Good news for the economy: the Republican filibuster in the Senate over a bill to help small businesses has been broken after a few Republican Senators defied the emerging party line to join with Democrats:
Senate Democrats today overcame a summer-long Republican filibuster of a bill to jumpstart job growth by providing small businesses with a $30 billion lending fund and around $12 billion in tax relief.
The vote to end debate on the small business measure was 61-37, paving the way for it to obtain final passage in the Senate later this week. The newfound support of Republicans George Voinovich of Ohio and George Lemieux of Florida was key in helping Democrats end the GOP blockade, after they came up only one vote short during their last stab at passing the bill in late July when lawmakers voted strictly along party lines.
The bill would establish a $30 billion small business lending facility run by the Treasury Department and provide another $12 billion in tax relief. Smaller banks – with under $10 billion in assets – would use the Treasury fund to extend loans to small businesses, helping get these companies back on their feet and hiring new workers. The fund, proponents say, could help leverage up to $300 billion in loans, a massive boost in loosening tight credit markets. Democrats have estimated that the bill could ultimately help create up to 700,000 new jobs.
“Small businesses are the engine that drives our economy and they need help,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor today.
“This,” said Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, “is exactly the kind of targeted job-creating legislation that folks are telling us to do, telling us to enact, and we ought to get it done.”
GOPers gave a variety of reasons why they opposed the bill but many news reports and cable news reporters included one explanation: although this bill was seemingly right out of the Republican playbook — a bill supported by key pro-GOP business groups and the kind of bill that Republicans would normally support — GOPers balked at approving it because they felt it might help Barack Obama and the Democrats in the mid-terms. The filibuster — if you strip all of the spin away — was basically due to good, old fashioned power politics.
The good news is it passed. The bad news is that only a handful of Republicans crossed party lines to pass a bill that would in other, less polarized times, might be considered good for the country by all…and a Republican bill to boot…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.