On Tuesday, Carte Goodwin, of the coal-rich state of West Virginia, will be seated as the 100th U.S. Senator. On the same day, the Senate will pass an extension of unemployment benefits, utilizing Goodwin to break a Republican filibuster. Now, you might think that the fact that all but one Republican in the Senate has been supporting a filibuster of this bill means that the Republicans oppose it. You’d be wrong.
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” the leader [Mitch McConnell] beat back comparisons of deficit spending in the George W. Bush administration.
“They’ve taken the deficit as a percentage of GDP from 3.2 percent to almost 10 percent in a year and a half,” McConnell said of the Obama administration.
“Somewhere in the course of spending a trillion dollars, we ought to be able to find enough to pay for a program for the unemployed,” he said.
“If we can’t pay for a program like extension of unemployment insurance that virtually every member of the Senate — I think, in fact, every member of the Senate wants to extend, then what are we going to pay for? When do we start?”
It’s interesting that McConnell has the cajónes to assert that “every member” of the Senate wants to extend unemployment insurance. We’ll see if the vote is 100-0 in favor of doing that. Will members like Bunning and Coburn who have filibustered prior efforts to extend these benefits suddenly turn around and vote for them? Will Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina suddenly see the light and understand the economic benefit of giving people in need some money to spend? Remember, the party chairman Michael Steele called for reducing the unemployment tax on businesses last December. This is not a party that cares about employees, whether they are currently employed or not. This is the party for employers. And not all employers, but just the ones that don’t give a crap about the people they hire to make them money. If they had their way, the GOP would still be executing Molly Maguires.
