[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 4984-4985]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

  Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to spend a short period of time, 
and hopefully it will not even be 5 minutes.
  What we have seen on the floor this afternoon is a motion to 
accomplish what the chairman of the Finance Committee wanted us to 
accomplish, without adding to the debt. We did not reach agreement on 
that motion. It was tabled. Then what we saw was a motion to proceed to 
take care of these issues by adding $9.2 billion to the debt. That is 
the real debate: are we going to pay for what we do? There is not an 
agreement to move forward and pay for it, and there is not an agreement 
to move forward and not pay for it.
  There is a process here called cloture, which means that by 
Wednesday, if all time is consumed, this problem would be solved and it 
would be dealt with. It is unfortunate that the potential is that we 
may go home and not deal with this issue, having us vote against 
tabling a motion to supply these needed priorities but also making sure 
we do not add to the debt as we do it.
  I look forward to the rest of the afternoon. I will not consume any 
additional time but will note that I do not care how we pay for it as 
long as it is legitimate, as long as we do not add to our kids' debt. I 
am hoping and willing to negotiate on any area of waste in the Federal 
Government that we can eliminate to pay for it. We cannot pay for part 
of it; we need to pay for all of it because we violate the principle of 
stealing from our kids.
  I advise the Senator from Alabama that we have unanimous consent and 
I cannot break off, and the Senator from North Dakota will be 
recognized after I yield the floor, so I cannot in good conscience 
yield to the Senator from Alabama.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I understand. I am proud of the commitment the Senator 
from Oklahoma has made and totally recognize it.
  Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I yield back the remainder of my time.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Dakota.
  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, this is a pretty disappointing thing to 
see on the floor of the Senate--a discussion about the potential of 
having unemployment insurance at this point in time lapse, let it lapse 
during one of the steepest recessions since the Great Depression.
  Unemployment insurance is not some abstraction when we have 15 
million, 16 million, 17 million people who got up this morning in this 
country and looked for work, people who lost their jobs and then 
searched valiantly to find a new job and could not find a new job, and 
so they pay their rent, they buy food, they provide for their children, 
they buy school clothes with unemployment insurance.
  We are told: We cannot reach an agreement, so we will just let it 
expire. We will not extend it. It will be OK.
  It will be OK for everybody here who gets up and showers in the 
morning and puts on a nice blue suit and comes to work. There is nobody 
here who is unemployed, but there are a whole lot of people in this 
country who are unemployed.
  If ever there were a need to extend unemployment insurance, it is 
now. We cannot do that to the most vulnerable people in this country.
  It is very interesting. It was not too many months ago that there was 
a proposal on the floor of the Senate: Let's give $700 billion to the 
biggest financial firms in America to bail them out. They ran this 
country into the ditch with unbelievable greed and speculation and 
recklessness. Then after running this country into the economic ditch, 
there is a bill brought to the Congress that says: We need to bail them 
out, $700 billion--a three-page bill. They said: We need to have it 
passed in 3 days--$700 billion. I did not vote for it, but there are 
plenty of people who did who now say it is too much to extend 
unemployment benefits to people who are out of work.
  It is the same old story, and it has been going on for decades in 
this country--big shots get in trouble, and you give them an aspirin, 
fluff up the pillow, put them to bed, and ask if there is anything else 
you can do for them. Ordinary folks get in trouble, lose their job 
through no fault of their own, and then when push comes to shove, they 
are told: You know what, we just cannot agree. Your unemployment 
insurance has run out. Get along. Tough luck. I find that unbelievable.
  Let me go back. The fact is, we have budget deficits. They are 
serious, and they are unsustainable. We have to deal with them, there 
is no question about that. But it is important for us to understand how 
all of this happened.

[[Page 4985]]

  Now we come to this moment, and we choose to say that unemployment 
insurance is where we are going to make the stand. Help for people who 
have lost their jobs--that is where we are going to make the stand.
  It was 10 years ago on the floor of this Senate when we were told: We 
have the first budget surplus in 30 years, and they expect budget 
surpluses as far as the eye can see.
  President Bush came to town and said: We are going to give large tax 
cuts, and we are going to give the biggest tax cuts to the wealthiest 
Americans. If you earn $1 million, guess what, we are going to give you 
something very special. You get an $80,000 tax cut a year.
  I said: I will not support that. Let's be a little conservative. What 
if we do not have these budget surpluses in the outyears? What if they 
do not exist?
  They said: Don't worry about that, it will be fine.
  They drove through a tax cut that benefited the wealthiest Americans. 
Then we were in a recession. Then 9/11, a war in Afghanistan, a war in 
Iraq, and then supplemental after supplemental request to increase 
defense spending, none of it paid--none of it--all of it emergency.
  Then at the end of that period, when the biggest financial firms ran 
this country into the ditch, the question was, What is going to happen 
to this economy? We were told: Now you have to have a $700 billion 
bailout for the biggest institutions in the country. That was done. 
Nobody paid for that. That was all ladled right on top of the debt. But 
today, in this ``let them eat cake'' moment, we are told: No, no, let's 
just let unemployment insurance expire. Just let it expire. It will be 
fine.
  It will be fine for everybody in this Chamber who wears a suit and 
claims it will be fine because they are not unemployed. But what about 
those people who are unemployed and are right at the cusp of losing 
their home? They have lost their job. They have lost hope. The only 
thing that keeps them going to pay the rent and to pay for food and to 
try to help their kids is the unemployment insurance while they are 
looking for a job. And this Congress has people who stand up to say: We 
will not allow them to extend unemployment insurance, even after they 
voted to give $700 billion to the biggest financial firms in America 
that ran the country into this big economic wreck we have had. I do not 
understand that at all. How do you go home and tell people that is what 
your priority is? How do you do that?
  If there is anything that ought to represent a priority for us, it is 
to say to those who are the most vulnerable in our society, those who 
have lost their jobs with a recession they did not create, those who 
are looking for work in the morning and cannot find it, those who now 
have no income because they have lost their jobs, probably lost their 
homes, and many of them lost hope--we say to them: It will be fine; you 
do not need this money to get along.
  Unemployment insurance is just that--it is insurance. That is why it 
is called insurance. Every one of their paychecks while they were 
working paid for a portion of this. I just cannot believe that this 
afternoon we would decide it is not a priority for us to help the most 
vulnerable in this country, especially during this period in which we 
have just ladled money out the door in terms of tens and tens of 
billions of dollars in emergency funding for almost everything.
  I held 20 hearings on the issue of waste, fraud, and abuse in 
contracting in the war in Iraq. They threw money away. In fact, not 
just threw it away, they actually loaded $100 bills on pallets and sent 
them over in C-130s and shoveled them out the back of pickup trucks, 
for God's sake, wasting taxpayers' money. I did not hear anybody stand 
up on the floor and say: Here is where we draw the line. No, you draw 
the line with the most vulnerable people. You won't notice you don't 
have the funds to buy your food, pay your rent, or for your kids.
  We have more responsibility than this, in my judgment. I hope by the 
end of this afternoon we will decide to meet that responsibility.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.

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