Senate Fails To Move Emergency Unemployment Compensation Forward 55-45, but Republican Constituents are Catching On that their Representatives Don't Care About Them

 Senate Republicans Move the Goal Posts and Deny 1.3 Million Americans Extended Unemployment Compensation, But Constituents are Starting to Realize It

Chart by www.cbpp.org

Well, the Senate failed to move the Emergency Unemployment Compensation bill forward because they couldn't get Republicans to vote for helping 1.3 million Americans in dire need of help.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has struggled to attract Republican votes as the GOP – still fuming about a rules change he pushed that diminishes their filibuster power – moved the goalposts on what it would take for GOP lawmakers to support an extension of the program.

Two procedural votes on different variations on an extension failed Tuesday afternoon, sending lawmakers back the drawing table.

 How can Republicans say they give an iota about Americans that are struggling?  At first, Senate Republicans said they would not support the extended benefits if it were not paid for. Then, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rounded up Democratic AND Republican proposals on how they would pay for an extension for varying lengths of time, the Republicans starting complaining about not being able to offer amendments to the legislation, therefore "moving the goalposts."

 Reid proposed a number of deals that would allow the Republicans to make amendments with 60 votes, as long as final passage of the bill would require only a majority of 51 votes. Minority leader Mitch McConnell rejected them immediately. The Republicans want a system where the minority of the senate that opposes unemployment insurance benefits gets both an amendment process where they can offer these poison pill amendments and then the minority of the Senate that opposes the bill can still kill the bill.”

 It outrages me that the Republicans/TeaPublicans really don't care what real people are going through so they can win political points. They don't have to worry about where their next meal, next tank of oil to heat there home, or tank of gas is coming from.

Republican Constituents Starting to Realize Their Politicians Don't Really Care About Them

 The PBS NewsHour.org reports that "Hardly a liberal bastion, El Paso County, in Colorado, has the largest number of people in the state who lost unemployment benefits, and many aren't happy about it. Plenty of Republicans, too, depend on jobless aid that Republicans in Congress are hesitant to prolong. The ideological argument for standing against an extension of benefits -- that the aid can ultimately make it harder to find work -- meets a more complex reality where people live.

 Democrats propose to extend the emergency benefits for people who have been or are about to be out of work for more than six months; Republicans are less inclined to take that step, particularly if it means the government borrows more money. The paralysis led to the expiration of benefits for 1.3 million long-term unemployed on Dec. 28. Lawmakers are still working on a compromise."

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Republicans Need to Get in Touch With the People, and Reality

 The  TeaPublican run Republican Party needs to get in touch with reality. They don't understand that the 1.3 million Americans who have now received their last unemployment check are in desperate need of assistance. On average, the $237.00 a week was allowing those families just barely enough to scrape by, and now they've taken that away. You can't tell me that with corporate subsidies reaching $154B last year that they can't find the $6B it would take to extend the benefits that these families so desperately need. Wake up people, this is real, not a game. How far can people be pushed to their limit? What happens now, when the recipients of those benefits can't put anymore food on the table, gas in the car? And no, their not what a number of Republicans have said this week, lazy!

Please contact your Senators through GovTrack.us and tell them to stop playing games with peoples lives, they will hit their limit, it's not right.