Well, that’s more like it. After weeks of jockeying and jousting on Capitol Hill, both the House and Senate finally passed the tax cut extension bill Friday that had threatened to bring Congress to a standstill at the height of the holiday season. President Obama signed it and shipped out to Hawaii that same day. Mahalo! –KA

AP via Google News:

Barely beating Santa’s sleigh, Congress delivered a last-minute holiday tax-cut extension to 160 million American wage-earners on Friday, just when it looked like they and millions of unemployed workers were going to be left with coal in their stockings.

It was a major yearend political victory for President Barack Obama, a big slice of humble pie for House Republicans and a blow to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, who’ll have an angry band of tea party lawmakers to deal with when Congress returns to Washington next month.

Back-to-back voice vote approvals of the two-month special measure by the Senate and House came in mere seconds with no debate, just days after House Republican leaders had insisted that reopening negotiations on a full-year bill was the only way to persuade them to prevent a tax increase on Jan. 1.

Obama immediately signed the bill into law.

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