Watch Retiring Sens. Snowe, Bingaman: Political Center Is Fading on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

A condensed version of the exchange:

Ifill: Are things irreconcilable?

Snowe: People have to step back and say, What’s the purpose of the United States Senate? What’s the objective of serving in public office. I happen to believe it’s problem solving. That I’ve come here to solve problems. That’s why I’ve been in public office for virtually 40 years. I believe we have an obligation, a responsibility to address the issues that come before your state or your country.

Does it seem to you like things are stuck?

Bingaman: Well… the whole country has become much more polarized politically. You have– the media is polarized. If you are of one point of view, you have one channel to watch. If you are of another point of view, you have a different channel to watch. I think that’s being reflected in the Congress. The Congress is more polarized. You have a lot of people running on a platform that they won’t compromise once they get to Washington They will stick to their guns. And of course our system of government was designed so that you gotta compromise.

Is it that people won’t compromise because they can’t or won’t compromise, or because, politically, they can’t afford to compromise?

Snowe: … People say to me, Why won’t you work together for the common good of the country? Now, the whole issue unfortunately with compromise is that people view it with disdain. It’s viewed as a capitulation of your principles. It’s not.

Sen. Snowe, I hereby grant you a magic wand. What’s the fix?

Snowe: A return to transparency and accountability would really build confidence in the integrity of the outcome of the legislation. We don’t have that anymore. It’s a closed door. It either comes to the floor without going through a committee. It’s crafted behind closed doors. We have up or down votes. I mean it’s sort of similar to the House. I feel like I’m back in the House. We have up or down votes. Have an open amendment process. Have people air their views.

And, sometimes, when you have that opportunity, you might not agree on everything in the package, which you might not because — if it’s a big package — but, at the end of the day, so, you know, I’ve made my voice heard on behalf of my constituents, and the ultimate result is something that I now can support, even if it’s not everything that I wanted.

Doesn’t the dysfunction have a chance to take greater hold with your absence?

Snowe: Well, you know, my concern is that it’s not going to change on the short term, and that’s what I had to consider at where I am in my own life…

I am concerned that the lines have drawn. I mean, the analyses that have been done recently about ratings of various — of all of us as senators, whether conservative or liberal and so on, back in 1982, there were 58 senators that came between the most conservative Democrat and the most liberal Republican. Today, there are none.

So there’s not much of a center, and we have to decide that the institution has to not only solve problems, but the American people have to give rewards to those people and individuals who are willing to work across party lines. There are no political rewards for that today.

The discussion echoed the question Daily Show host Jon Stewart in 2004 famously took to Crossfire, the CNN cable debate show that folded soon after Stewart appeared and told the hosts their predictable ginned-up left-right debates were doing a disservice to the country. “Just stop,” he said. Video of the exchange went viral and Americans applauded Stewart for articulating an exhaustion with the way cable news- and talk radio-style political theater seemed to be overtaking political reality.

In the short time he has been in office, Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet has made news for his evocative railing against the do-nothing anachronistic nature of the Senate and has taken to the floor on occasion to desperately plead for action.

[ Image: Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, NewsHour screengrab. ]

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“The young people who would benefit from the passage of the DREAM Act are here through no fault of their own,” she said. “If this bill becomes law, they would have the opportunity to become a part of the country that they love by serving our country in the military or by pursuing a higher education.  That’s good for them, and good for the United States – which is why leaders on both sides of the political spectrum agree that this bill needs to become law.  To that end, I urge Members of Congress like Representative Coffman and Representative Lamborn to not let politics get in the way of good policy.  It is imperative the Congress act now so that we can continue to move our country forward.”

The DREAM Act’s prospects for passing this year suffered a blow today when conservative Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson said he would block any move to call a full Senate vote on the legislation. Nelson’s hard-line stand makes it extremely unlikely that majority Democrats can wrangle the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. An attempt in September to bring the bill to the floor failed 52 votes to 44 votes.

Nelson’s reasoning, as laid out in an essay at his website, raises more questions than it answers, like many of the current arguments against the DREAM Act. Nelson said he is “not going to support any legislation that I don’t think adds to jobs, or the military or the economy… Consequently, I won’t support any motion to proceed or any kind of cloture measure on the DREAM Act.”

Yet, as Lynda Waddington at the Iowa Independent reports today, Defense Department strategic planning documents (pdf) described the legislation as a “smart way” to strengthen the country’s “mission-ready, all-volunteer” force.

Waddington also notes that many experts agree that the U.S. economy and longterm U.S. unemployment figures would benefit from the law:

In addition, a national organization of more than 5,700 school, colleges, universities and other education organizations has argued that “the contributions that DREAM Act students would make over their lifetimes would dwarf the small additional investment in their education beyond high school, and the intangible benefits of legalizing and educating these students would be significant.” According to the College Board‘s 2009 study, “education — especially inculcating the supporting strong literacy skills, communication skills and the skills required for what MIT and Harvard economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane call ‘expert thinking’ — generates powerful waves of social good.”

Compelled by what they see as the inadequacy of explanations of DREAM opponents like Nelson, a group of undocumented students joined with labor unions and immigration reform advocates to announce a six-figure ad buy that will finance ads that argue Republicans are spreading lies about the legislation and are “running out of excuses to oppose” it.

The ads will run on Spanish and English media and will target Senators whose votes could be crucial to passing the DREAM Act. The list includes Florida Senator George LeMieux; Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe; Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown; Nevada Senator John Ensign; and Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

The New York Times today documented the late push supporters are mounting to get the Act passed, but notes that enough Republicans are entrenched on the issue to make passage unlikely.

Polls suggest the DREAM Act is popular with the public. For Latino voters, the DREAM Act is a major policy issue and a sort of candidate litmus test on the left and the right.

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Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. – working with Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine – is trying to talk Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., into making a carbon cap limited to electric utilities part of the final energy package Reid is expected to send to the Senate floor by the end of the month. That gives the Senate just a few short weeks to debate the energy package before the August recess.

Udall last summer expressed disappointment in the RES initially proposed in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, on which he serves. That proposal called for a 15-percent standard – meaning the percentage of electrical power produced for renewable sources such as wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal – by 2021.

In a letter to his fellow senators this week, Udall urged them to support a 25-percent RES by 2025, citing a study showing it would create an additional 274,000 jobs in the clean energy sector. Last week Udall led the charge of 10 freshmen senators, including Colorado’s Michael Bennet, in pushing Reid to move a bill including a cap on greenhouse gas emissions and a federal renewable energy standard.

“We refuse to be the generation of leaders who posterity will view as those who failed to act,” the freshmen class wrote in a letter to Reid, who faces a tough reelection battle and hails from the mining-rich state of Nevada.

Udall, meanwhile, has taken a shotgun approach to revamping the nation’s power grid, including supporting a nuclear power renaissance that’s not popular with environmentalists. He campaigned for Colorado’s Amendment 37 in 2004, which saw one of the first voter-approved renewable energy standards in the nation.

The state legislature in 2007 upped it to 20 percent by 2020, and this past session – with the backing of the state’s largest utility, Minnesota-based Xcel Energy – increased it another 10 percent to the second highest RES in the nation behind only California.

According to the New York Times, some major utilities and trade associations have yet to take a position on the Kerry utility-only cap, including the Edison Electric Institute, which represents about 70 percent of the U.S. electric power industry.

But other utilities, including Duke Energy Corp – the sixth largest electric utility in the nation, according the DOE’s Energy Information Administration – supports the Kerry proposal because it would provide market certainty in the face of more stringent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulation of emissions. The EPA push promises to involve years of litigation.

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The vote will take place immediately following the swearing-in of Carte Goodwin, the replacement for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who passed away at the end of June at the age of 92. That vote will be the 60-vote cloture hurdle to end debate. With Goodwin, the Democrats have 59 in their caucus, and Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are expected to cross the aisle, while Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) will vote no.

The bill will then move on to a majority-rules vote on the actual legislation, which will return to the House, where the Democratic leadership plans to pass it as quickly as possible. (The Senate is not voting on H.R. 5618, the House’s standalone version, opting instead to hold a new vote on the Senate bill, which already failed to pass cloture once, in order to bypass an additional procedural roadblock.) President Obama could sign the bill as early as Wednesday evening, barring procedural hold-ups, and states could begin the process of disbursing the benefits as early as Thursday morning.

The bill does not include an extension of the $25-a-week Federal Additional Compensation funds, tacked onto many unemployment checks. It also does not include any of the other provisions originally included in or proposed for the jobs bill or extenders package: It does not close tax loopholes, or provide Medicaid funding to states, or include funds to keep teachers and other state employees working. It also does not create an additional fifth tier of benefits; federal extensions only continue in states with higher than an 8 percent unemployment rate, and the maximum weeks of state and federal benefits remains ninety-nine.

Nevertheless, the unemployment extension comes as a desperately needed lifeline to 2.5 million American families. “When millions of Americans lost their jobs, they didn’t just lose a place to go to work in the morning,” Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor on Monday. “They lost their incomes, their savings and their retirement security. They lost their tuition payments. Many lost their homes. They lost their gas money and their grocery money. All of this through no fault of their own. I’m not talking about just a handful of people in an isolated corner of the country. I’m talking about millions of Americans from every one of our states.”

Additionally, economists expect the unemployment benefits extension to have a strong stimulative impact on the economy, as the recovery lags and a growing band of experts calls for more government spending to keep up demand. Lawrence Mishel, the head of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that the unemployment benefits extension will support 800,000 jobs over the remainder of the year — as the unemployed generally spend their unemployment benefits immediately, rather than using them to pay down debt or to keep as savings. Unemployment benefits usually end up costing the government only about 40 percent of the sticker price, Mishel said on a call with reporters on Monday. “[Passing the unemployment extension] is not only a decent thing to do. It’s one of the most stimulative things you can do to create jobs,” he noted.

But Republicans have argued that unemployment benefits should no longer be considered emergency spending, in which case they would not be allowed to raise the deficit. “We’ve offered ways of paying for these programs, and we’ve been eager to approve them,” argued Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “But we can’t support job-killing taxes and adding tens of billions to the already unsustainable national debt. So the only reason the unemployment extension hasn’t passed is because Democrats simply refuse to pass a bill that doesn’t add to the debt. That’s it. That’s the only difference between what they’ve offered and what we’ve offered.” A number of Republican senators — including McConnell and Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) — introduced unemployment bills with offsets.

Over the weekend, President Obama joined the Democratic caucus in hitting at Republicans for blocking the benefits for so long. Never in U.S. history have extended benefits been allowed to expire with unemployment over 7 percent. He devoted his Saturday radio address the topic. And, speaking in the Rose Garden on Monday, flanked by three unemployed Americans, Obama said: “[Republicans] say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money. So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed. They’ve got no problem spending money on tax breaks for folks at the top who don’t need them and didn’t even ask for them; but they object to helping folks laid off in this recession who really do need help.”

[Photo: Michael Francis McElroy/ZUMA Press ]

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Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell (Ky.), have repeatedly blocked attempts to extend unemployment insurance over deficit concerns. (epa/ZUMApress.com)

Economists insist it should not be like this. Benefits for the jobless remain one of the most effective forms of stimulus. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys.com, estimates that they generate $1.61 of stimulus for every dollar spent. Moreover, expanding unemployment insurance is wildly popular, even among conservatives. Poll after poll shows that a vast majority of Americans support giving aid to the laid-off. And on Capitol Hill, even the most stringent deficit hawks do not object to the unemployment benefits themselves. They object to expanding the deficit to pay for them.

Democrats insist that the benefits expand the deficit, to put new dollars and fresh demand into the economy. Deficit reduction will have to happen, they say, but later. Having the government give with one hand and take with the other makes little sense. In this, they received support on Wednesday from Doug Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, who said that “[cutting the deficit] while economic activity and employment remain well below their potential levels would probably slow the economic recovery.” Republicans, however, have not been convinced.

So, the debate has dragged on. Yesterday evening’s failed cloture vote is just the latest in a long line of disappointments and failures around unemployment insurance, known as UI. For the past nine months, the Senate has devoted hours of floor time and hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes negotiations to ensuring that the government continues to support those left unemployed by the worst labor-market recession since the Great Depression. And for the past nine months, every bill — every extension, every jobs package — has faced staunch opposition from Republicans. Repeatedly, the Senate has had to turn to short-term stopgap measures rather than more permanent extensions. In the words of one aide, “it is beyond frustrating,” particularly since the measures are so noncontroversial. “Frustrating” has become the touchword for advocates of UI — and particularly for the unemployed.

It was last fall that Democrats in the White House and on the Hill started worrying that the extended unemployment benefits created by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act — the $787 billion stimulus bill passed in February 2009 — were running out before any sign of a labor-market recovery. The stimulus bill both lengthened the number of weeks of benefits by 13 or 20 and made some more generous, by $25 a week — enough to keep 800,000 people out of poverty, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has estimated.

But by the summer of 2009, the economy had not turned around. The September jobs report showed that the unemployment rate had edged up to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high. Joblessness had officially become a crisis in and of itself. And the stimulus’ expansion of unemployment benefits was due to expire on Dec. 31. President Barack Obama told the nation in a radio address, “[The] report on September job losses was a sobering reminder that progress comes in fits and starts, and that we will need to grind out this recovery step by step. That’s why I’m working closely with my economic team to explore additional options to promote job creation.” Democrats decided they needed to renew the benefits, and to expand them further.

ROUND ONE
Having decided to re-up the federal unemployment insurance benefits, House Democrats originated a bill and passed it with relative ease. The Senate created a stronger version — extending UI benefits for 14 weeks in all states, and 20 weeks in states with unemployment rates higher than 8.5 percent. The maximum number of weeks reached 99.

Senate Democrats anticipated some difficulty moving the measure. They were in the midst of the health care fight, and the bill was not offset with reductions in spending elsewhere; Republicans, they knew, might not come on board instantly. Still, given the horrific condition of the labor market, they expected nothing like the fight they got. On Oct. 8, Reid asked for unanimous consent to move the motion forward. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) objected. Five days later, Senate Democrats tried again. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) objected. Thus started a month-long battle over help for the jobless while the unemployment rate flirted with double digits.

The Senate quickly became embroiled in debates over amendments — with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader, insisting that Reid allow consideration of a provision to ensure that the community-organizing group and Republican bugbear ACORN would receive no federal funding and another provision to filter illegal immigrants out of the workforce. The amendments enraged Democrats, who saw them as pointless, and a tool for time-wasting. “The other amendments are vexatious,” Reid fumed. “They are argumentative. We don’t want them. They are not germane. They are not relevant to this legislation.” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) echoed his thoughts. “This [Republican obstruction] has become a tactic,” Stabenow told TWI at the time. “We could have [moved this bill] three weeks ago.”

After weeks of debate, the bill passed a cloture vote to move to consideration, 87 to 13. Democrats expected the legislation to race to passage, but Republicans continued to bring up objections, requiring a number of procedural votes and hours of floor time. “Maybe [Republicans] needed another ACORN amendment,” Reid said. “Maybe that would be something that would please them.” (The amendments did not make it in.) On Oct. 4 — 27 days and four votes since the bill’s initial introduction — it passed unanimously, 98-0. It became law in early November, adding two new tiers of unemployment benefits. The bill was a success — but the struggle for it was a portent of the difficulties to come for Democrats trying to extend benefits for the jobless.

ROUND TWO
That same month, the Senate Democratic leadership admitted problems with the extension. For one, the unemployment rate had drifted above 10 percent, seemingly necessitating a further expansion of the safety net. Additionally, there was a serious glitch in the bill: A Dec. 31 filing deadline meant that many jobless Americans would not get the full 20 weeks of benefits. The National Employment Law Project estimated that 475,000 people would exhaust state-funded benefits after Dec. 31, missing the deadline and losing federal help; a further 580,000 would exhaust one tier of federally funded benefits just after the deadline, missing out on additional federal benefits. Congress needed to extend the deadline. And it needed a better underlying unemployment bill to boot.

In December, Democrats managed to get the patch into the Defense Appropriations Bill after some wrangling — but only a two-month extension, to the end of February. Still, it gave them time to focus on an ambitious new bill aiding the unemployed and others hurt by the recessionary economy: pushing back the deadlines for the federal unemployment benefits, authorizing more Medicaid and COBRA funding and stalling a 21 percent cut to payments to doctors under Medicare, among numerous other measures under consideration. In December, the House passed those measures as part of the Tax Extenders Act of 2009 — later known as the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010 and commonly referred to by its House resolution number, 4213.

Before the Senate could get to it, again, benefits started expiring. On Feb. 25, Senate Democrats asked for unanimous consent for a House-passed 30-day extension of COBRA and unemployment benefits — just enough time to let the Senate get a more permanent fix in place. But Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) objected. “Everybody in this chamber wants to extend unemployment benefits,” he said. “[But] if we can’t find $10 billion somewhere for a bill that everybody in this body supports, we will never pay for anything.” Reid kept on pushing for unanimous consent. Bunning kept on objecting — stopping the Senate from moving forward a total of eleven times.

After a five-day standoff that threatened to stop all congressional work, and after Senate Republican leadership expressed their anger with Bunning, he eventually gave up. The vote passed, 78 to 19.

ROUND THREE
With the temporary extension signed into law, Senate Democrats moved on to a more permanent fix for unemployment insurance and serious consideration of 4213. Reid hoped to extend federal unemployment benefits through the end of 2010, rather than a few months at a time. The Senate included the provision in its amendment to the bill, and the motion passed on March 10, 62 to 36, with six Republicans joining the Democrats and only Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) breaking against them.

The problem? Some argued portions of the bill violated new paygo rules: Democrats could deficit-spend only in “emergencies,” and did the unemployment situation really qualify? Most Democrats insist they do, and have pushed back against whittling down the stimulus to pay for the benefits. “[UI extensions are] done in a way that we have always done it,” Stabenow told TWI. “[Those are] always categorized as an emergency. And, frankly, if 15 million people without jobs is not an emergency, I don’t know what is.”

Either way, the bill needed to go back to the House for approval. And House deficit hawks were not looking kindly on it anymore. Without the bill signed into law, the expiry of unemployment benefits — an albatross following Democrats for months by that time — returned again.

Procedurally, maneuvering to get another patch proved remarkably difficult. The Senate chose to take up a House-passed one-month extension, then to move to a more permanent solution. “We should not let these programs expire,” Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) argued on the Senate floor. But Republicans insisted they would not vote for anything not paid for.

They prevented unanimous consent — meaning Democrats needed to file cloture on the motion, and needed to give it time to “ripen” before a vote. It came down to the Friday before a two-week vacation started at the end of March. The long-term unemployed would start falling off of the federal government’s rolls on April 5. Congress would not be in session until April 12. The Senate failed to move, and hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans — around 200,000 a week — stopped getting their unemployment checks over Easter.

It took until April 15 for the Senate to get to passage of the patch; Republicans Olympia Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine) and George Voinovich (Ohio) crossed the aisle to support the measure. The bill extended the filing deadline for federal unemployment benefits to June 2, extended COBRA health subsidies and delayed the 21 percent cut to Medicare reimbursements for doctors. It cost $18 billion, with no offsets. On April 15, Obama signed it into law.

ROUND FOUR
And so, Congress turned again to 4213 — the extenders package, passed by the House, modified by the Senate and returned again to the House. There, deficit-hawk Democrats insisted on whittling the portions of the hundred-provision bill down. Compromises took a $140 billion bill down to $54 billion — shortening the extension of UI through November, trimming the Medicare doc fix and the COBRA extension and dropping the additional $25 a week on jobless checks. It passed, but barely.

The modified bill returned to the Senate just before — again — the extensions of UI and other provisions would start to end over the Memorial Day holiday. This brings us to the present, where the bill got stuck in the Senate for a month, dropping extended benefits for 1.2 million Americans before eventually dying.

The death wasn’t quick. On June 18, it lost a cloture vote, 56-40 — shy of the 60 votes needed — with Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) all voting no. A week later, a pared-down bill lost another cloture vote, 57 to 41. The responses ranged from depression to rage. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said, “This is one of the worst moments I’ve seen in 25 years in the United States Senate. … Even cutting our original proposal nearly in half wasn’t enough to secure even one Republican vote today.”

Reid broke the bill up, moving just the unemployment extension portion, along with a House-passed change to the filing deadline for the homebuyer tax credit. On Wednesday night, that last stopgap bill died, 58 to 38. Senate staffers say that this is not the end. They will wait for Byrd’s replacement, expected to be appointed within two weeks or so, and then move the bill with Snowe and Collins’ support. They will make the UI checks retroactive for the two million Americans who have been denied them in recent weeks.

But the anger is palpable after nine months of delays. “It’s not just Harry Reid or any other Democrat who needs brave Republicans to step up, for once, for what’s right and what’s needed. It’s the people we serve. We have Republicans ready to protect banks while sticking it to the working men and women of this country while opposing efforts to extend unemployment benefits,” Jim Manley, Reid’s spokesman, told TWI. “This is yet one in another series of cynical and brazen attempts by Republicans to position themselves as the party of ‘hell no’ in November.”

And the unemployed? They are confused and enraged. Yesterday evening, I spoke with Deb Martin, a 49-year-old Ohioan on the verge of losing her federally extended benefits. “I have kids,” she said. “I have a mortgage. It’s been years of this [garbage] and I don’t know what I’m going to do without those checks. Even if they make them retroactive, we might be living in the car by the time they do.”

The economic establishment stresses that the unemployment checks continue to be not only beneficial, but necessary. Testifying before the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, John Irons, the research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute argued, “Unemployment should reach 6 percent or lower, and be trending downward, before any fiscal contraction should be seriously considered. In fact, with unemployment hovering near 10 percent and with projections putting unemployment at elevated levels for at least the next couple of years, further job creation is indeed necessary.”

But privately, Senate staffers whisper that if this unemployment extension makes it through, it will be the last one. There will be no more torturous attempts to grant unemployment benefits to the 15 million unemployed. There will be no bills to add a Tier V for the million who have exhausted all benefits and still cannot find work. The benefits will end in November.

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Without one more swing GOP vote– or the vote of recalcitrant Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska– Senate Democrats might have to wait to pass the bill until after the July 4 recess, when the late Sen. Robert Byrd’s replacement takes his seat. More than 300,000 unemployed Americans would lose extended benefits in the meantime, adding to the current 1.2 million on the rolls.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

There are currently 58 members of Congress who caucus with the Democrats. Nelson though has voiced strong opposition to Reid’s bill. “If we had Senator Byrd’s replacement we would have 60,” Reid told The Hill. “We have to wait and see what a couple of Republicans do.”

The two Republicans are most likely Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, both of whom have signaled they would be willing to vote for a standalone benefits extension measure.

A Senate Democratic aide says gaining the 60th vote with both Collins and Snowe likely on board is proving extremely difficult — because Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) has indicated he will not vote for the proposal. This morning, he released a deficit-neutral version of the unemployment extension bill, paying for the benefits by taking money from the stimulus.

The cloture vote will likely happen tomorrow. Reid told The Hill the homebuyer tax credit portion of the bill might pass under unanimous consent today.

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Democratic lawmakers championed the bill. Republicans largely opposed it. At least four Republicans voted with the Democrats, reportedly to end a possible filibuster. They were Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, as well as George Voinovich of Ohio, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The president will sign the Act into law in the coming days. Opposition was based mostly on a reading of the bill that saw it limiting the rights of religious believers to speak out against homosexuality.

Earlier this month Tom Perez, the assistant attorney general now in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told his staff that the Hate Crimes Act would be a powerful weapon with which to attack discrimination against lesbian, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

Carrie Gordon Earll, senior director of Focus on the Family Action, reacted with concern.

“Too often it’s religious liberty that’s at stake when homosexuality is promoted in our society. The rights of people of faith who adhere to a biblical view of sexuality should not be crushed under the Obama administration’s political promises to homosexual activists.”

The Shepard Act, however, protects freedom of speech in matters of sexual identity the same way hate crimes legislation on the books for years has protected expression in matters of race. Analysts baffled by conservative concerns that the new measure would create “thought crimes” have pointed out that U.S. law has long made distinctions for motive in all kinds of crimes. Domestic abuse is a different crime than battery, for example, and is treated differently in the courts.

Democrats frustrated after a decade of obfuscation on the part of conservative lawmakers, resorted to strategy to pass the Act, attaching it to a Defense spending bill Republicans were loath to vote against.

Yesterday, Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet lauded the passage of the measure.

“As we learned in the civil rights era, sometimes communities need assistance and resources from the federal government when they have to confront the most emotional and dangerous kinds of crimes.”

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The site counts three robocalls and four mailers paid for by McCain and Republican Party organizations targeting voters in Colorado, including a robocall linking Obama to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and a mailer depicting the “hostile leaders of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea” under the headline “Welcome to the White House.”

Progressive blog Talking Points Memo created a similar map to “track McCain’s robo-slime and mail sleaze state by state.”

Democratic officials aren’t the only ones denouncing McCain’s “under the radar” tactics, including the Ayers robocall. So far, at least four Republican senators have called on McCain to pull the robocalls, with Maine’s Susan Collins saying, ““They don’t serve John McCain well. This kind of campaign call does not reflect the kind of leader that he is.”

Minnesota’s Norm Coleman urged McCain to stop the calls while Oregon’s Gordon Smith joined Maine’s other Republican senator, Olympia Snowe, denouncing the calls.

Colorado Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer stood alone praising the robocalls in a survey conducted by congressional news site The Hill a week ago.

“I do not anticipate asking that be done,” said campaign manager Dick Wadhams when asked if Schaffer would ask for the ads to be pulled. … “I think that’s a legitimate issue,” Wadhams said about the calls about Ayers.

Other Republican senators contacted by The Hill “demurred,” saying they either hadn’t heard the calls or hadn’t received any complaints from constituents.