Senate leaders reach tentative agreement

ALAN FRAM

DAVID ESPO

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Sen­ate lead­ers reached ten­ta­tive agree­ment Fri­day night on leg­is­la­tion to extend Social Secu­rity pay­roll tax cuts and job­less ben­e­fits for two months while requir­ing Pres­i­dent Barack Obama to accept Repub­li­can demands for a swift deci­sion on the fate of an oil pipeline that promises thou­sands of jobs.

A vote could be held as early as Sat­ur­day on the mea­sure, the last in a highly con­tentious year of divided government.

Any deal would also require House pas­sage before it could reach Obama’s desk.

Rac­ing to adjourn for the year, law­mak­ers moved quickly to clear sep­a­rate leg­is­la­tion avoid­ing a par­tial gov­ern­ment shut­down threat­ened for midnight.

There was no imme­di­ate response to the com­pro­mise from the White House, which a few hours ear­lier had backed away from Obama’s threat to veto any bill that linked the pay­roll tax cut exten­sion with a Repub­li­can demand for a speedy deci­sion on the 1,700-mile Key­stone XL oil pipeline pro­posed from Canada to Texas.

Repub­li­can sen­a­tors leav­ing a closed-door meet­ing put the price tag of the two-month pack­age at about $30 bil­lion and said the cost would be cov­ered through a fee on mort­gages backed by Fan­nie Mae and Fred­die Mac.

The leg­is­la­tion would also pro­vide a 60-day reprieve from a sched­uled 27 per­cent cut in the fees paid to doc­tors who treat Medicare patients.

Sev­eral offi­cials said it would require a deci­sion within 60 days on the pipeline, with the pres­i­dent required to autho­rize con­struc­tion unless he deter­mined that would not be in the national interest.

Obama recently announced he was post­pon­ing a deci­sion until after the 2012 elec­tions on the much-studied pro­posal. Envi­ron­men­tal­ists oppose the project, but sev­eral unions sup­port it, putting the pres­i­dent in the uncom­fort­able posi­tion of hav­ing to choose between cus­tom­ary polit­i­cal allies.

Sen­a­tors in both par­ties has­tened to claim credit.

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., issued a state­ment that said the com­pro­mise included leg­is­la­tion he authored “that forces Pres­i­dent Obama to make a deci­sion” on the pipeline.

Sen. Max Bau­cus, D-Mont., said he had “bro­kered a final deal by bring­ing law­mak­ers from both par­ties together to sup­port jobs.”

Offi­cials said that in pri­vate talks, the two sides had hoped to reach agree­ment on the full one-year exten­sion of pay­roll tax cuts and job­less ben­e­fits that Obama had made the cen­ter­piece of the jobs pro­gram he sub­mit­ted to Con­gress last fall.

Those efforts failed when the two sides could not agree on enough off­set­ting cuts to make sure the deficit wouldn’t rise.

“We’ll be back dis­cussing the same issues in a cou­ple of months, but from our point of view, we think the key­stone pipeline is a very impor­tant job-creating mea­sure in the pri­vate sec­tor that doesn’t cost the gov­ern­ment a penny,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Ken­tucky, the Repub­li­can leader.

There was no imme­di­ate reac­tion from House Speaker John Boehner. Nei­ther he nor his aides par­tic­i­pated in the nego­ti­a­tions, although McConnell said he was opti­mistic about the measure’s chances for final approval.

Hours ear­lier, McConnell chal­lenged Obama to give ground.

“Let’s not just pass a bill that helps peo­ple on the ben­e­fits side, let’s also include some­thing that actu­ally helps the pri­vate sec­tor cre­ate the jobs Amer­i­cans need for the long term,” he said.

In a polit­i­cal jab, he added, “Here’s an oppor­tu­nity for the pres­i­dent to say he’s not going to let a few rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal­ists stand in the way of a project that would cre­ate thou­sands of jobs and make Amer­ica more secure at the same time.”

Obama said on Dec. 7 that “any effort to try to tie Key­stone to the pay­roll tax cut I will reject. So every­body should be on notice.”

More recently, a veto threat issued Tues­day against the House-passed ver­sion of the bill cited the intro­duc­tion of “ide­o­log­i­cal issues into what should be a sim­ple debate about cut­ting taxes for the mid­dle class.” Senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials later told reporters that was a ref­er­ence to the pipeline.

The State Depart­ment, in an analy­sis released this sum­mer, said the project would cre­ate up to 6,000 jobs dur­ing con­struc­tion, while devel­oper Tran­sCanada put the total at 20,000 in direct employment.

The 1,700-mile pipeline would carry oil from west­ern Canada to Texas Gulf Coast refiner­ies, pass­ing through Mon­tana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The spend­ing bill would lock in cuts that con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans won from the White House and Democ­rats ear­lier in the year.

Repub­li­cans also won their fight to block new fed­eral reg­u­la­tions for light bulb energy effi­ciency, coal dust in mines and clean water per­mits for con­struc­tion of tim­ber roads.

The White House turned back GOP attempts to block lim­its on green­house gases, moun­tain­top removal min­ing and haz­ardous emis­sions from util­ity plants, indus­trial boil­ers and cement kilns.

After a last-minute veto threat, Repub­li­cans aban­doned attempts to block an admin­is­tra­tion pol­icy to ease restric­tions on vis­its to Cuba and on the money sent to rel­a­tives on the com­mu­nist island nation from fam­ily mem­bers liv­ing in the United States.

Addi­tion­ally, the leg­is­la­tion bars mil­i­tary and eco­nomic aid to Pak­istan until the admin­is­tra­tion cer­ti­fies that Islam­abad is coop­er­at­ing on coun­tert­er­ror­ism, includ­ing tak­ing steps to pre­vent such mil­i­tant groups as the Haqqani net­work from oper­at­ing in the country.

The pro­vi­sion stems from con­cerns that the Pak­istani gov­ern­ment har­bors ter­ror­ists and from asser­tions that some gov­ern­ment offi­cials knew that Osama bin Laden had estab­lished res­i­dence deep inside the coun­try. Bin Laden was killed in May by U.S. com­man­dos who raided his for­ti­fied com­pound in Abattabod.

Posted by AP News on Dec 16 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.