Unemployment bill fails to beat filibuster, 59-37

The latest effort to pass an extension of unemployment benefits -- which was, at this point, a compromise of a compromise of a compromise of a compromise --failed in the Senate last night. By now, you know this story: It got 59 votes, with Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe voting with the Democrats, and though 59 percent of the votes is enough to win you a Senate election or the presidency, it's not enough to win a legislative victory in the U.S. Senate. (Procedural note: The final vote was 58 in favor, as Harry Reid switched so he could bring the bill back later.)

Compounding the irony is that, in the end, it was Robert Byrd's death that made the difference, and for all the vaunted courtesies of the upper chamber, not one Republican felt honor-bound to ensure that their friend's passage didn't mean that his voice, and the role it would have played in the final vote, was totally ignored.

It would be too simplistic to say that Republicans oppose extending unemployment benefits. Instead, they oppose adding to the total size of the government's stimulus spending. The Republican counterproposal was to fund the unemployment benefits by taking unspent funds -- though funds that have been promised to various priorities -- from the stimulus. In return for chopping up the stimulus, Democrats could've secured Scott Brown and George Voinovich. They didn't take the deal.

At issue here is what you do in the midst of a recession. The theory behind any stimulus -- a theory that Republicans have hewed to in the past -- is that you expand the size of the federal deficit in order to add fresh dollars and demand to the economy. Taking the money for a bridge that was to be built next month in order to fund unemployment benefits for next week is like bailing water from one part of the boat into another part. Republicans, conversely, have coalesced around a form of deficit-driven economics that they didn't hold to in the Bush years but have reconsidered now.

The pity, though, is that this dispute has gotten quieter and quieter, even as its results have become more and more dire. The vote last night means that 2 million Americans will lose their unemployment checks by July 12. But neither the New York Times nor The Washington Post are carrying it on their homepages above the fold.

As my unmarried partner Annie Lowrey points out, the nature of these benefits, which expire every few months and force a new round of votes and battles, has left everyone -- particularly the Senate exhausted by the subject. Promoting another story about another vote to extend another round of another jobless program blends into the background at this point. And that means that even if the Senate does manage to pass one more extension when they return in mid-July, it's likely to be the last of the extensions. The problem, of course, is that unemployment does not share their exhaustion.