Royalists Vote Down Food Money For The Poor

(bumped)

Yesterday the House came very close to passing a bill extending unemployment insurance for 13 weeks. Under suspended rules they needed a 2/3 majority to advance the bill, and they came up 9 votes short. They might as well have gone for the 2/3 vote right away, because Bush is likely to veto the bill.

Bush claims unemployment is not high enough and the economy not bad enough to justify extending UI for workers who can’t find new jobs. Yet the total number of long-term unemployed is higher than it was the last two times Congress enacted federal extension programs (October 1991 and February 2002). In addition, joblessness is growing. May saw the biggest one-month jump in the unemployment rate in more than 20 years.

Right now, some 1.55 million workers have used up their benefits without finding work and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates about 3.5 million unemployed workers will exhaust their benefits this year.

You can't come up with a more effective economic stimulus than extending benefits for long-term unemployed Americans who need it the most. That money gets directly injected back into the economy and makes far more sense than giving random $600 checks to everyone. It's targeting with a laser and not a cannonball.

The Democrats are going to try this one again. It's so mind-bendingly simple that there's probably no way that Bush comes to his senses and signs it.

UPDATE: This just passed the House under normal rules (meaning it needed just a majority vote). The count was 274-137. Yesterday was 279-144, so a handful of Republicans took a walk today. Roll call isn't up yet...

...My bad, 274-137 is exactly a 2/3 majority, so they got this through under suspension of the rules. The roll call is up, and sure enough, all CA Republicans voted against it again. Challengers, feel free to blast your opponents.

UPDATE II: Watch Charlie Rangel open up a can of whoop-ass on David Dreier.