Earlier this month, Senate Democrats tried and failed on three separate occasions to pass a tax extenders bill that included an extension of unemployment benefits that have currently expired. The problem, though, wasn’t that the bill lacked majority support, but that it was filibustered by Republicans who, along with Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), refused to allow it to proceed to a final vote by defeating cloture motions.

Senate Democrats whittled the bill down to appease Republican concerns and subjected more and more of the bill to spending offsets, ultimately leaving just the jobless benefits extension unpaid for. But still, the Republicans refused to relent. However, one glimmer of potential hope remains for those counting on the Senate to take the belated but responsible step of extending benefits, as Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is advocating for a benefits-only bill, even saying that she’s okay with it adding to the deficit:

The hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans who are losing jobless benefits every week deserve our immediate attention, so I am writing today to urge you to bring a free-standing extension of unemployment insurance benefits to the Senate floor for a vote early next week. As of today, more than 1.2 million people out of work for longer than six months are ineligible for the next tier of extended benefits, which were originally provided by the economic stimulus bill to fight the recession.

It’s a pretty ugly spectacle to see Snowe call for paying “immediate attention” to a measure that she voted to filibuster not once, but three times. But, considering that 1.2 million people will have lost their benefits by the end of this week if something is not done and that 46 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for six months or more, I suppose this is worth considering.

Of course, passing a stand-alone bill neglects all the other important provisions that were in the extenders bill, including COBRA subsidies to help laid-off workers purchase health insurance and aid to states to help them with their Medicaid bills. Failing to pass such measures is only going to add to the economic misery that Snowe at least seems aware is occurring.

Today, the House attempted to rush a bill consisting of nothing but a benefits extension through under a suspension of the rules, which means that a two-thirds majority of members was needed for it to pass. However, the House fell short on a 261-155 vote, meaning that the bill — which costs $33 billion — will have to be brought back under normal order if House Democrats wish to ultimately approve it.

In the last two days, three of the four Republican senators who voted for their chamber’s version of financial regulatory reform legislation — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Scott Brown (R-MA) — have expressed reservations about the final bill crafted by the House-Senate conference committee. They’ve keyed upon a $19 billion fee that would be levied upon the biggest financial firms, to cover the cost of the legislation’s implementation, as a reason for their new-found doubts.

Brown today even officially said that, should the fee remain in the bill, he would vote against it. “I am asking that the conference committee find a way to offset the cost of the bill by cutting unnecessary federal spending,” he said.

This has led Congressional Democrats to reopen the conference committee and find some other way to raise the revenue necessary to implement the bill:

Administration officials said Democrats seemed to be coalescing around a push to drop the bank tax and to replace it with a provision to end the Troubled Asset Relief Program months short of its scheduled Oct. 3 expiration. Doing so would leave some money available that would help offset the cost of the financial regulatory bill. Lawmakers were also said to be negotiating yet another increase in the fee that banks pay to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, though details had yet to be worked out.

Before getting into the politics of this mess, it’s worth remembering what the spat is about. As Kevin Drum noted, the bank fee is “not there to punish banks or to create a slush fund for new spending. It’s there solely to make the bill deficit neutral.” What the Senate Republicans are saying is that they’d rather raid the budget elsewhere than raise taxes on the very biggest financial firms, which benefited tremendously from federal intervention during the financial crisis. Remember, this fee amounts to 0.01 percent of GDP over the next decade.

The ability to get the financial reform bill through the congress has obviously been complicated by the GOP’s intransigence and the passing of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV). Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) announced opposition doesn’t help matters. I’m sympathetic to the view that Democrats should remove the concessions Brown won in the final language and insert language that would bring Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), who voted against the bill in the Senate, around to supporting it, instead of removing the bank fee. But that still doesn’t get you from 57 to 60 votes.

What I can’t understand, however, is why no attempt to pass the bill as is will seemingly be made. As David Dayen put it, Democrats “could dare Republicans to filibuster a Wall Street reform bill over and over, putting them squarely in opposition to public opinion.” Back in April, just the threat of the Democrats pulling out the cots and camping in the Senate all night to pass an unemployment benefits extension was enough to get the GOP to drop its opposition. Doesn’t this call for a repeat performance?

When the Senate Banking Committee’s financial regulatory reform bill finally came up for a vote on the Senate floor, after the inevitable Republican filibuster was dispensed with, four Republicans cast their vote in support of the legislation — Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Scott Brown (R-MA) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Today, Brown said that he will vote against the final bill produced by the House-Senate conference committee (despite the inclusion of an special deal that he personally sought) because it imposes a $19 billion fee on the biggest financial firms to cover the cost of the law’s implementation. And now Snowe and Collins are singing a similar tune:

COLLINS: I’m not happy with the $19 billion new fee or tax that would be imposed. It was not part of either the House or Senate bill. It was added in the wee hours of the morning.

SNOWE: Well, obviously I’m concerned, anytime you’re placing taxes in the legislation that was not in the Senate bill. I’m going to have a discussion with Sen. Dodd on some of these issues.

It’s not only in the Senate that this tiny levy has become the object of scorn. “The imposition of a job-killing tax on large financial institutions to create a $19 billion slush fund to finance future bailouts is nothing short of bleeding this economy in the midst of the worse recession in 25 years,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN).

As Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, pointed out, “the fee is approximately equal to 0.01 percent of projected GDP over the next decade.” To derail legislation aimed at correcting the deficiencies that led to an economic meltdown because of a fee that will hardly be a blip on the radar of the biggest banks seems foolhardy, especially considering that Maine’s banking system is largely composed of smaller institutions that won’t be affected by the fee.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who chaired the financial reform conference committee, challenged the Republican hold-outs to find some other way to pay for the bill, if they don’t want to use a bank fee. “Do they want to add to the deficit?” he asked. “Is there another way? What’s their other way?”

As the Economist’s Ryan Avent put it, opposition to the fee also has implications for the debate over addressing the deficit. “The most moderate Republicans in the Senate are balking at the charge. Not because they disagree in any real sense with the economics of the fee. They simply won’t vote for anything that looks like a tax. This is why it’s so difficult to imagine a solution to America’s long-run budget crisis,” he wrote.

One of the key planks of Senate candidate Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) campaign is scaremongering about the nation’s deficit and debt. “The United States government spends more money than it takes in,” Rubio said. “It’s as simple as that. You can’t do that for long without getting into trouble.” Rubio has repeatedly called on President Obama to “stop spending money we don’t have.”

However, Rubio’s concern with the deficit seems to evaporate when it comes to tax cuts. Democrats in Congress want to allow the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire on schedule at the end of the year, but yesterday on Fox News, Rubio wholeheartedly endorsed making the cuts permanent and “doing it now”:

RUBIO: I would argue in favor of making permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. And I would argue doing it now, before they recess, so that people have some level of certainty. [...]

VARNEY: You’re arguing economics. I put it to you that, if you suggested that we not increase taxes on the rich on January the 1st, you would be demagogued to death. You would be accused of giving money to the rich at a time of a nasty recession.

RUBIO: Well, the bottom line is that we need folks to create jobs in America. And jobs in America are created by people that have money or access to money.

Watch it:

This proves that Rubio is actually not at all serious about addressing deficits, as the Bush tax cuts are one of the main drivers behind the country’s long-term deficits. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, the Bush tax cuts will cause $3.4 trillion in deficits over between 2009 and 2019. The debt-service costs caused by the Bush tax cuts amount to “$1.7 trillion over the 2009-2019 period” and more than $330 billion in 2019 alone.

Not only that, but Rubio is incorrect that cutting taxes for the wealthy inevitably spurs job creation. The Bush tax cuts actually led to “the weakest jobs and income growth in the post-war period,” with monthly job growth the worst of any business cycle since 1945. Rubio’s call to extend the cuts for the wealthy also comes at a time when income inequality is the worst it has been since 1928. In fact, according to the latest data, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.”

Of course, Rubio is hardly alone in believing that spending adds to the deficit but reductions in revenue somehow do not. “Allowing Americans to keep more of their money through tax rate reductions is an entirely separate issue,” said Ryan Patmintra, a spokesman for Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) when asked about the deficit effect of extending all the Bush tax cuts.