Happy to allow a debate on birth control in 2012, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will give Republicans a vote on an amendment to the surface transportation bill authored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), known as the “Freedom of Conscience” amendment.

The series of anti-SOPA activism going on today has already claimed an early victory. Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator and Tea Party favorite, dropped his support after being a co-sponsor of the bill. Now other Senators are starting to announce their opposition.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who negotiated the two-month stopgap bill on the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doctor’s fix that passed the Senate with 89 votes, ended his silence on the House GOP actions on the bill, by saying that they should go ahead and pass the stopgap. This further isolates John Boehner and House Republicans.

During a pro forma session designed to block recess appointments (streams crossing), Steny Hoyer asks for unanimous consent to bring up the Senate two-month stopgap on the payroll tax, unemployment insurance and the doc fix. Instead of just objecting to UC, the presiding officer, in this case Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), just ignores Hoyer and gavels down the session, walking away. This allows Hoyer to grandstand on CSPAN.

Regarding the payroll tax cut deal, apparently the plan is for a straight up-or-down vote tonight on the measure. House Speaker John Boehner promised that the vote would fail. That creates another stalemate, and Boehner misled his Senate GOP colleagues who already voted for the Senate bill.

Harry Reid basically thumbed his nose at John Boehner’s call for more negotiation on a year-end bill to extend a payroll tax cut, unemployment insurance and a doctor’s fix on Medicare reimbursement rates.

Earlier today, Reid reiterated that the Speaker empowered him and Mitch McConnell to come up with a solution. “When we met last week, Speaker Boehner requested that Senator McConnell and I work out a compromise. Neither side got everything they wanted, but we forged a middle ground that passed the Senate by an overwhelming bipartisan majority.” Boehner, indeed, said at the time that the Senate would work something out and the House would pass it. Now his caucus is upset about the end result, so he’s going back on his word.

Readers of this space know that the pace of safety reforms for America’s nuclear facilities, especially in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, has been alarmingly slow. The recalcitrance–if not active hostility–exhibited by the nuclear operators and their government handmaidens borders on the criminal. So, it might sound more than a little bit shocking to hear that the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, is now under attack. . . for trying to implement new safety standards too quickly.

That’s not how House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is putting it, of course. In doublespeak that would make Orwell proud, Issa has written to the White House, issued a report, and fallen just shy of calling for Jaczko’s head.

The House passed its payroll tax cut Christmas tree of a bill yesterday, with a minimal amount of defections from the conservative wing of the caucus. The final vote was 234-193. Fourteen Republicans voted against the measure, while ten Democrats (Barrow, Boren, Boswell, Braley, Cardoza, Donnelly, Loebsack, Matheson, Ross, Walz) voted for it. The President has promised a veto, and the bill is DOA in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is attempting a high-stakes gamble, tying the payroll tax/unemployment insurance legislation that the House will vote on today with the omnibus spending bill to avoid a government shutdown. Without compromise on the former, according to Reid, the latter cannot pass, increasing the risk of a government shutdown.

So let’s break this down. To pay for a tax cut that will hopefully increase consumer demand and help increase hiring, Republicans would – 1) fire hundreds of thousands of people, 2) freeze their pay (the opposite effect of a payroll tax cut, which operates as a wage increase), 3) put no-strings, volunteer peer pressure on millionaires to pay additional taxes (I’m sure there will be a high takeup for that), 4) means test a number of programs to ghetto-ize them as welfare, including unemployment benefits, which is particularly cruel, because once federal benefits kick in and you’ve been out of work 6 months, it doesn’t matter what you earned before, you’re in trouble.