Dems Push Campaign Show Votes But Refuse To Vote On Conservative Job Creation Idea

Today in Washington, D.C. - April 8, 2014
The Senate reconvened at 10 AM today and began a period of morning business. Last night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) filed cloture on S. 2199, another Democrat trial lawyer giveaway that’s disguised as a bill concerning “paycheck fairness.” Yesterday, the Senate voted 59-38 to pass H.R. 3979, the unemployment insurance extension bill which title was changed to " (Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014 )". The bill read "The Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to ensure that emergency services volunteers are not taken into account as employees under the shared responsibility requirements contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Don't we the citizens love the changes made to bills. A majority of conservatives voted against this bill.

The House reconvened at 10 AM. Bills under consideration:
H.R. 1871 — "To amend the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 to reform the budget baseline."
H Con Res 96 — Fiscal 2015 House Budget Resolution

Yesterday the House passed:
H.R. 1872 (230-165) — "To amend the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 to increase transparency in Federal budgeting, and for other purposes."
H.R. 3470 (Voice Vote) — "To provide for the transfer of naval vessels to certain foreign countries, and for other purposes."
H.R. 4323 (Voice Vote) — "To reauthorize programs authorized under the Debbie Smith Act of 2004, and for other purposes."
S. 404 — "To preserve the Green Mountain Lookout in the Glacier Peak Wilderness of the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest."

ECONOMIC SNAPSHOT
Current Deficit: $377 billion
Current National Debt: $17.49 trillion
Debt Per Household: $143,604
Debt Per Individual: $55,334
Unemployment Rate: 6.7%

While job gains are positive, Washington remains a major obstacle to stronger economic growth. And, the longer Washington waits to admit it’s the problem – rather than the solution – the longer it will take for recovery to reach everyone.

Job Gains Are Too Slow, Too Few: Adding payrolls is a step in the right direction, but for the past five years, gains have been too slow and too few. Millions of Americans have left the workforce, and many continue to struggle to find employment that maximizes their skills. After nearly a trillion tax dollars spent in the name of job creation, five years later we still face a lackluster economy that leaves people wondering if they can survive.

Barriers to Growth and Prosperity Continue to Hinder Our Potential: From Obamacare to overregulation, the past five years have seen an onslaught of laws and rules that hurt job growth. Employers are tired of the games that Washington plays with them; they need certainty in order to have the confidence to create jobs.

Middle Class Continues to Be Squeezed, Antagonized by Washington: Families across the nation feel that they have not gotten back to where they were before the recession, let alone ahead. And, Washington is no help, seeming more and more like an adversary. The government will take more of their hard-earned tax dollars with no plan to get overspending under control, and politicians continue to stick by a health care law that ultimately costs their constituents more.

On the Senate floor this morning, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “America’s Middle Class is struggling. They need serious job-creation solutions. But that’s not really what they’ve been getting from the President. He seems more intent on staging campaign-style rallies to bemoan an economy he’s been presiding over for the last five and a half years — not really to offer solutions, but more to do what he does best: shift blame. Meanwhile yesterday, here in the Senate, Republicans were hoping the Democrat Majority Leader would finally work with us to pass a job creation package that contains ideas from many of our members — legislation with provisions several key Democrats support too. But that’s not what the Majority Leader chose to do. Instead of focusing on jobs, he launched into another confusing attack on the Left’s latest bizarre obsession. Just think about that: The percentage of Americans in the workforce is at an almost four-decade low — and Democrats chose to ignore serious job-creation ideas so they could blow a few kisses to their powerful pals on the Left. At a time when so many Americans are desperate for a good job. At a time of fewer opportunities. People are hurting. College graduates can’t find a job. Working families can’t afford to pay their bills. What they need right now are real job-creation solutions, not some tone deaf blame-deflection rally or some daily bout of shadowboxing on the floor. Some say this is all just embarrassing. But there is one positive side to Washington Democrats’ never-ending political roadshow: it really throws the divide between the two parties into stark relief.

“On one side, you have a Washington Democrat Party that’s simply run out of ideas. When it comes to fixing the economy, they’ve already tried just about everything their ideology will allow — taxing, regulating, spending,  ‘stimulating,’ you name it — and none of it’s worked. So at this point, they’ve basically dropped any pretense of doing anything serious on the economy.”

Indeed, Democrats haven’t even tried to hide the fact that their agenda and events today and in recent weeks are all about politics. The AP writes, “President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress are making a concerted election-year push to draw attention to women's wages, linking Obama executive actions with pending Senate legislation . . . . The Democratic-controlled Senate this week planned to take up legislation that would make it easier for workers to sue companies for paying women less than men because of gender.” The AP story notes “Democrats are pushing the bill, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., as part of a campaign-season agenda” and goes on to point out, “Underscoring the politics behind the efforts, Democrats were aggressively soliciting campaign contributions, accusing Republicans of standing in the way of pay equity.”

Politico wrote on Friday that “Democrats had planned to hold a coordinated vote on paycheck fairness for men and women on Tuesday meant to coincide with Equal Pay Day and a speech from President Barack Obama” but were unable to do so after they blocked any votes on Republican job creation amendments.

As Politico explained, “In addition to seeking a vote on their own economic ideas, Senate Republicans also wanted to force vulnerable Democrats to vote on Keystone and the medical device tax, provisions some Democrats have supported in the past. But Democrats rejected having their senators up for reelection this year vote on such proposals as a condition to more speedy passage.”

And at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House’s political show today is running in to its own problems. The Washington Post reported yesterday, “As President Obama prepares to unveil two new executive orders aimed at narrowing the wage gap between men and women, press secretary Jay Carney defended the fact that women at the White House earn, on average, 88 cents for every dollar that men do. During the White House briefing Monday, reporters asked Carney to explain why an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found the median salary for female White House staffers was 12 percent lower than those of male staffers.”

The Weekly Standard highlights a report from CBS’ Major Garrett on the issue this morning. “The White House is getting, as you indicated Norah, roughed up by its own pay equity rhetoric,” Garrett reports. “In an analysis of White House salaries, which nobody here disputes, shows that the median income of female staffers is 88 percent of that of male staffers. Now the study also showed that men and women with the same White House jobs earn exactly the same salary. Now the White House said its gender pay gap is tied to job experience, education, and hours worked among other factors. This matters because those explanations, according to the Labor Department, explain a good deal of the gender pay gap nationally. The big difference in these stories: When President Obama discusses this issue nationally, he doesn't mention those other work variables, only the broad figure . . . .”

The larger point, of course, is that Democrats are desperate to distract from their failures on the economy and Obamacare and have shifted into full campaign mode. As Leader McConnell said, “That’s why we heard them essentially admit that their ‘governing agenda’ is actually a political document drafted by campaign staff — that the proposals it contains are basically just show votes designed specifically not to pass. So that’s one side of American politics: a party that’s out of ideas, campaign-obsessed, and utterly beholden to the Far-Left.”

In stark contrast, he said, “you have a Republican Party that’s committed to getting our economy working for the Middle Class. We believe in the power of ideas, and we know that, with the right forward-looking policies, we can — and will — break through the stagnation of the Obama Economy. Republicans’ focus is on offering more opportunity to the Middle Class, and those who aspire to it. Our focus is on offering innovative ways to generate the kind of stable, well-paying jobs the Americans people want. . . . So I’m asking our Democrat colleagues to consider dropping all the show votes, the blame-deflecting, and the perpetual campaigning. What I’m asking is for them to consider shifting from policies that don’t work — in other words, what they’ve been trying the past five-and-a-half years — to ones that will.”

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