Lamar Alexander, John Barasso, Bob Bennett, Jim Bunning, Richard Burr, Tom Coburn, Bob Corker, John Cornyn, Mike Crapo, Jim DeMint, John Ensign, Mike Enzi, Judd Gregg, Orrin Hatch, Mike Johanns, Mitch McConnell, James Risch, Jeff Sessions and John Thune. Those are the guys who decided Tuesday night that Americans limping along on meager unemployment benefits apparently are, in the word chosen by Nevada Rep. Dean Heller, "hobos." They all voted against extending those benefits.
If you're drawing such benefits in Tennessee, Kentucky, Wyoming, Utah or Idaho, you have both of your Senators to thank for telling you to get off the dole and get a job ya lazy bum. Yep. Who would want to work instead of enjoying all that these magnificent government checks will buy? It's such a cush life on the $275 weekly maximum you can draw from unemployment coffers if you live in Tennessee, where the jobless rate is 10.9%. If it's you, your spouse and a couple of kids in the family, those benefits will put you $8,000 below the federal poverty line.
That is, if you were lucky enough before being laid off to work in a job covered by unemployment insurance in the first place. Only 38% of out-of-work Americans have that option. But whether you're covered by benefits or are one of the less fortunate 62%, the above 19 members of the Party of No Way, No How have a couple of words for you: Tough shit. Like Jim Bunning riding the Senators-only elevator, they all just keep giving out-of-work Americans the finger. Those exact same 19 Senators plus 19 of their Republican colleagues also voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act a year ago. And most of them were on board to oppose the teensy job-creation bill that passed the Senate last month.
Bums with comfy jobs and Cadillac health coverage, their snouts buried to the ears in the public trough, all of them saying no, no, no to the record 6.3 million who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer. And yet they dare to show their faces in public.
