House Rejects Senate Measure on Bush Tax Cuts

As expected, the House took the opposite stance to tax cuts as the Senate and passed legislation Wednesday that would extend all of the Bush tax cuts for everyone for one year.

The House rejected the Senate’s vote on July 26 to extend the Bush tax cuts for only those families earning less than $250,000 a year, which President Obama had asked Congress to do.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., issued a statement the same day the House voted on its bill, H.R. 8, which passed 256-171. “For nearly two years, the Republican-led House has ignored the will of the American people by accomplishing virtually nothing of bipartisan substance,” Reid said, urging House Republicans “to show Americans that you are still capable of accomplishing something of utility by passing the only bill to avoid the fiscal cliff for middle-class families that has a chance of being signed into law: the Senate’s middle-class tax cut.” Reid noted that the bill the House passed Wednesday had “already been rejected by the Senate on a bipartisan basis.”

Meanwhile, on Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee passed the Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act of 2012, bipartisan legislation to extend tax cuts that have expired or will expire at the end of this year for American families and businesses. The committee approved the bipartisan bill by a vote of 19-5.

The legislation includes tax cuts for small businesses, working families, research and development and renewable energy. 

In passing the bill, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the legislation “gives certainty to and critical support for working families and businesses across the country and prevents middle-class families from being hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) for two years.”