Senate Republicans Roadblock Unemployment Benefits Extension

by Mike Hall, Jun 17, 2008

Senate Republicans today threw yet another roadblock into the path of legislation to reach out a helping hand to the nearly 300,000 jobless workers a month who run out of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits without finding a new job.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted to bring to the floor the recently passed House bill that would provide an extra 13 weeks of benefits for unemployed workers, plus another 13 weeks for workers in states with high unemployment. But Minority Leader John Kyl (R-Ariz.) used Senate rules to block the bill.

As of the end of May, some 1.55 million unemployed workers have been unemployed for longer than six months, according to the Department of Labor. Under the House-passed bill, about 3.8 million jobless workers would receive help after running out of their state benefits.

May also saw the largest one-month jump in the unemployment rate in more than 20 years. The economy has shed jobs for five months in row, for a loss of 324,000 jobs since December.

Says Reid:

Even as the rising costs of living and rising unemployment make middle-class life less affordable, Republicans today said no to extending benefits that would help the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in the Bush economy. Long-term unemployment is already higher than it was during previous economic downturns in which Congress extended benefits…Extending unemployment benefits will not only help struggling families, but will also inject a needed stimulus into our weakening economy.

Last month, the House and Senate voted to extend benefits as part of a supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war. But a combination of circumstances, including President Bush’s threat to veto the war bill if the jobless aid was included, led Democratic House leaders to bring the extended benefits bill to the floor separately last week, which passed overwhelmingly,  274-137.

Now the fight to extend UI benefits will focus again on the war spending bill that will come up for another vote—most likely in the House this week and in the Senate next week. Congressional negotiators say they are in talks with the White House over the jobless aid, but Bush’s threat to veto the bill over benefit extension remains in play.

Bush first issued his veto threat early this year, when there was a move to include a jobless benefits extension in an economic stimulus bill, claiming the economy wasn’t bad enough and there weren’t sufficient long-term jobless to justify an extension. Since then, the economy has soured even more, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed continue to grow.

Now, the Bush administration is claiming that even if the economic picture is grim, there are better ways to address soaring unemployment—now take a deep breath—extending tax cuts for the rich and more trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA because they will create jobs.

That, as Ross Eisenbrey, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) vice president, says on Huffington Post today:

…is a lame and callused argument…This is hogwash….Today, there are 8.5 million officially unemployed and only 3.7 million job vacancies—a shortage of 4.8 million jobs. It took more than six years for the Bush economy to produce 4.8 million jobs, despite getting the trillions of dollars of tax cuts it wanted. The record so far this year is a loss of several hundred thousand jobs. Who do administration officials think they’re fooling?

In addition to the trade deals and tax cuts for the rich, the Bush administration says the other silver bullet to the jobs crisis is to reform the two major federal job-training programs.

Says Eisenbrey:

This is a sad joke, since the “reform” involves cutting the job-training budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. As it is, the two programs provide training to only a tiny fraction of the unemployed. In any event, training people to do jobs that don’t exist is no solution. It’s dressing them up with nowhere to go.

Including the unemployment office if Bush vetoes the bill.

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