Senate Democrats Restore Jobless Benefits
The Senate approved a bill extending unemployment benefits averaging $309 a week for millions of people stuck on jobless rolls. The 60-40 vote came moments after Carte Goodwin, a successor to West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, was sworn in. Goodwin was the crucial 60th senator to defeat a Republican filibuster that has led to a lapse in benefits for 2.5 million people.
Democrats stripped the unemployment insurance measure down to the bare essentials for Tuesday's vote, which was a do-over of a tally taken late last month.
The House is expected to take the measure up Wednesday and then send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.
About 2.5 million people will receive jobless benefits retroactively. Instead of being dropped from a federal program that extends benefits for those whose six months of state-paid benefits have run out, millions of others will continue to receive payments.
Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies have been pressing the issue for maximum political advantage, blaming Republicans for the impasse that halted unemployment checks for people unable to find work as the jobless rate remains close to 10 percent.
Mr. Obama launched a fresh salvo Monday, demanding the Senate act on the legislation - after a vote already had been scheduled - and blasting Republicans for the holdup.
Republicans say they do favor the benefits but are insisting they be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere in the government's $3.7 trillion budget. After initially feeling heat this winter when a lone GOP senator, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, briefly blocked a benefits extension in February, the GOP has grown increasingly comfortable opposing the legislation.
But the president has fired back by saying that Republicans have a double standard, CBS News White House correspondent Chip Reid reports.
"The same people who didn't have any problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are now saying we shouldn't offer relief to middle class Americans," the president said.
The providing of additional weeks of jobless benefits in the midst of bad times has been regarded as routine, and the latest cycle of additional benefits began in 2008, the last year of George W. Bush's administration.
"For a long time, there has been a tradition under both Democratic and Republican presidents to offer relief to the unemployed," Obama said. "That was certainly the case under my predecessor, when Republicans several times voted to extend emergency unemployment benefits."
But with conservative voters and tea party activists up in arms about the deficit, conservative Republicans have adopted a harder line that has caused three interruptions of jobless benefits.
"What the president isn't telling the American people is that many of us in the Senate are fighting to make sure our children and grandchildren aren't buried under a mountain of debt," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. "If we are going to extend unemployment benefits, then let's do it without adding to our record debt."
Though the economy is said to be slowly recovering, the jobless rate remains painfully high at 9.5 percent. And Obama, putting a human face on those hard times, brought three unemployed people to the Rose Garden with him on Monday.
An increasing number of people, however, have been out of work for so long that they have exhausted their eligibility for benefits, which ends at 99 weeks in most states. This measure won't help them.
In Bellevue, Wash., for example, unemployment benefits ran out last week for 63-year-old Sherry Blum. She's been job hunting since August 2008. Already behind on her mortgage, the loss of her weekly benefits means she will have to sell her town house.
"Unemployment (benefits) helped me stay just above water," she said. Blum plans to sell her town house, with its $1,600 monthly mortgage, and move into a small apartment. But with the housing market still ailing, that could take time. Three other homeowners in her development have taken their homes off the market recently after failing to sell them.
"Hopefully my house will sell before it goes into foreclosure," she said.
Millions of people have been unemployed longer than six months - and longer than both economists and job-seekers expected because an economic recovery has been slow in coming, reports CBS News business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis.
"When they lose those $309 checks on a weekly basis, it not only has an impact on them individually, but it also has an impact on the economy overall," Jarvis said. "That's because when people get unemployment check, research has shown it usually goes directly back into the economy. So if you're unemployed, you get a check, you spend that check immediately as opposed to putting it in the bank and letting it sit there."
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