Unemployment Benefit Extension Fails, Blame Game Rages On

(Nov. 19) -- Who you gonna blame?

On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives failed to muster the votes of two-thirds of its members to pass a three-month extension of unemployment benefits for Americans who have been out of work for more than six months. Almost before all the votes had been tallied, House members and media pundits began assigning blame for the lapse of benefits that could affect approximately 2 million unemployed Americans starting on Nov. 30.

Surge Desk has a look who is being taken to task.

Blame the Democrats
Though only 11 Democrats voted against extending benefits while 247 voted for it, some news organizations decided to couch the story in terms of that particular party's shortcoming. On Thursday Agence France-Presse's headline read "Democrats fail to pass jobless benefits extension."

The "no" votes of the 11 Democrats were more than offset by the "yes" votes of 23 Republicans in the House. However, if those 11 Democrats had voted "yes" instead, and if they had been joined by the seven Dems who, for various reasons, sat out the vote, and if the same 23 Republicans had also kept to their "yes" votes, the measure would have received 276 votes, one more than the necessary two-thirds majority required to pass it.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, on the other hand, takes Democrats to task for putting the unemployment benefits extension at risk in the party's zeal to ensure that the Bush tax cuts are repealed.

Getting rid of the tax cuts for the rich is not as important as extending unemployment benefits or protecting the Affordable Care Act. Right now, Democrats have settled on a strategy that focuses on those tax cuts and leaves unemployment insurance and the debt ceiling alone. That's a bad strategy. If we're extending economic relief, we should be extending it to for the jobless. Giving someone making $195,000 a year a tax cut but cutting off the unemployment benefits for an unemployed machinist in Ohio is cruel and counterproductive.

Blame the Republicans
A far more common headline after the vote assigned blame to the 143 Republicans who voted "no." The Los Angeles Times, for instance, portrayed the vote this way: "House GOP blocks extension of jobless benefits."

Democratic politicians offered a similar assessment. "Today, Democrats voted to extend unemployment insurance to Americans who lost their jobs through no fault of their own; unfortunately, Republicans did not," Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after the vote.

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison also threw in a holiday-season jab that the GOP. "Sadly, the new Republican majority demonstrated today how they view extending unemployment benefits: No, No No," Ellison said in a statement. "To recall Charles Dickens: the new Republican majority wants to give Scrooge a tax break and leave the unemployed Cratchit family out in the cold for Christmas."

Blame the Deficit
The leading rationale given by most House Republican members for not passing an extension of benefits is that doing so would add to the ever-ballooning deficit in dangerous ways.

"We're facing a fiscal crisis in this country. If we're going to choose to extend unemployment again, we've got to find a way to pay for it," Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana said at a news conference Thursday.

Louisiana Rep. Charles W. Boustany concurred, stating, "What we heard earlier this month is that people want us to provide help to those in need but not add to the mountain of debt."

In order to pass an extension, GOP members would like to see cuts made somewhere else in the budget. Some Republicans have also been angling to try and broker a deal with Democrats to extend the benefits in exchange for keeping the Bush-era tax cuts in place.

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Blame the Unemployed
The benefits that are set to expire on Nov. 30 would go to those individuals who have been out of work longer than six months. As Nevada tea party Senate candidate Sharron Angle sees it, extending unemployment benefits is encouraging those without jobs to stay that way.

"I was criticized for saying that Americans won't do certain jobs and the reason that they won't do certain jobs is because they get more pay on unemployment than they can get to work those ... those good jobs that are really out there," Angle said while campaigning over the summer. "What has happened is Harry Reid has just extended unemployment and when he did that he not only made it so that people are less employable, but he makes it so that they want to be dependent on the government. This entitlement pays them more than getting a real job."


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