The following is a statement from Working America.
The recent move to block unemployment insurance, which is set to expire December 31st, will devastate millions of working families already struggling to get by in this Wall Street-created economic crisis.
As House Republicans take leave of their duties to the American people, and big banks and financiers enjoy their bailouts and record profits, jobless Americans will continue this holiday week and next to demand responsible governance from their lawmakers who claim to hold their interests at heart.
In places like New Mexico, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and more, working families will gather together, make phone calls, and send messages to lawmakers pushing for immediate extension to unemployment insurance – an uncontroversial measure that keeps jobless people afloat in this scant job market and provides immediate economic stimulus to communities.
Fearing they didn’t have the votes to defeat a bipartisan Senate compromise that would extend unemployment insurance (UI) for long-term jobless workers and a payroll tax cut for workers, Republican House leaders scuttled a vote on the bill today. Then they left town for the holidays. Both the UI program and the tax cut expire Dec. 31.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) previously indicated he supported the compromise that passed the Senate 89-10 with 39 Republican votes. However, when the Republican tea party wing vociferously objected, he changed his tune and opposed the bill. Republican leaders then blocked an up or down vote and 229 Republicans voted to kill Senate bill through parliamentary trickery.
Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), says that the compromise was negotiated “with the involvement and blessing of the Speaker of the House.” She also says that Senate bill rebuffed attempts in an earlier House bill that scapegoated unemployed workers and “enacted dangerous changes to the basic UI program which undermined its very purpose and effectiveness.”
While a two-month deal is not ideal, time is running out to protect the unemployed from being victims of the worst partisan games Congress has ever seen. Congress is preparing to recess for five weeks. By the time members return to D.C. to begin negotiations anew, close to 1.8 million long-term unemployed will lose their only life-line. As Speaker Boehner well knows, this stalling tactic virtually guarantees that benefits for the long-term unemployed, those already hit hardest by the recession and slow recovery, will lapse for a dangerously long period of time.
Wondering why this Congress has an approval rating that has hit a historical-record low of 11 percent? Just check out the surreal means by which the mad Tea Party that runs the House Republican caucus halted unemployment insurance and middle-class tax cuts today.
In less than two weeks, the payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment benefits will both expire—a major hit to the economy next year. But the House, in this vote, showed themselves perfectly comfortable with that outcome.
As I go through the details of how this economic relief measure actually went down, let’s remember that this is not some abstract matter of legislative arcana, or a purely political battle. This is about the payroll taxes paid by 160 million working people and the unemployment insurance that millions of families of the jobless depend on. This may seem like a silly Washington story, but when you look at the actual lives and pocketbooks of working-class and middle-class people, it’s a devastating failure.
As I’ve said before, there should be an easy answer here: everyone in Congress should be able to agree to cleanly extend the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance. The Senate tried and failed, thanks to Republican filibusters, to pass longer-term extensions of these provisions on their own and through the American Jobs Act. Finally, this weekend, they passed a bipartisan two-month extension that would give them time to continue to negotiate over the long-term options.
That was the theory, anyway, until the hard right of the House GOP caucus decided not to accept the bipartisan deal. Late last night, Speaker John Boehner planned to bring the Senate bill to the floor with the intent of defeating it—but was afraid he wouldn’t have the votes to kill it outright.
All that the House has to do to make the bill officially ready to be signed into law is hold a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate’s bipartisan bill. But during a 3 a.m. meeting of the House Rules Committee last night, the Republican majority devised a different plan — twist the voting procedure so that the Senate’s bill can be rejected while allowing the Republicans to save face by technically voting “aye.”
And the plan succeeded. In a 229-193 vote, the House Republicans killed the bipartisan Senate bill, in a downright acrobatic feat of legislative farce:
They didn’t give that bill an up-or-down vote. They gave it a down-or-down vote. The question before the House wasn’t “do you agree with the Senate bill?” It was “do you disagree with the Senate bill?” Thus a “yes” vote was actually a vote against extending the payroll tax cut and vice-versa; and even if the majority of the House had supported the Senate bill, it wouldn’t have passed. It was set up to fail.
So what happens now? The Senate is out of session, which means the House is kicking the issue back to an empty chamber. The House Republicans are insisting on the passage of their own bill, which would have cut 3.3 million people off of unemployment benefits, among other bad provisions.
There are 11 days to go, and Christmas hits at the end of this week. People who are depending on the economic boost of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance—like Working America’s 3 million members, half a million of whom are unemployed—can’t wait around for the House Republicans to grow up. Is it any wonder that 9 out of 10 Americans aren’t happy with their representatives?
This shouldn’t be particularly complicated. Two key policies keeping working families afloat—a temporary cut in the payroll tax and an extension of the time people out of work can draw unemployment insurance—are set to expire in a matter of days, pulling money out of the pockets of millions.
Congress had an easy choice available. Since our economy continues to struggle with high joblessness and low consumer demand, our elected leaders should have simply renewed these policies. But never underestimate the hostility of the House Republican majority to simple governance and their indifference to the economic condition of working-class people.
On Saturday, the U.S. Senate passed—after a lot of negotiation—a bipartisan compromise that would extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance in the short term. It’s not perfect, but it would at least avoid pulling the rug out from under 160 million workers and millions of unemployed people. House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, asked Senators of both parties to come to a compromise, which passed 89-10, on the assumption that the House would vote on the same bill today.
But since nothing can be simple with this Congress, not even the most no-brainer extension of basic economic relief, House Republicans may very well defeat the compromise bill tonight. The political-journalism term of art for this might be “playing hardball,” but the more accurate term is “throwing a tantrum.”
It’s worth noting that the House Republicans’ strategy here is to bundle together the important payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance extensions with unrelated riders aimed at scoring political points. This is sure to upset people who signed this pledge, right?
We will end the practice of packaging unpopular bills with “must-pass” legislation to circumvent the will of the American people. Instead, we will advance major legislation one issue at a time.
Once the authors of that pledge hear about the House Republicans’ violation of that principle, they’re sure to…oh. Wait.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent nails it: the caucus that controls the U.S. House is “extreme, intransigent, self-indulgent and hostile to basic norms of governing.” To that I’d only add “clearly completely uninterested in the real-world effects of their decisions.”
Terry Miale, a communications systems engineer, lost nearly everything when she lost her job.
My whole life is gone. My retirement is gone. My house is gone. For a period of time, I lost my mental health because I went into a deep depression.
Even though she worked 30 years in her field, it took Miale four years to get re-employed. So Miale can’t understand why Republican leaders in Congress just won’t extend unemployment insurance (UI) to long-term unemployed workers who can’t find jobs in an economy in which there are more than four workers for every one job.
When I needed unemployment benefits, they were there. I really think that it isn’t fair to pull a lifeline out from under people that are just now having to collect unemployment benefits. It’s hard enough to live on unemployment benefits, let alone live with none.
Unless UI is extended this month, 2 million jobless people will lose their lifeline. Those in Congress blocking the UI extension should be made to feel what it’s like to be unemployed.
It bears repeating, every day: if Congress doesn’t act, six million people will lose unemployment insurance benefits at the end of the year. That’s six million people who will find it harder to make ends meet, and six million fewer people who can support their community’s economy.
Half of America is poor or low-income and wide majorities say that our economic and political systems are unfairly tilted towards the rich. It’s time we start listening and responding to the voices of the people who are actually impacted by our political decisions—not just the politicians, pundits and lobbyists who set the agenda in Washington. Here are two.
Shonda, a Working America member from Ohio, has been unemployed for nearly two years, and has relied on her unemployment insurance to help care for her ailing mother.
Karen, a Working America member and a former bank teller from Pennsylvania, has been unemployed for 13 months.
So many people in this country are unemployed—including half a million of our members—and House Republicans are offering up a bill that would end unemployment insurance for more than 3 million people. How can you claim to be concerned about the economy when you’re fighting to pull back the unemployment insurance so many families, including people like Shonda and Karen, are counting on to make ends meet?
In Washington, they’re really making their priorities clear. Either their idea of how the economy works is totally backwards or they’re just not interested in policies that actually help working-class and middle-class people like Karen and Shonda.
“The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 3630. With only days left before taxes go up for 160 million hardworking Americans, H.R. 3630 plays politics at the expense of middle-class families. H.R. 3630 breaks the bipartisan agreement on spending cuts that was reached just a few months ago and would inevitably lead to pressure to cut investments in areas like education and clean energy. Furthermore, H.R. 3630 seeks to put the burden of paying for the bill on working families, while giving a free pass to the wealthiest and to big corporations by protecting their loopholes and subsidies,” the administration said in a statement of policy.
Added Carney definitively: “If the president were presented with H.R. 3630, he would veto the bill.”
Cue the feigned shock and anger from Speaker John Boehner, whose office said the veto threat was “legislative malpractice,” based on “fictitious reasoning.”
We’re going to once again disagree with the Speaker: there’s nothing “fictitious” about the economic pain and suffering that will result if H.R. 3630 becomes law.
With the average length of unemployment at a record high, it is cruel and selfish to cut 40 weeks off of federal unemployment benefits.
With millions of Americans out of work through no fault of their own, it is cruel and selfish to require applicants to be tested for drugs just to get the funds to buy groceries and fill their gas tanks.
With the unemployment rate in states like Michigan still over 10 percent, it is cruel and selfish to end Tier IV unemployment compensation and cut aid from states that need it most.
With state governments faced with impossible budget choices, it is cruel and selfish to override their ability to make decisions on unemployment benefits – and from the same Congressmen who were elected on the promise of “smaller government.”
With 80 percent of Americans begging the two parties to work together for solutions, it is cruel and selfish to treat unemployed Americans as pawns in the Speaker’s political chess match with the President.
Memo to House Republicans: It’s not a game to those outside the Beltway. It’s not a game to the people at home having to decide between food and medicine. We aren’t fooled or amused by Rep. Dave Camp writing a bill that insults our dignity and hurts our wallets, and then putting a bow on top and calling it “The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act.”
Why don’t they get it? Why do they think less money in the pockets of Americans translates into “job creation?” Why do they think the inability to pay for food and housing is good for the economy?
We’re far from agreeing with everything the Obama Administration does. But if this bill gets to the President’s desk in its current form, a veto is the least he could do. If I was President, I might rip it up, or set it on fire.
We’re tweeting all day about the importance of unemployment insurance to millions of Americans and the economy at large. Join in by tweeting with the hashtag #ExtendUI.
If you closed your eyes and tried to imagine a piece of legislation that could inflict the most damage on the pocketbooks and dignities of working Americans, you couldn’t get much better than H.R. 3630.
Introduced by Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), fresh from driving the bipartisan “Supercommittee” into the ground with his intransigence, H.R. 3630 is a Frankenstein of poison pills, deceptive language, and punishment for the unemployed.
A report from the National Employment Law Project lays out the tenets of this bill:
H.R. 3630 shortens the federal unemployment benefit period by a whopping 40 weeks, even as the average length of unemployment is at its highest since 1948.
H.R. 3630 overrides the power of the individual states to determine eligibility for unemployment benefits.
H.R. 3630 eliminates Tier IV of unemployment compensation, removing a vital lifeline specifically from those states with the highest rates of unemployment.
H.R. 3630 charges unemployed workers for the cost of their own reemployment.
H.R. 3630 imposes the requirement of a high school diploma or GED to be eligible for benefits, an unfair burden on those with less access to education.
And in an insult to the millions of American who are unemployed through no fault of their own, the bill allows states to test every UI applicant for drug use.
It’s titled, unbelievably, the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2011.” George Orwell doesn’t hold a candle to Rep. Dave Camp.
H.R. 3630 would protect the most privileged one percent of all Americans from having to pay one more penny in taxes, and it would do so by demanding still more sacrifice and pain from jobless workers, federal employees, and low- and middle-income families. The authors of H.R. 3630 obviously have more sympathy for millionaires than for the victims of the economic crisis caused by Wall Street. We urge you to vote against this cruel and selfish piece of legislation.
Tomorrow, starting at 11am, we’ll be having an #ExtendUI Tweet-a-thon to get the word out about the importance of a clean extension of unemployment insurance. If you haven’t, sign our 9 Demands for the 99 Percent petition, which includes a demand for Congress to extend this vital lifeline.
It can’t be said often enough: with the jobs situation as bad as it is, we need to keep unemployment insurance flowing to the millions of households who need them. There are more than four job seekers for every job opening, and the average unemployed person has been out of work for some 40 weeks. Unfortunately, the extension of unemployment insurance that would support those struggling with long-term unemployment is set to expire at the end of the year.
And now, to add insult to injury, the Republican caucus in the U.S. House is pushing a new bill that would slash weeks out of the unemployment benefits that those out of work can draw on.
That means that families hardest-hit by the economy are going to have less money in their pockets to spend on their food and their home. It means that they can’t contribute as much to the local economy. The new bill is short-sighted and cruel in its impacts.
In addition to the new reductions on the length of benefits, the bill is riddled with proposals that would punish the unemployed, make the system less efficient and undermine the guarantee of unemployment insurance.
As economist Jared Bernstein notes, “The whole thing makes no sense…we’ve never failed to extend with the jobless rate this high. It’s bad for families who need the money, and it’s bad for the macro economy, since they spend the money.”
As usual, the Republican leadership in Congress is showing where its priorities are—and making things better for working families doesn’t seem to make it onto the list.
