Politico

By JONATHAN ALLEN and SEUNG MIN KIM

House Republicans postponed a planned Monday night vote on the Senate-passed payroll tax cut bill, bowing to pressure from rank-and-file lawmakers to fight the battle in a fresh media cycle, avoid a dark-of-night vote and, perhaps most important, find a way to reject the Senate bill without voting directly against a tax cut.

House leaders had hoped to vote down the Senate bill, which would extend for two months President Barack Obama’s payroll tax cut, certain unemployment insurance benefits and the current Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors. But after a long debate Monday night, it appeared more likely that they would vote to create a House-Senate conference committee rather than first rejecting the Senate bill outright.

“The Senate did — they did their job. They produced a bill,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said. “The House disagrees with it.”

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Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) said the contents of the round of Tuesday votes were still being “sorted out” late Monday night.

Some Republican lawmakers did not want to be in the position of voting against a tax cut, a desire House leaders were sensitive to as they worked to draft a schedule of floor votes for Tuesday.

But Democrats cried foul on the Republicans’ procedural moves, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) telling reporters that GOP leaders would not allow for a direct vote on the Senate’s version of the payroll tax cut plan.

“My guess is that they’re afraid their members are not going to stick with them on voting against the tax cut,” Pelosi said during a news conference at the Capitol.

“Speaker Boehner should allow an up-or-down vote on the compromise that Senator McConnell and I negotiated at Speaker Boehner’s request,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) added.

This much is clear: House Republicans are nearly unified in their desire to drag the Senate back to Washington and have a full-fledged fight over whether to extend the tax cut and other provisions for two months, as the Senate voted to do, extend them for a year, as the House prefers, or let them expire amid partisan squabbling.

Hanging in the balance are 160 million American workers who would see the taxes that fund Social Security rise by 2 percentage points on Jan. 1, doctors who would get hit with a 27.4 percent cut to reimbursement rates for treating Medicare patients, and recipients of welfare and certain unemployment benefits that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year.

In a sign of the importance of winning the spin war, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) appeared live in studio on Fox News’s “Special Report with Bret Baier” at 6 p.m. while the Republican Conference met to devise its strategy. Just before that, he appeared on Wolf Blitzer’s program on CNN.