Staff Photo by Allison Kwesell/Chattanooga Times Free Press
Greg Summers delivers a beer at the Terminal Brewhouse.Given the rancor and the poisonous partisanship that prevails in the nation’s capital these days, even the most astute and attentive chronicler of the nation’s political scene would find it difficult to find an issue on which Democrats and Republicans agree. There is one, though. There is clearly significant bipartisan support for beer. Or, more precisely, for BEER, a U.S. Senate bill that is officially entitled the Brewer’s Employment and Excise Relief Act.
Sen. John Kerry, the high-profile Democrat from Massachusetts, and Sen. Mike Crapo, a stalwart Republican from Idaho, generally have little in common politically. They see eye-to-eye, though, on BEER, surely one of the best acronyms to emerge from Washington in years.
The pair jointly introduced the measure to lower federal excise taxes on small breweries earlier this spring. Nine Democrats and eight Republicans quickly signed as co-sponsors. That level of cooperation likely is the recent high-water mark for bipartisanship in the Senate.
The congeniality engendered by the BEER bill in the Senate apparently is contagious. When similar legislation was introduced in the House, it quickly won a large number of co-sponsors from each party, too. It’s hard to say whether the merits of the legislation, the power of the craft beer/small brewery lobbyists or the legislators’ desire to win the votes of beer-drinking voters in the next election cycle is responsible for such behavior.
Whatever the reason, the proposed legislation will update decades-old rules that sponsors say make it hard for the many small breweries that have begun operations in cities across the nation in the last few years to compete against the gigantic, multinational breweries that dominate the U.S. beer market.