Well, that didn't take long.  Just eleven days after President Obama signed the Pay-as-you-go law, which requires Congress to find offsetting budget cuts for any new spending or tax cuts, the Senate waived that new law in order to approve a jobs bill backed by Democratic leaders.

"Washington politicians proved they cannot curb their spending addiction," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) in an I-told-you-so press release.

"Congress decided it would be too hard to find a single wasteful government program to cut and, instead charged more than $12 billion to future generations," fumed Coburn.

The original jobs bill had a specific exemption to PAYGO slapped onto the last page of the bill.  The new, slimmed down plan did not have that, so Republicans raised a point-of-order on the Senate floor about it, forcing supporters to come up with 60 votes to waive that requirement.

Six Republicans then voted with 56 Democrats to circumvent the new PAYGO law, to avoid having to make any offsetting budget cuts.

For those of you scoring at home, the six Republicans who voted to waive the new PAYGO restrictions were Bond (MO), Brown (MA), Collins (ME), Snowe (ME), Inhofe (OK) and Voinovich (OH).

On the final jobs bill vote, seven more Republican Senators broke ranks and joined the Original Six and voted for the overall plan.  The other seven were: Alexander (TN), Burr (NC), Cochran (MS), Hatch (UT),  Lemieux (FL), Murkowski (AK) and Wicker (MS).

Next stop for this jobs bill is the House, where Democrats have an interesting decision to make.  They can just accept this $15 billion plan or try to negotiate a middle ground with a much larger $154 billion bill that was narrowly approved by the House in December.

The late word on Thursday seemed to indicate that the House would just move to accept the $15 billion plan, chalk up a victory and try to move on to other jobs issues.

But that could get derailed, as there are some lawmakers angry about changes in highway funding formulas - as this blog detailed earlier this week - along with Blue Dogs who actually want the PAYGO rules to apply.

So, for now, PAYGO is 0-1.  We'll see if it goes to 0-2 in the House.

 

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