Politics

Midweek Unemployment Extension Update

By Sunlight Foundation & Participatory Politics Foundation

If Congress doesn’t pass an extension of unemployment insurance benefits this week, the filing deadline will expire and the long-term unemployed will start seeing their insurance payments disappear. Two million will be left without government support by the end of the year. We’re now more than half way through the week, so what’s the status with Congress getting this done?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D, CA-8] says the House is planning to hold a vote on extending unemployment benefits sometime before this session is up. And today Democrats introduced a bill that would extend benefits for three months, essentially keeping benefits alive until early in the next session. The real problem is in the Senate, where there is currently no plan for holding a vote on extending benefits. Senate Democrats only have 58 votes for passing an extension (all D’s but Ben Nelson [NE] and no R’s), but they would need 60 votes to beat an inevitable Republican filibuster.

One emerging strategy for getting this through the Senate seems to be doing the unemployment extension and the Bush tax cuts together in one bill. Some reports are indicating that a temporary extension of all the Bush tax cuts could be linked to an unemployment extension, possibly for up to one year. Extended unemployment benefits and the Bush tax cuts for income above $250,000 both add about $70 billion to the deficit annually, so it would be an ironic solution to an impasse based on concerns about the deficit. But I guess that’s compromise, or something. This strategy is probably the unemployed’s best chance for a longer extension.

Either way, this is not going to get done before Congress leaves on Friday for a week long Thanksgiving vacation. That means benefits will lapse, at least temporarily, which means that people who exhaust their current tier of benefits will not be eligible for any additional weeks.

On the 99er front, the news, unfortunately, is much worse. Here’s Dave Dayen reporting from a call with Sen. Jack Reed [D, RI]:

Reed basically closed the door on any Tier V funding above 99 weeks of unemployment. Large numbers of the unemployed fall into that long-term category. 'Our focus is maintaining the current system, and even that is a real challenge,' Reed said.

Full post as published by Open Congress on November 17, 2010 (boomark / email).