In the face of an historic jobs crisis and a historic backlog of needed transportation projects, congressional conservatives put forward a combination of lies and evasions to keep the country from moving to quickly put hundreds of thousands of people back to work doing critically needed repairs and improvements on our transportation network.

Before the debate the Associated Press knocked down one conservative "outrageous tale," that "the federal government spends one out of every $10 in transportation aid on wasteful projects." It's a line that conservative lawmakers have been using to undermine support for increased federal spending on transportation. "To make their case, lawmakers have exaggerated and misrepresented some projects that have received aid," the AP reported.

In some cases, lawmakers have made false claims that federal dollars were used to pay for projects that were in fact locally or privately funded. In other cases, safety or environmental improvements were mocked: a "turtle tunnel" in northern Florida, for example, not only benefits turtles living near an interstate highway but it prevents car accidents caused by motorists swerving to avoid turtles and other small animals attempting to cross the road.

More central to the debate is the nonsensical claim that this infrastructure spending "would do little for the economy and putting people back to work in the short term,"  as Sen. Mitch McConnell put it. Actually, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wrote in an op-ed that the bill would result in "an immediate investment in construction jobs upgrading 150,000 miles of road, laying or maintaining 4,000 miles of track, and restoring 150 miles of runways."

Many capital projects by their very nature stretch out over multiple budget cycles, but even projects that are not immediately "shovel-ready" produce jobs in their preparatory stages, and those early-stage projects would have been able to move toward spring and summer launch dates had this legislation passed.

Conservatives also attacked the administration's plan for funding the legislation: a 0.7 percent tax on incomes over $1 million. In other words, for every $1,000 a person earned in excess of $1 million, that person would see their tax bill increase by $7.

Every American would benefit from this investment, but it is a particularly good investment for the top 1 percent, precisely because enabling our transportation networks to move goods and people more efficiently results in direct improvements to their bottom lines.

Instead of supporting this bill, Senate conservatives put forward their own so-called "jobs bill" that Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said would actually result in the loss of 200,000 jobs. The legislation would provide limited funding for transportation projects, but it also incorporates language from House bills designed to severely cripple the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies. The legislation would, among other things, effectively block the ability of the EPA to impose updated clean air regulations on fossil-fuel power plants.

That legislation also failed to garner 60 votes; the final vote was 47-53.

The media will most likely portray the Senate action as yet another example of "both sides playing partisan politics" and neither side getting serious about addressing the crisis of 14 million jobless people and an economy that the Federal Reserve had announced days before the vote would be barely growing over the next two years. But that would be wrong.

The Rebuild America Jobs Act is in fact a serious proposal designed to address a real need to update a transportation system that in virtually every respect gets a failing grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers. It is based on needs that both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agree must be met. (However, the Chamber reverted to type and sent to the Senate a bill calling for a vote against the Rebuild America Jobs Act, in part because of the tax surcharge.)

As for the surtax to pay for its cost, most reputable economists would have argued that at least in the short term this is precisely the kind of deficit spending we need to help energize the private sector, which would have been the real beneficiaries of the bill. After all, it's not "bureaucrats" who build roads; it's construction companies and dozens of other categories of private contractors. But in this age in which politics demands that spending like this be "paid for" even if that is not sound economics, asking the top 1 percent of Americans to dig a little deeper is reasonable, especially when many of these same 1 percent stand to benefit disproportionately from a rebounding economy.

The conservative counterproposal, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was more of an ideological jeremiad. It contains a requirement that major executive branch regulations have to be put up to Congress for a vote. Lobbyists who are already having a relatively easy time hamstringing executive agencies attempting to execute laws passed by Congress (that were already diluted as they ran the lobbying gantlet) will now have yet another opportunity to quash efforts to hold them accountable for their actions, and to subvert the interests of the people. The legislation would also quash clean air rules that would have required older fossil-fuel power plants to upgrade to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, a step that would have not only given us cleaner air but would have put many thousands of people to work on the tasks needed to bring the plans into compliance.

That should clear up the confusion about which side was serious about creating jobs and which side was seeking to score political points for their corporate overlords. Unfortunately, the real losers are the more than 24 million Americans with either no job or a make-do part-time job.