.
“House Republicans’ bill is a partisan joke that has no chance of passing the Senate, but middle-class families facing a thousand-dollar tax hike on January 1st are not laughing. Instead of playing political games, Congress should work to find common ground. In the days ahead, I intend to do exactly that.”
And yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that the Senate and the President will not be taking any Christmas vacation until the payroll tax cuts for working Americans are extended.
"We are not going to go home to vacations," Reid said in a news conference on Capitol Hill. "Does this mean embarrassing Republicans, humiliating them? Probably -- as it should."
Two things are certain, 1) Republicans don’t care about working Americans, and 2) the Democrats will cave and compromise to another hostage taking by republicans as they did last Christmas to pass the unemployment extensions in exchange for two more years of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. The same tax cuts that have added more than 2 trillion dollars to our deficit and created no jobs.
The Grover Norquist anti tax pledge that republicans have signed out of fear that they will be replaced, and who find it so easy to put this pledge ahead of their Constitutional Oath, have been told by Grover Norquist that it’s OK for them to raise taxes on working Americans.
Republicans who place this pledge and many others that they sign before they even get to Washington, and then take their Oath of Office, should declare those pledges void, or resign. At least in a republic that holds it democratic values to such high standards they should.
But this is the United States of American, where standards are now so low; our founding fathers would have trouble recognizing it.
Today, republicans continued their War against Working Americans.
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