Sometime this spring, Republicans turned against unemployment. In Nevada, Sharron Angle (R), the candidate facing incumbent Sen. Harry Reid (D), told local reporters, “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job.” (Untrue.) Angle also called the unemployed “spoiled.”
Today, Congress plans to vote to extend unemployment benefits, which have been held up in the Senate for an unprecedented two months. Lawmakers will reconsider H.R. 4213, also known as the jobs bill or the extenders package, as the vehicle for a $34 billion extension of benefits — retroactive to June 2, when they lapsed, and continuing through the end of November.
On Tuesday, members of the U.S. Senate plan to vote on a federal extension of unemployment benefits, which has been blocked by Republicans for an unprecedented two months. The swearing-in of Carte Goodwin, the temporary replacement for the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), will give Democrats the crucial 60th vote to overcome a GOP filibuster and restore unemployment insurance to 2.5 million Americans.
WASHINGTON– On Wednesday night, a bare-bones measure to keep federally funded unemployment insurance checks headed to the long-term unemployed failed in the Senate. Moderate Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine had signed on to vote for cloture on the $34 billion bill. But without Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who passed away earlier in the week, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — the majority leader who hails from the state with the worst unemployment rate in the country — once again found himself stuck at 59 votes. By the time Byrd’s replacement is in place, in mid-July, two million Americans will have lost their benefits, and the bill extending them will have languished for some 11 weeks.
Faced with the fact that millions of Americans are losing their unemployment benefits and cutting into the national economic recovery, Tuesday night Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the Senate majority leader and the head of the Senate…
Today, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) plans to introduce a standalone bill to continue federally extended unemployment insurance benefits. The major federal jobs bill, also known as H.R. 4213, included the unemployment extension along with a number of other…
The Washington Independent’s Annie Lowery today drills into the deep end of the linked unemployment and foreclosure crises, contrasting a story of impending family homelessness and the so far mostly failed efforts in Washington to boost the national economy…
The economy added 431,000 jobs last month, dropping the national unemployment rate from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent, the Department of Labor Statistics announced this morning.
But Republicans, who a month ago were saying that they’d recognize progress…
For millions of unemployed workers, the recession is poised to go from bad to worse. More than 3.2 million laid-off Americans will prematurely exhaust their unemployment insurance in the first quarter of next year unless Congress intervenes, an advocacy group warned Monday.
Mike Lillis at the Washington Independent sends the following dispatch from the frontlines in the partisan war to extend benefits to the vast ranks of the unemployed.
“To hear the Democrats tell the tale,” he writes,…
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