Whenever Democrats want to pass legislation in Congress—whether extending unemployment benefits or expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit—Republicans always have the same response: it needs to be deficit neutral. And not just deficit neutral, the offset must come from reduced spending elsewhere, not increased taxes. Also, that reduced spending cannot be from an accounting gimmick that Congress loves to use.

Those are the Republican rules—except of course, when Republicans need to pass legislation. Then those rules go out the window.

The clearest example of these hypocritical rules is on unemployment benefits. There are currently 3.8 million long-term unemployed Americans. Fifty five percent of them are male and 72 percent have at least a high school diploma. They would all collect federal unemployment benefits right now, except the program expired in December and Republicans have blocked an extension of it since then. Republicans have two main arguments against renewing the program: that unemployment benefits discourage work and, of course, that they need a spending offset. (That’s beside the two absurd arguments that Speaker John Boehner voiced last week.)

The academic evidence shows that unemployment insurance has, at most, a small disincentive effect on work. They also stimulate the economy, as the Congressional Budget Office has found. Democrats have offered multiple spending offsets to appease Republicans as well. One of them, as part of an 11-month extension of unemployment benefits, would extend until 2024 the cuts to mandatory spending in the sequester. It wouldn’t fly, because the cuts technically fell outside the CBO's 10-year budget window. Sanctimoniously evoking the bipartisan spirit of this year’s Ryan-Murray budget, Senator Jeff Sessions called it “an utter violation of the spending agreements that we have agreed to.”

Less than a month later, 41 Senate Republicans, including Sessions, voted to…utterly violate that spending agreement—in the exact same way they had rejected a month earlier. The issue that made Republicans willing to use an extension of the mandatory spending cuts as a spending offset? Rolling back cuts to working-age military pensions in the Murray-Ryan budget.