Main Street

Senate Set to Vote to Extend Jobless Benefits

The Senate is expected to vote Tuesday to extend federal unemployment insurance programs, finally overcoming a two-month Republican-led filibuster that has caused jobless benefits to be cut off to more than 2.6 million long-term unemployed workers.

The vote on the six-month unemployment extension is scheduled to occur shortly after the swearing in of West Virginia Democrat Carte Goodwin as the Senator named to temporarily replace Robert Byrd, who passed away last month. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin III announced his choice of Goodwin last Friday. When Goodwin is sworn in as the newest Senator, Democrats expect to finally have the 60th vote they have needed to break the Republican filibuster.

The extension of the federal jobless benefits for those unemployed six months or more has been blocked three times by Republicans in the Senate. Earlier versions of the bill were continuously pared down in an attempt to attract the 60 votes needed. Despite a clear majority of Senators favoring the bills, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska joined all but two Republicans in keeping the bills from being considered for floor votes.

Meanwhile the number of long-term unemployed cut off from receiving benefits has continued to soar.

As we reported two weeks ago, never before have extended benefits been cut off or allowed to expire when unemployment was so high. Never before has a Senate minority effectively cut those benefits off. And never before have they done so arguing that those benefits don’t qualify as emergency spending, and should not be passed if they add to the deficit.

The Republicans have been shown to be deficit frauds, of course, at the same time insisting that the Bush-era tax cuts to benefit the wealthiest Americans should be extended regardless of those tax cuts adding more than $600 billion to the deficit — more than 20 times as much as the cost of the unemployment benefits.

President Obama blasted the Republicans for filibustering recovery and obstructing progress in his weekly address this past Saturday. And standing with unemployed workers at a news conference this morning, the President called on the Senate to pass the jobless benefits extension:

But right now, these benefits – benefits that are often a person’s sole source of income while they’re out of work – are in jeopardy. After years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, the same people who didn’t have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn’t offer relief to middle class Americans like Jim, or Leslie, or Denise, who really do need help.

Over the past few weeks, a majority of Senators have tried – not once, not twice, but three times – to extend emergency relief on a temporary basis. And each time, a partisan minority in the Senate has used parliamentary maneuvers to block a vote, denying millions of people who are out of work much-needed relief. Republican leaders in the Senate are advancing a misguided notion that emergency relief somehow discourages people from looking for a job.

Well, I think that reflects a lack of faith in the American people.

The bill being considered extends eligibility for the existing federal unemployment programs only through November of this year, and does not include any new Tier for those who have exhausted up to 99 weeks of benefits.

Tags: filibuster, jobless benefits extension, Jobs, unemployment