McConnell on Payroll Tax Holiday

Washington, D.C.– U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following statement on the Senate floor Tuesday regarding the bipartisan effort to extend the payroll tax holiday through the end of the year: 

“I just wanted to make a couple of observations this morning about the payroll tax. 

“I’ll start with the obvious: Republicans strongly support extending this tax cut for the rest of the year. “Americans have suffered long enough as a result of this President’s economic policies. They don’t need to suffer more because of his failure to turn the economy around three years into his administration. 

“But the fact of the matter is, any solution requires both sides to engage in good faith negotiations. “And when the Majority Leader of the Senate comes to the floor and says that Republicans in Congress are only willing to extend this tax cut if they’re allowed to poison Americans’ drinking water, then I think it’s pretty safe to say that they’re the ones who’ve veered away from good faith negotiations. 

“When a tax hike that’s been rejected repeatedly by members of both parties over the past year is the opening bid in a negotiation, I think it’s safe to say that Democrats are more interested in scoring political points than in scoring a tax cut that millions of middle-class Americans are counting on. 

“When the Democratic Majority Leader of the Senate suddenly drops a proposal of his own to extend this tax cut even as a conference committee is in the midst of negotiating a bipartisan solution that everybody can support, I think it’s pretty obvious that the problem isn’t with Republicans.

“It’s with a Democratic majority and a President who were elected to lead. “I think most Americans would expect that at a moment like this, when a solution to a pressing problem is sought, the Majority Party bears the responsibility to find it. 

“Yet all we get from the Democratic Majority in the Senate are exaggerated claims and false accusations aimed at delaying a solution rather than achieving one. 

“I would remind the Majority Leader that the particular piece of legislation he railed against yesterday has broad bipartisan support, and rightly so in the middle of a jobs crisis. We should seize every opportunity we have to help job creators at a time when more than 13 million Americans are looking for work and can’t find it. 

“The only thing controversial about this proposal is the idea of opposing it.

“I would also remind the Majority Leader that the federal pay freeze received more than 300 votes in the House, and that he himself has already agreed in negotiations this past fall to spending cuts that would cover the cost of extending this payroll tax cut for the remainder of the year. 

“So let’s allow the conferees to finish their work, and get this payroll tax cut extended for the rest of the year.  That’s what Republicans want. That’s what the President says he wants. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to get this done.  “The Democratic Majority in the Senate should be encouraging that effort, not rooting for its failure.”