Democratic Disarray Endangers Obama Agenda

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed to have achieved the impossible. On Thursday morning of last week, after a year of partisan battles and dashed hopes of advancing President Obama's agenda, Reid had in hand a bipartisan agreement on the president's top domestic priority for 2010 -- a jobs package-- that could win enough Republican support to pass the chamber.

Although the House passed its own $150 billion jobs bill in December, the Senate had devoted its Christmas season to passing health care reform. The new year began with a feverish attempt by Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and top White House officials to meld the House and Senate health care bills together. But the possibility of passing a Democratic-only bill came to an abrupt end with Republican Scott Brown's stunning victory in Massachusetts, a triumph based in part on his promise to vote against the health care bill that Democrats had spent more than a year crafting.

By the end of January, the White House had retreated from the health care measure, which polls showed had become deeply unpopular with the American public, to unemployment and the economy, the issues that had ranked at the top of voters concerns since the 2008 campaign.

See Jill Lawrence, Melinda Henneberger, Patricia Murphy, Jill Lawrence, Lynn Sweet and Bonnie Erbe discuss the current congressional gridlock in this week's Woman UP video. And read Jill's analysis of the whether the new focus on "bipartisanship" can work.

Obama used his State of the Union address to drive home his new focus, telling members of Congress sitting in the audience, "Now, the House has passed a jobs bill... As the first order of business this year, I urge the Senate to do the same, and I know they will." That prompted applause in the chamber. "People are out of work," he continued. "They're hurting. They need our help. And I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay."

But no jobs bill could get to the president's desk in the post-Scott Brown era without at least some Republican support. So Reid asked Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus to work with Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the panel, to hammer out a bill that could muster at least a few GOP votes.

The final draft, announced Thursday morning, cost an estimated $85 billion, and featured a payroll tax holiday for new hires, a re-authorization of the highway trust fund to kick-start road building, and a bond issue to finance construction of schools and energy projects. The package also included a series of popular add-ons, like extensions of business tax cuts and unemployment benefits, as well as time-sensitive measures that the Senate has not dealt with this year, including a temporary extension of portions of the Patriot Act, and re-instituting the estate tax, which expired last month.

The White House quickly released a statement Thursday praising Baucus and Grassley's bill as a bipartisan problem-solver, and Sen. John Kyl, the Republicans' second-ranking leader, predicted it would pass with Republican support. "I have already said, within fairly short order, it will be adopted," Kyl said in the Capitol.

But just as Republicans and the president signaled their approval for the measure, liberal Democrats blasted it as a "special interest give-away."

"It looks more like a tax bill than a jobs bill," said Ohio's Sen. Sherrod Brown. "I want a jobs bill."

"We have to look and see the right way to go," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). "If we can get a good strong jobs bill passed, that's the best thing. When you start tying it to too many bells and whistles you run into trouble."

After huddling with his splintered caucus at lunch time, Reid emerged to tell reporters about his new jobs plan.

The stripped-down, $15 billion proposal would preserve the bond measure, the highway funds and the payroll tax exemption, but eliminate the tax extenders, the unemployment benefits and the Patriot Act language. Those would come in another bill, Reid said, because the Baucus-Grassley measure had become "too watered down."

Strategically, Reid had taken a bill designed to pass the Senate, and replaced it with one designed to force Republicans to allow it to fail.

"Republicans are going to have to make a choice," Reid said. "I don't know in logic what they could say to oppose this, but we've seen since Obama was elected, they have opposed everything. They're the party of no...I have a long list of disappointments where we start out by holding hands and wind up pointing fingers at each other."

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the new version of the jobs bill, saying it was still bipartisan. "Senator Reid's legislation, I wouldn't characterize it as a -- as a Democratic-only plan since the hiring tax credit is, as you know, the Schumer-Hatch -- legislation designed by Senators Schumer and Senator Hatch."

But Hatch said Republicans felt betrayed by Reid's last-minute decision to scrap the plan they'd helped to create. "I personally believe that every Republican would have to vote against cloture," he told the AP, speaking of the motion used to cut off debate and force a final vote on the legislation.

A spokeswoman for Grassley agreed, saying Reid's decision "undermines the carefully crafted Baucus-Grassley effort and throws sand in the gears of bipartisan negotiation. It's disappointing and surprising, considering we were told that Reid's staff was aware of and signed off on the Baucus-Grassley statement this morning."

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) stood up for the majority leader, explaining in an interview with the Fox Business Network that Reid had never reached a final agreement with the GOP leadership and could not trust Republicans to go along on the jobs bill when they have been so unwilling to compromise before. "Senator Reid met with Max Baucus, he met with Senator Chuck Grassley, he met with Mitch McConnell," Carper said. "Our leader came out of the meeting and he just didn't feel encouraged that Republican colleagues would, in the end, play fair and square."

By Thursday afternoon, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) had lost hope of any progress on the jobs bill and predicted it would suffer the same painful demise as the Democrats' efforts on health care. "I don't think it will pass," he said. "Why would the Republicans vote for something? When have they ever voted for something?"

House Speaker Pelosi issued a tepid statement in response to the drastically scaled back second draft -- and it soon became clear that GOP senators would probably be unanimous in opposition to yet another of Obama's key initiatives.

But unlike past Republican attempts to stall legislation, which required at least one Democratic senator to join in the dissent, the new math -- now with an added Republican vote -- not only imperils the president's agenda, but also Reid's political future. He must choose to either build consensus from the middle of the ideological spectrum to pass a bill, or build consensus on the left, and blame Republicans when the legislative effort fails.

Reid's treacherous path on the jobs bill last week indicated that he has chosen the latter course, for now. It also proved that the feat that seemed impossible Thursday morning-- creating bipartisan consensus on the Obama agenda-- really was beyond his reach in the end, even if it was because Reid chose to make it so.