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Just Pathetic: Republican Messaging and Unemployment Benefits

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Here’s a memo to the Republican Party: when you’re paid $174,000 a year to work two hours a day on committee meetings and actual votes, one to two hours a day on constituent meetings, and four or more hours a day on fundraising calls and cocktail hours, and you only show up 120 to 180 days out of the year, you don’t get to pontificate about the absurdity of unemployment benefits.  Pick your battles, but don’t pick them over this issue, given the present reality of your situation.

Republicans make the argument than an extension of emergency unemployment benefits will deter workers from making the hard choices to go to work for jobs that pay far less.  The maximum weekly benefit available to workers in Arizona comes in at $240; at the other end of the spectrum, unemployed folks in Massachusetts can make a maximum of $653 a week.  Nevertheless, the Republicans want to make sure that extensions of unemployment benefits are paid for by cuts elsewhere in the federal budget, or by extending the sequester cuts.

Interestingly enough, Republicans weren’t exactly rushing to pay for the additional $45 billion in defense spending under the Ryan-Murray compromise with cuts to other items in the budget.

While their opponents were busy imploding on Obamacare’s disastrous rollout, and continuing their tone deaf response to the rollout debacle, Republicans could have simply punted on the issue of unemployment benefits to keep the narrative focused on Obamacare.  Instead, Senate Republicans got caught up in procedural wrangling over extending emergency unemployment benefits.

Harry Reid offered consideration of five Democratic amendments and five Republican amendments at 60 votes, with the underlying unemployment legislation to be subjected to a simple majority vote.  What followed was predictable: outrage. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took his case to the media, blaming Senate dysfunction on the Democrats and calling Reid’s offer “ridiculous,” saying that Republicans “couldn’t possibly accept” the deal.

This isn’t a showdown over nuclear Iran.

It’s unemployment benefits.  The hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell complaining about the impossibility of Reid’s offer comes into clarity when you consider what it took to get Mitch McConnell to back off during the recent shutdown: $2 billion for his dam in the infamous Kentucky Kickback.  Perhaps Reid should have offered McConnell thirty more pieces of silver to get his acquiescence, and the nation could have moved on from the showdown over unemployment benefits to renew its focus on the Democrat’s biggest and most expensive failure of all time: Obamacare.

Mitch McConnell, who is paid $193,400 to help lead one of the least productive Congresses in history in its continuing campaign to do nothing, has the gall to critique Americans who collect unemployment insurance that their employers pay for in taxes.  That’s right, those bums, who don’t work at jobs that afford them 239 days a year off, need to get off their duffs and just take a mop job.  That’s the message you want to send in a year where you have the chance to make historic electoral gains and take control of the Senate.

Of course, given the increasing phenomenon of employers refusing to hire “overqualified” applicants, it stands to reason that chronic unemployment may not be rooted in the indolence of holdouts.  The economy sucks.  The only reason the unemployment rate is actually declining is the fact that long-term unemployed workers aren’t counted in the statistics.

A guy making $193,400 a year at a job that gives him 239 days a year off should not be bloviating about unemployment benefits.  He should sit down, shut up, and let it ride in order to bolster his party’s chances of winning in November, but Mitch McConnell is too damned stupid to see the larger picture.  He’s too idiotic to understand that bashing unemployed voters, many of whom will vote for Republicans this November just on the possibility that things might change, is detrimental to his party’s interests.  Getting tied up in procedural wrangling that cuts out their source of income is stupid.

If Republicans don’t get to vote their pork-laden amendments into the Senate unemployment bill, so what? If Mitch McConnell doesn’t get his Kentucky Kickback Part Deux, so what?

The spectacle is appalling to behold: on the one hand, Republicans have every chance to take back the Senate and add to their margin in the House, if only they’ll execute their messaging in a way that taps into voter dissatisfaction and brings in new votes; on the other hand, Republicans seem unable to avoid opening their mouth for the sole purpose of switching feet.  No one cares that Republicans in the Senate didn’t get to put the unemployment bill to a 60 vote threshold.  No one outside of the Beltway gives a damn about that fact.  If Harry Reid is asking you for the rope to hang himself in November, give it to him. Don’t make him ask for a super-majority to get the rope out of your hands.

If you want to message unemployment benefits effectively, simply say that Harry Reid now wants to extend the period that unemployed Americans have to eat table scraps, because he has no program or policy to help get those unemployed Americans back to a seat at the table.  He has no idea how to spur the economy. He has no real program to fix the banking sector, which is still a financial black box of securitized devices and overleveraged balance sheets.  Harry Reid is a moron who has the incredibly good fortune of existing alongside an even bigger moron in the other party’s leadership.

Here, America, have some more unemployment benefits, because Harry Reid doesn’t want to actually do anything to help you gain actual employment and restore your dignity.  He’s too busy trying to blame Republicans for a mess that he and his boss haven’t been able to fix, because they’ve been too busy fixing your insurance by making it more expensive, and doling out firearms to Mexican drug cartels and jihadists in Libya and Syria.

While Harry and Barack are overthrowing tyrants abroad, the twin tyrannies of poverty and destitution have been left to rule in America’s long-term unemployed, who have to suffer the double indignity of not being counted in official unemployment statistics.  That’s right, Harry and Barack will tell you that employment is improving, because they’re ignoring those Americans who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, or those Americans who are discouraged and have just given up in an economy that won’t hire them because they’re overqualified.

And why are they overqualified? Because Harry and Barack are overseeing an economy that only produces jobs where any college graduate would be overqualified.  We’re talking temporary, minimum wage jobs.

However, Mitch McConnell won’t talk about that, because that’s an argument he and the Republicans could actually win. No, Mitch is too interested in throwing the entire game by acting like a jackass when he doesn’t get a simple majority vote on unlimited amendments to the unemployment bill.

It’s just pathetic to watch.

 


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