US Senate - On vacation for 30 days

The House passes a year long extension to the President's payroll tax cuts and sends it to the Senate. The Senate chops the year extension to two months, tacks on a permanent .01% tax hike on all new mortgages underwritten by Fannie and Freddie (90% of all mortgages), and leaves for vacation until next year (Jan 15th), without ever verifying the House would accept such changes. I guess they considered their work done. After all, isn't the rest of America starting their 30 day long taxpayer funded holiday right now?

Racing to meet an end-of-year deadline, House Speaker John A. Boehner said Monday the House will insist on a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut and demanded senators cut short their Christmas vacation, return to Washington and hash out an agreement the old-fashioned way.

â€œThe president has said repeatedly no one should be going on vacation until the work is done. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have said exactly the same thing,â€ Mr. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said at a morning press conference.

Mr. Boehner stunned senators and the White House on Sunday when he rejected the bipartisan two-month deal the Senate passed a day earlier, 89-10. He said that doing tax cuts in two-month increments doesnâ€™t give the economy certainty.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Congressâ€™s top Democrat, said heâ€™s not bringing his troops back to town until the House passes the two-month bill first.

â€œI will not re-open negotiations until the House follows through and passes this agreement that was negotiated by Republican leaders, and supported by 90 percent of the Senate,â€ Mr. Reid said in a statement.

He said if taxes do go up on Jan. 1, the GOP will be to blame.

The House on Monday night is expected to vote to reject the Senate plan and to send the two versions into a conference committee, which is the traditional way of resolving fights between the two chambers.

Conference committees have been rare in recent years, but the House and Senate just concluded a successful one last week with the passage of the gigantic year-end spending bill that funded most of the federal government for fiscal 2012.

Senators left town Saturday after passing their two-month payroll tax extension, which also includes another round of unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, higher payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients and a provision forcing the White House to decide whether to allow the Keystone XL pipeline to be built.

The two-month extension was worked out by the top Republican and Democrat in the Senate. But Mr. Boehner said the House never signed off on the deal, and said he always had told senators he wouldnâ€™t begin negotiating until the upper chamber actually produced a bill of its own to match up with the House, which earlier had passed a full-year extension of the 2 percentage point payroll tax cut.

According to the Senate schedule, senators are not supposed to return to town for another month.

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US Senate - On vacation for 30 days

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US Senate - On vacation for 30 days

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