The payroll tax bill has passed in the House with a strong Republican majority and a few Blue Dog Democrats hanging on. However, the bill is so loaded with toxic GOP interests that it’s likely to be dead on the Senate floor. The payroll tax cut, instituted by President Obama in 2009, has been keeping an extra $1,000 dollars in the pockets of middle class Americans to help them weather the current economic storm. However, should congress be unable to agree on a way to preserve the tax cut, it will expire at the end of this year, hitting American people when many are already overwhelmed.

The payroll tax cut legislation was going to be an easy victory for Obama at the end of the year. The tax cut has been active for two years, helping middle class people, and tax cuts are, traditionally, a central leg in the Republican platform. However, as with so many other political issues in this contentious legislative year, the idea has been mired down in partisan political hangers-on. The House bill is laden with GOP special interests that make the passage of it highly unlikely in the Senate. The payroll tax cut will peal back air quality regulations by the EPA, cut unemployment benefits, cut back on Obama’s healthcare reform law, and force construction of the XL Keystone oil pipeline. The latter, a contentious issue in both parties, has already received a vow from the White House that any legislation forcing its construction will be vetoed immediately.

The House bill seems to be an attempt to incite the Democratic caucus than a real effort at legislative progress. It looks like House Republicans grabbed the top four items on their list of talking points and threw them onto the bill to send a message. This will no doubt spark a frenzied debate right up to the midnight hour, a methodology that has come to characterize this Congress. Unfortunately, while the GOP forces its politics and the Democrats continue to push back, the real losers in the fight are the lower middle class families that have come to depend on the payroll tax cut to help make ends meet.

One further note about the payroll tax cut is the revenue that it is removing from the Social Security Trust Fund, the piggy bank that serves to pay back seniors after retirement. Republicans came up with a common sense alternative to the cutting payroll taxes, which is a tax credit of equal value, which would take the money from the general budget (which would prove far easier to remedy than further cuts to Social Security). However, this idea seemed to common sense to pass in the Republican-controlled House, and would be rejected by Democrats who are as loathe to see a Republican victory as Republicans are to see a Democratic one.