Reid, McConnell Duel over Unemployment Benefits - East Idaho News
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Reid, McConnell Duel over Unemployment Benefits

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Getty 010714 ReidMcConnell?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1389129957317Alex Wong/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday he was reluctant to allow Republicans to offer amendments to pay for extending unemployment insurance, setting up another contentious showdown that could derail the proposal to reinstate benefits to more than 1.3 million Americans who are among the long-term unemployed.

In back-to-back afternoon news conferences, Reid said the Republican proposal to pay for the unemployment benefits by delaying parts of Obamacare was “a nonstarter.”

“If they come with something that’s serious, I’ll talk to them,” Reid told reporters. “But right now, everyone should understand, the low-hanging fruit is gone. We’ve scavenged every place we could go.”

He suggested Republicans were being hypocritical because they never demanded that the cost of emergency unemployment benefits be offset during the Bush administration.

“My colleagues say they want to pay for this bill. This is new religion for them, because all five times that President Bush extended unemployment benefits, it wasn’t paid for,” Reid said. “So I say to my Republican colleagues, this is a three-month extension. Let’s pass this bill so that our fellow Americans, more than a million of them, don’t have to suffer.”

Even as the Senate voted Tuesday to begin debate on the bill to extend unemployment benefits, it remained an open question whether the measure would ever actually pass, considering that 60 votes are also needed to bring the debate to an end. If the procedural hurdles are cleared in the Senate, the prospects in the House remain unlikely, unless the costs for extending the benefits are offset elsewhere in the budget.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said the blame would fall to Reid if he did not allow senators to consider amendments that would provide a way to pay for the extension in jobless benefits. He suggested Reid was interested “in a show vote, not an outcome.”

“The fact that we’re on the bill indicates that there were enough Republicans interested in discussing the way forward to be on the bill,” McConnell said. “And the way you handle a bill if you’re serious about passing it is you allow amendments and you have a discussion about the terms under which you can pass it. If you’re not serious about passing it, you prevent amendments, harden the opposition of the minority, because then that means you’re only interested in a show vote, not an outcome.”

He said Republicans were not engaging in a double standard by demanding that the program be paid for by cuts elsewhere in the budget.

“When George W. Bush was president we didn’t have a debt as big as our economy,” McConnell told reporters. “We’ve added more debt during the Obama years than all the presidents from George Washington down to George Bush. We have a debt crisis. We ought to be able to find, in over three million dollars of annual spending, a way to pay for this program. I don’t think that’s unreasonable or outrageous.”

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