They can’t even be slightly human
by digby
With all my cynicism and all my dark predictions, I continue to be more optimistic than I should be. I truly thought that the Unemployment Insurance extension was probably a done deal. Silly me for being a pollyanna:
Just as it appeared the Senate was poised for a breakthrough on extending federal unemployment insurance for another year, things took a turn for the worse, and lawmakers left the chamber Thursday afternoon without holding a vote.
Three of the six Republicans who’d helped the Senate advance an unemployment bill through the first 60-vote hurdle on Tuesday complained bitterly that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had declined to let them offer amendments. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) asked if there would be votes on GOP alternative language, Reid said there would not.
[…]
The deal negotiated in the Senate on Thursday would have reinstated the benefits for one year, unlike the three-month extension that the chamber advanced Tuesday. In an attempt to win Republican support, Reid and other Democrats, including Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.), agreed to slash the duration of the benefits, saving $8 billion, and adopted a version of a Republican proposal to prevent Americans from simultaneously receiving unemployment insurance and Social Security Disability Insurance. The rest of the money used to pay for the extension would have come from prolonging the sequestration cuts to mandatory spending accounts by one year.“In this proposal, there has been a desire to address the concerns of the Republicans and Democrats,” Reid said. “Is it perfect? Of course not.”
Republicans, however, were hardly satisfied with the parameters of the deal. They saw the sequestration concession as an insufficient and insincere way of paying for the extension, since it wouldn’t be achieved until 2024. They also complained that Reid had watered down the proposal to prevent people from double-dipping on disability and unemployment insurance. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who had pushed that amendment forcefully during negotiations, had wanted more stringent restrictions. His version would have saved the government $5.4 billion. The Reid proposal saved $1 billion.
“Sen. Portman was not looped into conversations or negotiations with Sen. Reid about this today and just learned about this on the floor,” a Portman aide said.
So the main reason it failed is hurt fee fees and Harry Reid is an big old poopy head. Why would I have ever thought otherwise?
This is just insane. These people are out of money. There are no jobs. It’s going to hurt the broader economy. It makes no sense.
Today the government reports that unemployment has dropped to 6.8% — still a number formerly thought of as a crisis — and despite the fact that it’s attributable to people leaving the workforce in droves they will almost certainly use this as an excuse to say that the economy is now hunky dory and these lazy slackers need to get off their butts and start cleaning toilets.
Hopefully this is just the usual kabuki dance and they are all going to eventually find a deal that just noxious enough to make liberals sick to their stomachs so that it can pass. But sometimes I think the idea is to force progressive activists to fight for even the most pro-forma government functions until they just fall over in exhaustion and give up. Even the tiniest act of human decency requires going to the mattresses these days.
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