After nearly a year of political wrangling we finally wrestled this puppy to the ground and the House passed the miscellaneous tariff bill – now referred to as the “U.S. Manufacturing Enhancement Act” (H.R. 4380) or at least half of the MTB.
The story begins well over two years ago, when the House of Representatives first started collecting bills and reviewing them through the Administration’s inter-agency process. Once the process was completed, the House waited almost one year for the Senate to take similar action. In December of 2009 the Ways and Means Committee publicly released an MTB draft, but different priorities in the Congressional agenda impeded the process from moving forward. Republicans and Democrats began blaming each other for the long delay. The result was that only “extensions” of expiring MTB provisions were included in this bill.
As we reported in our April 21, 2010 post entitled “My Moratorium is Better than your Moratorium,” House Republican Members took a one-year “earmark moratorium” in March to respond to a similar halt on earmarks taken by Democrats. Finally the Democrats called the Republican bluff bring the bill up vote under what is called a “suspension vote,” which meant that two-thirds of the votes where required for the bill to pass, making it imperative to gather even more Republican votes.
The hours before the vote were tense. Republican leadership sent letters to their Members asking them to vote against the bill because it would be considered a violation to the earmark moratorium. Several Republicans wanted to vote in favor of the MTB but did not want to break ranks with the Party. Democrats, on the other hand, wanted to put the blame on the Republicans if the bill failed to pass, so they had to get all their Members to vote in favor of the bill. As the vote was taking place, the “Yeas” on the Democratic side started to climb, and a dozen Republican votes joined in. The Republican votes increased further, making it more and more likely that the bill would gather the necessary two-thirds majority. As the vote was about to close and the bill had gathered all the necessary votes, several Republicans who had initially voted against the bill began switching their votes.
In the end, the House approved the MTB by what it looked like a bipartisan (378-43) vote. 42 of the 43 votes against the bill came from Republicans, the great majority of them strong trade supporters who stuck to the moratorium in the end. Only one Democrat voted against the bill.
The next hurdle will be to get a vote in the Senate; after that, we have to begin work on the non-extension MTB provisions that were left behind to pass the other ½ of the MTB package.
