Senate Republicans talk a good ballgame when small business is the sport — and well they should: Our nation's small-businesspeople embody the free-enterprise spirit of America — and they're the real generators of jobs; they employ two out of every three workers in the private sector.

But the GOP, having called loud and long for small-business support, this summer decided to hold those hard-working, risk-taking entrepreneurs at ransom.

On whose behalf? The super-rich; the ones whose Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year, making them pay a fairer share of taxes that would help bring the federal budget into balance.

Because congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama aren't buying into their pitch for extending those 10 years worth of breaks — through which precious few jobs were created in this country while hundreds of thousands were "outsourced" overseas — the Repubs are wielding their filibuster power against the small-business aid package.

What the elephants are claiming is that the end of the tax cuts will harm small business.

Maybe a few — but for all their long hours and sweating to make payroll, along with re-investment in inventory, most small businesspeople's income is far from the $250,000-a-year level where they'd be subject to higher taxes.

No, the people who'd be most affected by the end of the tax breaks are the millionaires and billionaires, a few of the latter now being exposed as backers of supposedly populist gatherings against what's being vilified as socialism: You know, the notion of fair wages and (shudder) Social Security ...

As cannon-fodder in their war on social justice, the Republicans have conscripted the soul of their party.

So here we have Democrats taking the small-business side; their bill includes:

• Governmental guarantees of as high as 90 percent for some loans, and higher loan maximums from the Small Business Administration.
• A $30 billion loan fund accessible to thousands of community banks with assets of $10 billion or less.
• $18 billion worth of tax breaks, including credits for new hires.

Yesterday, the president called for an end to the small-business blockade. In a Rose Garden speech, he asked Congress to make the aid package its first order of business when summer recess ends in two weeks.

As if the business community needed reminding, Obama said the package is "one thing we know that we should do" — yet it's being "held up by a partisan minority that won't even let it get to a vote."

And what party would that be? The one claiming to be the friend of business, large and small.

If Obama and his fellow Democrats were cynical, they could back off on this bill, and campaign all the way to November on their opponents forsaking the best of our businesspeople. To their great credit, they're pressing hard for this bill — and giving lie to the idea of Democrats somehow being anti-business.

If ever there were a bill worthy of bipartisan support, this one most certainly is.