As lawmakers work on a balanced deal of spending cuts and revenue increases to avoid the coming fiscal cliff, another prominent Republican is publicly rejecting Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) told a local television station in Georgia on Wednesday that he will no longer support the Taxpayer Protection Pledge to never vote for any tax increases under any circumstances.

Admitting the need for higher revenue, Chambliss — who is part of a small group of senators working on a deal to reduce the debt — said, “I’m willing to do the right thing and let the political consequences take care of themselves”:

“I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge,” Chambliss says. “If we do it his way then we’ll continue in debt, and I just have a disagreement with him about that.” … Now Chambliss says he wants to do what it takes to right the U.S. fiscal ship, even if that means findings ways to raise revenue, which Norquist strongly opposes.

Does Chambliss think Norquist will hold the anti-tax pledge against him during his next re-election bid in 2014? Yes.

“But I don’t worry about that because I care too much about my country. I care a lot more about it than I do Grover Norquist,” Chambliss says.

Watch it:

Before the 2012 election, Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform boasted that 279 Congressional incumbents — and another 286 challengers — signed its pledge.
But as Democrats fought back against anti-tax zealotry, many voters reacted positively, rejecting the pledge and its adherents, and telling pollsters that they supported higher taxes on the richest Americans.

As a result, 16 incumbent Republicans and one incumbent Senator who signed Norquist’s pledge lost on election night. In total, at least 56 Republican House incumbents or candidates who signed the pledge and 24 Republican Senators or hopefuls lost.

Today, many workers at the nation’s largest retail stores, including Walmart and Target, will have to go to work instead of spending the entirety of the Thanksgiving holiday with their families. Many retailers have decided that Black Friday, the biggest retail day of the year, now needs to start on Thursday, despite workers complaints.

Having to miss special occasions and holidays is an all-too-real phenomenon for many of America’s workers, as the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not mandate vacation time. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research found:

European countries establish legal rights to at least 20 days of paid vacation per year, with legal requirement of 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries. Australia and New Zealand both require employers to grant at least 20 vacation days per year; Canada and Japan mandate at least 10 paid days off. The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger if we include legally mandated paid holidays, where the United States offers none, but most of the rest of the world’s rich countries offer between five and 13 paid holidays per year.

In the absence of government standards, almost one in four Americans have no paid vacation and no paid holidays. According to government survey data, the average worker in the private sector in the United States receives only about nine days of paid vacation and about six paid holidays per year: less than the minimum legal standard set in the rest of world’s rich economies excluding Japan (which guarantees only 10 paid vacation days and requires no paid holidays).

The U.S., in fact, trails most of the developed world on a host of labor policies.