President Obama turned up the heat on House Republicans Tuesday afternoon, urging them to rethink their opposition to a Senate-approved bill that would extend the payroll tax holiday for at least two more months next year.

Shortly after House conservatives voted Tuesday to rebuke the Senate and risk raising the payroll tax in January, the president grabbed his spokesman’s podium to deliver his own message to lawmakers.

"I need the speaker and House Republicans to . . . put politics aside . . . to bring up the Senate bill for a vote and give the American people the assurance they need in this holiday season," Obama said as he burst into the briefing room with a grin.

Neither the House nor the Senate would budge amid a stalemate over an extension that both chambers and both parties say they support in concept. The president said it is not a question of whether the tax break gets extended for a full year, but when. Lawmakers should agree on a stopgap to give themselves time to come to a meeting of the minds, he said.

The Senate on Saturday voted, 89-10, to approve a 60-day extension of the tax break, unemployment insurance and a carryover for the existing reimbursement rate paid to doctors who treat Medicare patients. The bill included a provision dreamed up by House Republicans to hasten the administration’s approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline next spring. Obama had signed off on the compromise.

That short-term continuance measure, senators said, would give Congress more time to work out a full-year extension in 2012. House Republicans, however, rejected the Senate bill Tuesday and voted, 229-193, along party lines for a one-year extension, arguing that tax changes adopted in monthly increments stirred up uncertainty among businesses and the public. They demanded a conference procedure with the Senate, intended under ordinary legislative circumstances to blend two bills into one measure to be approved by each chamber.

One Senate GOP source conceded that House Republicans willfully took a significant political risk by declining to adopt the Senate bill and leaving Washington for the holidays with a popular tax break set to expire. “I don’t think either party should ignore the fact that all incumbents are at risk on this issue,” he told RCP. “. . . If it doesn’t pass, both parties will take a hit on it.” Nonetheless, he added, “Senate Democrats have a lot more incumbents facing re-election than the Republicans do. Ultimately it feeds into what you’re hearing about ‘Washington is broken.’ ”

How Congress -- now at historic polling lows with a majority of the public -- extricates itself from yet another in a series of bitterly partisan battles remained unclear.

“I don’t know how you overcome a huge bipartisan Senate vote, which the public understands, and the presidential microphone,” said Republican Tom Davis, a former head of the GOP’s congressional campaign committee and now a director of federal government relations for Deloitte Services LP. “The politics of this thing and the optics are not very good,” he told RCP.

Davis said he believed the payroll tax disagreements eventually would be worked out, but “this does not help the narrative,” he said, particularly for House Republicans. With Congress at an 11 percent approval rating as an institution, “this is probably not a time to roll the dice. Now they’re under a spotlight on this thing. Whatever happens, it looks like more quarreling, which the public is sick of, and who is right and wrong gets lost in this.”

Davis also said it was clear that if the House had called the Senate legislation to a simple vote Monday, it would have passed. Some House Republicans will break with their colleagues as the controversy simmers, he suggested. The Senate will not accept the House measure “because it has too many poison pills,” but that does not guarantee that the House will change its mind and accept the Senate measure, he added.