In an impressive bit of caving, the House Republican leadership has given up on finding offsets for the payroll tax cut, proposing a bill that would extend the current cut to the end of the year without any funding. However, the other two pieces that were tied to the overall legislation at the end of [...]

The conference committee for the payroll tax cut is on a road to nowhere, and it’s clear that the House and Senate leadership will have to step in if the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and the doctor’s fix will get extended beyond the end of the month. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave [...]

The Senate will vote as early as today on whether to punish transportation unions in a bid to get Federal Aviation Administration authorization through 2015. The House already passed its version of what negotiators called a bipartisan compromise. But unions object to the deal and have gotten more vocal about it in recent days. The [...]

The payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits expire on February 29. And though the House-Senate conference committee charged with figuring out a year-long extension met yesterday, there really isn’t a lot of movement toward a solution. Pay-fors seem to be the biggest stumbling block. On Wednesday, the House approved one of the GOP’s favored [...]

The House/Senate conference committee looking to reconcile legislation on a payroll tax cut extension, along with unemployment benefits and potentially a doc fix, met yesterday to go over the deal. And it didn’t turn out that well. Meeting for the first time, members of a new bipartisan, House-Senate committee negotiating a final version of a [...]

In its first day back, Congress held a quorum call and voted on a new Sergeant-at-Arms. That’s it. It’s going to be that kind of year. Today, there’s a “resolution of disapproval” on the President’s request for another tranche of debt limit funds. You’ll recall that this is the request the Administration delayed so that [...]

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats pulled off a neat little trick yesterday. The two-month extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance really only allows for one month of negotiation in the conference committee, since Congress stands in recess until the end of January. But there’s no reason that the conference committee cannot [...]

Steve Benen thinks that the payroll tax cut is doomed, based on the conferees the Senate Republicans added to hammer out a long-term agreement. The newly named Republican conferees are Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona, Michael D. Crapo of Idaho and John Barrasso of Wyoming [...] These aren’t three senators you’d appoint to a conference [...]

As Charlie Pierce writes, one reason why we should hold back on the celebration over the two-month extension on the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance is that the conference committee has yet to work its will on the process. We don’t really know what is bound to come out of that, but we can [...]

With the two-month stopgap put to bed, all eyes turn to the next round on the fight to extend a payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance. Once this law is signed, lawmakers will have until the end of February to reach agreement on what they claim to want, a year-long extension on the above two [...]

And there it is. John Boehner has cried uncle. House Republicans will pass the two-month Senate stopgap bill to extend the payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance benefits and a doctor’s fix to avert a 27% cut in Medicare reimbursement rates. In exchange for this cave, Harry Reid will appoint conferees to go into negotiations on [...]