Failure isn’t an option in getting tax bill through House

The U.S. Senate saw the closest thing to a filibuster that it’s seen in years when Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, stood in the Senate chambers last week and spoke for nearly nine hours against the compromise reached on a tax bill by President Barack Obama and Senate Republicans.

Technically it wasn’t a filibuster, said Senate historian Donald Ritchie, because a filibuster is an action to prevent the majority from casting a vote, and no vote was scheduled until this week. Still, it was an interesting return to the days when senators who felt strongly about a bill had to actually do something other than threaten to filibuster to derail it.

A procedural vote Monday to move what’s been named the Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2010 ahead got 83 yeas and 15 nays. Among the nays were Sanders and both Ohio senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican George V. Voinovich, though for different reasons.

Brown was pushing for an amendment to strengthen U.S. trade law on currency manipulation and was opposed to provisions on the estate tax and on extending a lower income tax rate for the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers.

Voinovich, on the other hand opposed the bill because in his words, “it’s time to stop kicking the can down the road.” He favored letting the George W. Bush-era tax cuts expire, which he said would “force Congress and the president to make the tough choices needed not only on these taxes, but the entire tax and entitlement crisis facing our country.”

Both men spoke to the principles they hold, but in this, the 11th hour, pragmatism is in order.

Certainly Voinovich is right on the numbers. If these tax rates were sustainable, they would have been made permanent in the first place, not designed to sunset at the end of 2010. But putting in the sunset date, allowed the Bush Administration to make long-range forecasts that predicted balanced budgets and a reduced national debt in the years after Bush left office.

Sen Voinovich’s “kicking the can down the road” metaphor was apt, but the phrase would have been equally true in 2001 and 2003, when Voinovich voted with virtually all his Republican colleagues to approve the president’s tax cuts.

That was then, this is now

Nonetheless, the nation is still struggling with a jobless recovery from the most severe recession since the Great Depression. This is not the time to indulge either Sen. Brown’s or Sen. Voinovich’s principled stands. The package not only continues tax cuts temporarily, but it extends unemployment coverage. That coverage is important to Ohio and Pennsylvania, two of the 10 states that would be hardest hit by the expiration of unemployment benefits.

There’s no question of Senate passage of the package, but there are Democrats in the House who are talking about amendments to the bill that would eliminate tax cuts at higher levels, cut the $5 million exemption for estate taxes and increase the 35 percent estate tax rate that is in the compromise bill.

A little politicking is understandable, and certainly some members of both parties are guilty of speechifying to their bases. But it would be irresponsible for House Democrats to play a serious game of chicken with the Republican leadership in the Senate. Just as there are liberal Democrats who say Obama bargained away too much, there are conservative Republicans who would be perfectly happy to see this deal die and to start over after the first of the year. None of them would be following Voinovich’s departing advise — they’d be looking to make the top-scale tax cuts permanent and to eliminate the extension of unemployment.

The deal on the table is far from perfect, but the Senate should pass it today, and the House should quickly follow suit.