Conservative Blog

According to this article from The Hill, Democrats are struggling to get Republicans to agree to take up a thirteen week extension of unemployment benefits in the Senate, so they are likely just to tack it onto the Iraq Supplemental Spending Bill and see if they can ram it through and avoid a veto. Senate Republicans had already voted in favor of a similar proposal that also include a new G.I. bill, but this measure met with resistance in the House, where some liberals are demanding offsets for the G.I. Bill (which was added by Democrats to begin with) and other liberals are demanding a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

All of this is only complicating a bill long stalled as politicians argue over adding pork and earmarks to legislation necessary to our fighting troops overseas. Avoiding the topic of playing with the needs of our military men and women, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talked about tacking the unemployment changes to the Iraq spending bill, “We have an obligation to help people … People are desperate.”

This merely ads to the problems for the House version of the bill, or perhaps it doesn't. It's hard to say at this point. A bill of this prominence inspires so much populist political exhibitionism that it's hard to track which factions will settle for what. Perhaps this is some inside the beltway version of "Let's Make a Deal". Add the unemployment without the G.I. Bill in the Senate and the House Dems will take the timetable off the table? Any way you look at these deals, all the curtains have donkeys behind them, as usual.