Yesterday, the Senate voted 51-49 in favor of bringing the infrastructure portion of Obama’s Jobs bill to the floor. However, a majority of the Senate was not enough, because Republicans filibustered to obstruct the measure, so America’s crumbling infrastructure will continue to rot and the thousands of Americans, who could have found work repairing it will continue sit idle, unemployed. Why? Republicans object to a tiny 0.7% (seven tenths of 1%) surtax on income over $1 million. All the Republicans goose-stepped together in opposition. Two others joined them. They were Traitor Joe LIEberman, (ASSHOLE-CT) and Benedict Nelson (DINO-NE). If either is your Senator, express your outrage, nonviolently of course.

There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.

That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group — and hewing to their rigid antitax vows — was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.

Senate Republicans filibustered the president’s full jobs act last month for the same reasons. And they have vowed to block the individual pieces of that bill that Democrats are now bringing to the floor. Senate Democrats have also accused them of opposing any good idea that might put people back to work and rev the economy a bit before next year’s presidential election.

There is no question that the infrastructure bill would be good for the flagging economy — and good for the country’s future development. It would directly spend $50 billion on roads, bridges, airports and mass transit systems, and it would then provide another $10 billion to an infrastructure bank to encourage private-sector investment in big public works projects.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican of Texas, co-sponsored an infrastructure-bank bill in March, and other Republicans have supported similar efforts over the years. But the Republicans’ determination to stick to an antitax pledge clearly trumps even their own good ideas… [emphasis added]