President Barack Obama had his American Jobs Act. Now, Senate Republicans may have their Real American Jobs Act.

After more than two years in which the GOP political strategy to Obama’s policies has revolved around the word “no,” Republicans, who are growing increasingly confident they will win back the Senate in next year’s elections, want to give voters a sense of how they’d attempt to turn around the struggling economy if they were in power.

So they’ve rolled out a jobs plan that amounts to a conservative’s dream agenda: targeting labor and environmental regulations, enacting a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, lowering corporate and individual tax rates, encouraging energy production and expanding free trade, according to a draft obtained by POLITICO.

“I think it’s good for people not only to see why we think stimulus 2.0 wasn’t a good idea … but to see a little more detail on what we would do if we were in charge,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is tasked with winning a GOP majority next year.

The effort is being led by a trio of strange bedfellows — Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a wonky former head of George W. Bush’s budget office, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a libertarian-minded tea party favorite, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the party’s 2008 presidential nominee. And it remains to be seen whether the entire 47-member GOP conference unites behind the proposal, but McCain said at its unveiling Thursday that “all but a handful” of GOP senators are on board with the plan.

A draft of the plan referred to it as the “Real American Jobs Act,” a not-so subtle riff on Obama’s $447 billion bill that was defeated by a GOP-led filibuster on Tuesday and would have pumped billions into infrastructure and school construction, cut payroll taxes, give tax incentives to companies hiring laid-off workers and provide aid to ailing states.

Officially, the plan is called the “Jobs Through Growth Act.” At a press conference with 11 GOP senators on Thursday, Republicans cited the conservative Heritage Foundation to claim that the plan would create 1.6 million private sector jobs. They said they did not yet have an official cost estimate.

The move by Republican senators to unveil a more specific economic agenda comes at an urgent time for the GOP. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week showed that the public gave the president a 15-point edge over congressional Republicans on the handling of the economy.

Republicans are using their proposal to rebut growing criticism from Democratic leaders and the White House that the GOP lacks plans to turn around the economy.

“I think we should have a Republican jobs plan,” Paul said Wednesday. “It’s just unfair for [Obama] to say that there is no Republican jobs plan — there is one, and we’re going to put into legislation.”

Senate Republicans are taking on a risk by putting their ideas in legislative language. They could open themselves up to criticism from Democrats if official budget scorekeepers show that the price tag could drive up the deficit and if economists are dubious on whether it would actually create jobs. And Democrats will undoubtedly attack the plan as a rehash of old GOP proposals.

A draft of one version of the plan, for instance, calls for “revenue neutral” changes to the Tax Code at a time when bipartisan commissions have called for higher revenues to reduce the deficit. And it appears to punt some of the tougher decisions on precisely where spending cuts would come from and how the Tax Code should be overhauled, instead forcing congressional committees and future Congresses to make those calls.

Moreover, some Republicans aren’t sure whether it will serve simply as a campaign manifesto to sharpen the party’s political messaging or whether it would be a serious attempt to find a solution to the economy when millions are out of work and the national debt is more than $14 trillion.

“I don’t know if I’ve seen the product yet to know whether it’s political,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). “The best thing for us to do is to figure out what common ground there is in the Senate and House.”

McCain told his colleagues at a closed-door lunch Wednesday that the trio of senators may unveil the legislation as soon as Thursday, saying it will serve as an accumulation of proposals that have been advocated and introduced by a range of Republican senators, according to attendees. And senior Republican aides said it won’t be the only GOP alternative to Obama’s jobs plan.

“We’re close,” McCain said in a brief interview before the lunch.

The draft plan divides the proposal into sections titled: Spending Reform, Tax Reform, Regulation Reform, Domestic Energy Promotion and Export Promotion. And it borrows ideas from both wings of the caucus, from Maine moderate Olympia Snowe to Louisiana conservative David Vitter.

Under spending reform, Republicans call for the balanced-budget amendment as well as a bipartisan proposal to give the president line-item-veto authority. On tax reform, the senators call for reducing individual and corporate income tax rates to 25 percent.

On regulatory reform, Republicans will propose repealing the health care and financial reform laws and try to limit medical malpractice lawsuits. Any rule that would cost the economy more than $100 million would have to be approved by a joint resolution of Congress. In a shot at the president, no federal agency could issue regulations until the unemployment rate drops to 7.7 percent, the level in January 2009 when Obama took office.

It would target expensive mandates on states, whack an air-pollution rule that the GOP said would affect “farm dust” and overhaul the National Labor Relations Board. Offshore energy production would be ramped up by prodding the Interior Department to take action and coal mining permitting would be sped up.

A number of the legislative proposals were modeled after an agenda that Portman presented to his caucus at a January retreat in the Library of Congress and later publicly unveiled with the support of the leadership in May.

“We agreed to a jobs plan months ago, and the question has been whether you want to put it in legislative language,” Portman said Wednesday.

In proposing legislation in painstaking detail, Republicans in the Senate are diverging from tactics Minority Leader Mitch McConnell employed during other major policy fights. While individual Republicans have offered specific bills, the overall GOP conference has studiously avoided getting behind a detailed set of policy ideas — even during hugely consequential fights like over health care reform.

But with Republicans frustrated that the Democratic-led Senate has not considered their proposals, and with the economy certain to dictate the outcome of next year’s elections, the GOP senses it’s time to shift tactics.

Veteran Sen. Chuck Grassley said “of course” the proposal would show how the GOP would govern in the majority.

“In the last year or this year at least, the four letter word ‘jobs’ is tops on everybody’s minds,” the Iowa Republican said. “And we’ve got to have a jobs bill.”

The large group of freshman senators, in particular, have been agitating to get their proposals considered. And they believe that if the Senate GOP can rally behind a specific set of ideas that are in line with the House Republican majority, they could force Senate Democrats to cater to their demands.

“Our strategy needs to be to utilize the one lever of power we have in the House and do that effectively to communicate to the American people, ‘Here is the problem, here are our solutions,’” said freshman Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. “I’m hopeful that’s going to be our approach from here on to the elections.”

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