Senate Blocks $60 Billion Infrastructure Plan

WASHINGTON--The U.S. Senate shot down another piece of President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill today, as a stalemated Congress goes through the motions of attempting legislation to spur economic growth largely as a mechanism to allow each party to blame one another for the failure to act.
By a vote of 51 to 49, the Senate blocked a measure to spend $50 billion on highway, rail, transit and airport improvements, and another $10 billion as seed money for a new infrastructure bank designed to spark private investment in construction.
The measure needed 60 votes to proceed to a full debate.
The failure came in advance of a new jobs report due out Friday morning that will show the trajectory of the job market as the final quarter of the year begins.
So far, there are signs that employers are shrugging off the ill effects of European’s troubles and volatile financial markets and are continuing to hire at a gradual pace.
Indeed, the September unemployment report relieved concerns about massive waves of layoffs, and last week the federal Department of Commerce said that the economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the late summer months, its fastest clip in a year.
The federal Department of Labor also reported today that the number of people filing new claims for unemployment insurance benefits fell last week to 397,000, from a revised 406,000 the previous week. That was the lowest level in five weeks.
Also today, a survey from the Institute for Supply Management on activity at the nation’s service businesses was little changed, at 52.9 in October (from 53 in September).
Numbers above 50 indicate expansion.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, all 47 Senate Republicans joined U.S. Sens. Ben Nelson (Dem., Neb.) Joseph I. Lieberman (Ind., Conn.) in opposing the Obama infrastructure measure, which would have been funded with a 0.7 percent surtax on those making more than $1 million a year.
“It makes no sense when you consider that this bill was made up of the same kinds of common-sense proposals that many of these senators have fought for in the past,” President Obama said in a statement issued by the White House.
“It was fully paid for.”
Democrats have been trying to move the president’s American Jobs Act forward plank by plank, without much success, since the Senate blocked the package in its entirety last month.
Already, the Senate blocked another element of the plan that would have provided $35 billion in aide to states to hire teachers and first responders, and Democrats have indicated they will ask the Senate to also vote on other pieces of the plan, including extending a payroll tax holiday for workers and benefits for the unemployed, and offering new tax incentives to businesses to hire veterans and the long-term unemployed.
Today, Democrats joined to block a separate Republican proposal to extend the government’s highway spending authority for the next two years and roll back some environmental regulations.
A procedural motion to advance the measure died on a 47 to 53 vote.