WEP And GPO Elimination Bill Faces Obstacles

     From the Monroe (LA) News-Star:

A bill to eliminate the Social Security penalty for workers with government pensions and their spouses hit a snag in the U.S. House this week, forcing Louisiana U.S. Reps. Garret Graves and Julia Letlow into a last-ditch effort to keep it alive.

Graves and Letlow, both Republicans and co-authors of the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R. 82) by Illinois Democrat Rodney Davis, thought they'd secured enough support in August to force a vote on the House floor, but they blamed a procedural maneuver from Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi for stalling the vote.

Davis, Graves and Letlow have scheduled a press conference Thursday morning to announce an effort to secure 218 colleagues' signatures on a petition to trigger a floor vote, but time is running out for the current Congress, which will likely meet only a handful of days before and after the mid-term elections.

"Only when we were on the cusp of forcing a floor vote did Democratic leadership take action to ... essentially bog it down in a backlog," Letlow, of Start, said during a House floor speech Wednesday. ...