Yesterday, a coalition of House Dem women, led by Nancy Pelosi, tried to get the Senate to do the right thing.

They failed yesterday, but they aren't done. In an interview with HuffPo's Arthur Delaney, Pelosi said the task remains urgent. But her suggestion that the Congress consider doing it with offsets might not go over well in the Senate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told HuffPost on Friday that reauthorizing the benefits remains an urgent task, raising the possibility that Democrats might agree to offset the cost of the spending. "It really has to happen," said Pelosi of reauthorizing extended benefits. "One of the debates that goes on now -- which I completely resist, but it's one of the debates going on -- is at the end of the day, these people have to have their benefits, and should we begin paying for unemployment benefits?"

..... While Republicans and conservative Democrats like Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) have insisted that the entire bill be offset, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have refused to cave so far. Historically, extended unemployment benefits in times of high unemployment are always classified as "emergency" spending, so it's not offset. "It's a completely bad idea because the stimulative effect that you get from putting money down is all set on either reducing something else or raising taxes," said Pelosi. "So the double purpose of it, which is to reduce the needs of the unemployed and the stimulative effect, are canceled out."

Jobless benefits have been treated by every Congress and every administration since the program began as emergency spending, and as Debbie Stabenow said in a conference call with reporters today, "If 15 million people out of work isn't an emergency, I don't know what is." The offsets Republicans have been pushing for the hardest are the most potentially damaging to any hope of further economic growth. They want to raid what's left of the already-appropriated stimulus funds to pay jobless benefits, a suggestion at cross-purposes, since the stimulus money is supposed to be creating the jobs to get these folks working again. Not that lapses in logic have ever bothered Republicans.