White House takes its employment plan back to Congress despite Republican resistance
After seeing his jobs plan blocked in the Senate last week, U.S. president Barack Obama is trying to force feed it to Congress by slicing it into smaller parts. “Maybe they [Congress] just couldn’t understand the whole all at once. So we’re going to break it up into bite-size pieces so they can take a thoughtful approach to this legislation,” he told a cheering crowd on Monday during a campaign-style tour of North Carolina and Virginia, two key swing states in the 2012 presidential election. This week, for starters, the Obama administration is preparing to push through Congress a measure to give states money to hire teachers, firefighters and police, one of the many proposals contained in the president’s original jobs plan. The strategy is aimed at jumpstarting the faltering economy as much as embarrassing Republicans for repeatedly blocking jobs bills in the run up to next year’s poll.