Drowned out by the news of Osama bin Laden’s death and talks between the White House and Congress on the approaching debt limit, each chamber’s minority party last week issued separate plans aimed at creating jobs and revving up the nation’s lackluster economy. Few people on Capitol Hill were paying attention to the announcements about the new plans, even though jobs remain the top priority of American voters. The nation’s unemployment rate slipped back to 9 percent last week, jobless claims are on the rise, and the housing market remains in a deep slump.
“I haven’t had a chance to look at it,” House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told The Washington Examiner when asked about the “Make it in America” jobs plan announced by House Democrats on Wednesday. “Ask me about it next week.”
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In the Senate, just a handful of reporters turned out to last week to talk to Republican Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Rob Portman of Ohio about the Senate GOP’s jobs plan, perhaps because it has little chance of passing in a chamber controlled by Democrats. Among the key elements in the GOP plan are provisions the Democrats oppose outright, like preventing the Environmental Protection Administration from regulating greenhouse gases and allowing oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.
Despite the persistently gloomy economic indicators, neither party has been able to get beyond their differences to pass any specific job creation proposals.
Last week, the Senate failed to garner enough votes to pass a major small-business research bill that was a pillar of the “Winning the Future” jobs agenda the majority Democrats rolled out in February.
The National Small Business Association described the research program as “the nation’s largest source of early-stage research and development funding … responsible for 25 percent of the most critical U.S. innovations of the last decade.”
But after a month of debate, the GOP blocked the bill because it lacked provisions that would eliminate what they say are burdensome government regulations that hinder small-business growth.
The small-business research program runs out of money at the end of the May, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he is eager to move on to other legislation.
In the Republican-led House, meanwhile, there is little chance the Democrats’ “Make it in America” plan will make it on to the floor. The plan includes provisions intended to appeal to the GOP, like making permanent a research and development tax credit, but it would also create a “national infrastructure development bank.” It also includes encourages more clean and alternative energy use.
Instead, the GOP is eager to push through an agenda they promised voters in the 2010 campaign and which they say will both increase jobs and boost the economy.
Last week, they passed bills to repeal critical elements in the nation’s new health care reform law and legislation banning federal funding for abortions. They also passed two measures aimed at increasing domestic oil production.
“Virtually everything we have passed in the House will create jobs,” Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told The Examiner.
