OurFuture.org Blogs: Isaiah J. Poole

The African-American Community Needs A "Jobs Surge"

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:44:45 -0700

The nation is facing a jobs crisis, but “crisis” doesn’t begin to tell the story in the African-American community. “Five-alarm emergency” comes closer. A report by the Joint Economic Committee released today underscores the severity of African-American unemployment and bolsters the case for a $100 billion jobs bill introduced in the House last week.

That report—which included some heretofore unpublished Labor Department data—helped launch a discussion sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus today on what needs to be done to address chronic unemployment. That report noted some particularly troubling effects of the current recession among African Americans:

Nearly one in five African-American men are unemployed.
More than two out of five African-American teenagers are unemployed.
African-American female heads of households have an unemployment rate of 15 percent.
African-Americans with a four-year college degree have an unemployment rate of 8.2 percent, nearly twice that of white four-year college graduates.
While African Americans are 11.5 percent of the labor force, they are more than 20 percent of those who are unemployed for more than 26 weeks and 22 percent of those who have been unemployed for more than a year.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said that in areas of the “black belt” in the South where he participated in the major civil rights battles of the 1960s, unemployment rates range from 25 percent to 54 percent. “All of those to whom were given new rights have been left in the dark,” he said.

Jackson and other panelists said there were a number of causes, including serious flaws in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that meant that jobs were not created in the areas that needed them most.

For example, nothing in the Recovery Act required businesses receiving stimulus dollars to post available jobs at local job banks, said Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP. Many unemployed people in urban areas had simply no opportunity to apply for jobs that local contractors created with Recovery Act dollars, he said.

Douglas Palmer, the mayor of Trenton, N.J., said that the Recovery Act relied too heavily on state governments, which too often did not target funds to hard-pressed urban areas. “The money did not get to the local communities,” he said.

Most of the participants embraced the Local Jobs for America Act, sponsored by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., as the right short-term response to the jobs emergency plaguing African-American communities.

That legislation would funnel money directly to communities, based on existing aid formulas, to either create or save public service jobs in government agencies, nonprofit organizations and the private sector. These jobs would be full-time, permanent jobs that would usually come with health care and other benefits.

“Direct job creation is the most efficient and most cost-effective way to create jobs,” said Deepak Bhargava, director of the Center for Community Change. The Miller jobs mill “is really visionary legislation” that includes targeting to communities that have the greatest need, he said.

“What we face here is not a small-scale problem but a catastrophe, and it requires a massive response,” he said.
Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., said that when he was in a meeting at the White House last week, President Obama expressed confidence that the bill could pass the House, but indicated its passage in the Senate was an open question.

“I saw that as an organizing challenge for you and for me,” Ellison told the audience. He called the Local Jobs for America bill a good piece of legislation, adding, “The energy is there, the verve is there, we’ve got to get behind it and keep the energy moving.”

Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, captured the sense of urgency in his comments.

“The Congress mustered up the political will, and the money, to put a troop surge in Afghanistan. We need a jobs surge in this nation,” he said. “When the financial services was tottering on the brink of collapse, ruin and destruction, this Congress and the executive branch stepped up in record time and committed over a $1 trillion in Congress and the Federal Reserve and the Treasury committed trillions of dollars more, to rescue the financial services industry.

“The people who sit in Kansas City, Richmond, Indianapolis, Detroit, Philadelphia Tallahassee, have witnessed record, sustained action on behalf of banks, in support of a war in Afghanistan, and now I’m here based on the testimony that we’ve collected and I’ve had a chance to look at, they want strong action when it comes to jobs.”

Broken Government: Conservatives Keep Up Record Pace Of Obstruction

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:07:51 -0800

A Center for American Progress report this week chronicles just how obstructionist conservatives in the Senate continue to be as they use the filibuster to block reform efforts in the Senate.

Scott Lilly elaborates on a trend that we began chronicling more than two years ago as conservatives announced that routine use of the filibuster would become their political strategy. They would flip-flop from being the party that insisted on "the up-or-down vote" to the party sometimes willing to block votes at all costs.

Lilly chronicles a steadily rising occurrence of filibusters in the Senate, from an average of 20 a year in the 1970s and 1980s to an average of 36 a year up to the 2006 elections. But that dramatically changed when the Democrats took control of the Senate in 2006.

To borrow a term from “Star Wars,” filibustering has gone from overdrive to “hyperspace.” Filibusters are now commonly used to block not only legislation the minority opposes, but to block legislation the minority does not necessarily have strong feelings on but will use to place a stick in the spokes of the legislative wheel anytime an opportunity presents itself.

The effect is that a 60-vote supermajority has become a routine requirement for moving virtually any legislation through the Senate. That has fueled the accurate perception that the Senate is "broken," though only sporadically have Senate leaders clearly stated that it is Senate conservatives who have broken it.

Statistics maintained by the Senate show that so far in the 111th Congress, starting last year, there have been 80 cloture motions filed to end filibusters, a pace that could match, if not exceed, the 110th Congress, which saw a total of 139 cloture motions filed to end filibusters. There were more than twice as many cloture motions in the 110th Congress as there were in the 109th.

Those numbers, as Lilly notes, do not take into account the invisible filibusters that never result in floor action but have the same effect of allowing a conservative minority to kill legislation.

Cloture is filed against only those threatened filibusters that the Senate leadership has the floor time and possible votes to overcome. Much legislation and many presidential appointments are killed before they can be reported by committee either because 60 votes cannot be obtained or the cost in time to the Senate schedule is too great to warrant the effort required to defeat a threatened filibuster.

Lilly is proposing some modest measures to address the abuse of the filibuster, recommending that filibusters not be allowed on appropriations bills and confirmations. In the wake of the recent filibuster by arch-conservative Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning that ended up cutting off unemployment benefits for thousands of unemployed people and furloughing thousands of transportation workers, Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., said he is pushing for a broader filibuster reform that he wants to see enacted at the beginning of the next congressional session. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has said this week that he is prepared to hold hearings on the subject as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.

In the meantime, it is important for activists to keep the conservative abuse of the filibuster at the forefront as public anger builds over what they view as a dysfunctional legislative branch. "Most rank-and-file senators will not willingly give up the extraordinary powers that the current system grants them," Lilly concludes in his report. "And their leaders would probably cease to be leaders if they demanded such reforms. Change will probably only come when the public is made more aware of the costs of the current system and demands specific change."

This Jobs Bill Could Work

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:45:49 -0800

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., introduced a bill today that is a meaningful response to the nation's jobs crisis. It still falls short of the need, but it would accomplish far more than the anemic measures that have been served up by Congress so far.

The legislation acknowledges a fundamental truth that conservatives refuse to face: You cannot put the economy back on a stable growth path without significant direct government spending on jobs. That's particularly true for urban areas, where the private sector job base was weak even before the current recession, and social services, which are facing devastating cuts in much of the country as state and local tax receipts dwindle.

Miller's legislation is called the Local Jobs for America Act, and he says the bill would create or save up to 1 million full-time, good-paying jobs. These include about a quarter million jobs in education, and 750,000 other jobs providing services that range from public safety to child care, in both the public and private sector. Nearly all of the money for these jobs—about $100 billion—would be funneled through state and local governments, through procedures designed to minimize administrative costs.

Miller's staff members held briefings about the bill with activists before the legislation was introduced, where they took pains to distinguish this bill from previous public sector job-funding efforts, such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of the 1970s. These jobs, they maintain, would not be temporary, make-work positions, and many, if not most, of the jobs would either be expansions of existing programs or restorations of cuts made because of the recession.

In that respect, the legislation addresses the fundamental inadequacy of last year's Recovery Act bill in compensating for the spending cuts that state and local governments did even as those funds were flowing out to states and localities. Do the math: According to Recovery.gov, a total of $194.9 billion in Recovery Act funds have been spent, of which $81.6 billion was in contracts, grants and loans and $113.3 billion was in entitlements to individuals. But the expected state budget shortfalls for the 2010 and 2011 fiscal years is expected to total $375 billion. Add to that projection the $110 billion budget gap states had to close in their 2009 fiscal year and that nearly equals the entire spending portion of the Recovery Act. And that does not include the billions more local governments have cut to balance their budgets.

To close these budget gaps, state and local governments have shed a combined total of 192,000 jobs since August 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Miller bill has the backing of the Jobs for America Now, coalition, which includes Campaign for America's Future and about 60 other grassroots progressive organizations. Alan Charney, campaign manager of Jobs for America Now, issued the following statement:

“Besides passing health care reform, the most important thing Congress can do right now is to enact legislation that addresses the unemployment crisis in this country. We know that the economy remains weak and the private sector cannot generate enough jobs to put us on a safe and sure path to recovery. With this legislation, Congress is finally taking action to create jobs. We thank Chairman Miller for introducing legislation that will directly fund one million jobs. This is an important step to putting our country back to work.”

But it's only one step. The Miller bill's virtue of focusing on solid jobs (most of which would come with health and other benefits and in many cases would be union positions) does not address the needs of younger and lesser-skilled workers—the unemployment rate among people with only a high-school diploma is 10.5 percent, for example—or African Americans (15.8 percent unemployment) and Hispanics (12.4 percent). Miller's bill should be complemented with a job-creation effort targeted for these populations; a well-funded green jobs initiative that would put people to work on making public facilities and homes more energy-efficient would be one approach.

But Miller deserves credit for introducing legislation that at least elevates the jobs conversation where it should be, at a time when 15 million Americans, and especially the 6.1 million who have been out of work for more than six months, can't afford to wait for the ephemeral promise of a private sector revival.

Citizen's Posse Serves Warrant Against Health Insurers

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:38:34 -0800

Health insurance executives who came to Washington's Ritz-Carlton Hotel for their big trade conference on March 9 were greeted by a "citizen's posse" armed with arrest warrants charging them with crimes ranging from fraud to the involuntary manslaughter of 45,000 people who could not get health coverage.

James Parks, in his account for the AFL-CIO Blog, wrote that "the boisterous, energetic, diverse crowd marched from the AFL-CIO and AFSCME buildings and Dupont Circle to the sound of beating drums and shouted slogans like, “Blocking health care is a crime” and “Health care can’t wait.” The crowd was so large, it completely encircled the block-long Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the front group for the nation’s biggest insurance companies, the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) is meeting."

Former governor and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean helped kick off the protest, which also included remarks from several labor leaders; Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau; and several citizens with first-person accounts of how they or a family member had been denied care.

The Huffington Post interviewed several people at the protest:

"I know it from both sides; the system's broken," said Terence Gerace, a doctor and cancer survivor from Washington. "It's a for-profit system. A significant amount of cost goes to executives, and not the providers, and it needs to be rectified. It's an immoral system as it currently stands."
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Gerace said that at one point he was charged $6,000 for a minor medical test. "The public option is the best way to keep the companies more honest and more competitive," he said.

Paul Shenkyr, 51, carried a homemade sign reading "My Daughter Is Not a Pre-Existing Condition." He told HuffPost: "I'm here trying to make it difficult for insurance executives to have a meeting. They like to deny health care to people who are pregnant, among others. What kind of a policy is that?"

"I think it's a real shame that this country doesn't have some sort of insurance that covers everyone, said Chony Gallardo, an elderly immigrant from Spain. "I have enjoyed, all my life, government-run health insurance. So when I came to this country and I saw the state of affairs, I was dismayed. Now, I am living with American for-profit health insurance."

Gallardo said that the insurance companies have constantly changed her policy rules in order to make more money. "The small print is always somewhere."

Watch Health Care for America Now's video of the demonstration.

Listen Up, Tom DeLay: Nine Jobseekers For Every Job

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:47:15 -0800

Former House Republican Leader Tom DeLay appeared to be dancing with the stars in his head Sunday when he said on CNN that "there is an argument to be made" that an extension unemployment benefits, such as the one that conservative Republican Sen. Jim Bunning infamously blocked a little more than a week ago, "keeps people from going and finding jobs." Today, the Labor Department released new data that shows how high in the stars DeLay and his fellow conservatives are.

The bottom line: For every job, there's an average of nearly nine job seekers.

That statistic is based on a Bureau of Labor Statistics report today that there were 2.72 million jobs available at the end of January. That comes in the wake of Friday's jobs report that said that during February, there were 14.87 million unemployed workers and another 8.7 million part-time workers who actually wanted full-time work. If you only count the fully unemployed, as the Economic Policy Institute does in its analysis, the ratio would still be 5.5 job seekers for every job opening.

DeLay, you will recall, was echoing a statement a few days ago from Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who also said that unemployment compensation "was a disincentive to seek new work." And today, The Washington Post published an article in which unspecified "critics" are said to be concerned "that the Depression-era program created as a temporary bridge for laid-off workers is turning into an expensive entitlement."

The obvious answer today to the person who argues that extended unemployment benefits are a disincentive to seek work is, "What work?" The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary that the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes each month shows the gap between job demand and job availability.

While the report shows that job prospects are beginning to improve, the job market is still very bad. That's borne out by the fact that in January the 4.1 million people who left their jobs that month ("separations") was once again higher than the 4 million people who were newly hired. Calculated Risk today notes: "Separations have declined sharply from early 2009, but hiring has barely picked up. Quits ... are at near the low too. Usually "quits" are employees who have already found a new job (as opposed to layoffs and other discharges). The low turnover rate is another indicator of a weak labor market."

Meanwhile, The Post quotes James Sherk, a labor economist at the Heritage Foundation, as fretting that the repeated extensions of unemployment benefits means that "it is no longer an unemployment insurance program but a welfare program."

If conservatives are really concerned about ending this "welfare" program, they would encourage the Senate to take meaningful steps to put people to work. One opportunity is a proposal that Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., has said he plans to introduce this week (video, note comments at 13:30) that could create or save up to 1 million public service jobs, many of them in urban areas with high unemployment. That proposal currently has no Senate backers, but it is precisely the kind of bold jobs initiative that we need the Senate to embrace if we are going to make a serious dent in unemployment. Extensions, like the one the Senate will have a procedural vote on today, are fine. But, despite the rhetoric from the right, jobless workers don't want meager unemployment checks. And they can't wait for trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy that may never actually trickle down to them. They want real jobs, right now.

RNC Fund-raising Scandal And Conservatism's True "Code Red" Colors

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:49:02 -0800

As prominent Republicans continue to distance themselves from an internal Republican National Committee fund-raising presentation that emphasized "fear" as a primary motivator of "reactionary" potential donors, it pays to reexamine the evidence that for today's conservative movement, the only thing it has to offer is fear itself.

One example is the National Republican Congressional Committee "Code Red" project, which according to its website is devoted to "alerting Americans to the Democrats' health care takeover." That site contains the hyperbolic attack lines that the right has been relentlessly pounding and that were echoed by Republican lawmakers at the recent health-care summit at the White House.

The site asserts several falsehoods about the health-care legislation: that it would:

* Radically Increase Government Spending
* Raise Taxes on Families and Small Businesses
* Destroy Jobs
* Cut Medicare for Seniors
* Force You Out of Coverage You Like
* Allow for Taxpayer Funding of Abortion

These statements have been rebutted time and time again, yet conservatives in the GOP keep uttering them. And, as the Republican party ramps up for the 2010 congressional races, they are not hesitating to plunk down the fear card to rile up the "reactionary" masses.

The Baltimore Sun reported March 4 that the GOP is targeting Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil with attack-ad robocalls, even though Kratovil has voted against health care reform in the past and has said he is likely to do so again.

The Sun published a transcript of the robocall, which says in part:

Hello I’m calling from the NRCC with a Code Red alert about an impending health care vote in Congress. Even though a majority of the country wants them to scrap it, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are planning to ram their dangerous, out-of-control health care spending bill through Congress anyway. What’s worse, Congressman Frank Kratovil might vote for it. Frank Kratovil votes with Nancy Pelosi 84% of the time and may follow her orders on this bill, too. Frank Kratovil might vote for a bill that will kill jobs, raise the costs of health care, and increase taxes. Frank Kratovil should be focusing on creating jobs, yet he might be the deciding vote that causes this massive new spending bill to pass.

This page from the conservative campaign book is old. Back in 2006, FactCheck.org compared political campaign ads from the two parties and concluded that while Democrats "generally attack Republican candidates on policy issues or their performance in office," Republican ads "are much more likely to demean an opponent's character. That's the very definition of political mudslinging."

The demeaning campaign fund-raising document from the RNC—with its caricatures of President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Pelosi and its absence of any positive policy agenda—merely reflects a long-standing characteristic of the conservative movement. Now that the bankruptcy of its fundamental ideas are clear for the public to see, its only clear route to power is not through the strength of its solutions to the country's problems but the extent to which they can create a fog of fear and deception. Conservative elected officials today are denying that's the case, but we'll see in the coming weeks their true colors.

Never Say Never, Heritage Foundation: Here's The Truth About Reconciliation

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:06:08 -0800

Today's Heritage Foundation "Morning Bell," its daily conservative talking-points memo, contains this blunt statement about the process that the Obama administration wants to use to pass a health care reform bill through Congress: "Never has reconciliation been used to pass any bill on purely partisan lines."

Never?

Heritage should never have written that line without reviewing this take-down of that conservative propaganda line—which was part of an op-ed piece written by Sen. Orrin Hatch in The Washington Post—by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on her show Tuesday night:

You could hardly get more "purely partisan" than the December 21, 2005 Senate vote on the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which required the intervention of Vice President Dick Cheney to break a 50-50 tie in which all but four Republicans, but no Democrats, voted in favor of the bill. The House vote was almost equally partisan: the 212 votes in favor were all Republican; all the Democrats were opposed and were joined by nine Democratic defectors. Similarly, the May 23, 2003 tax-cut legislation vote came down to a 50-50 tie in the Senate that Cheney had to break, with two Democrats crossing over to join the "yes" side with the Republicans and two Republicans defecting to join the Democrats in voting "no." The House votes on that legislation were about equally partisan.

The 2003 and 2005 budget reconciliation bills were particularly stark examples of Republicans muscling through major legislation with no more than token support, if any, from Democrats. It is true that the other major reconciliation bills that have gone through Congress since 2000 passed with somewhat wider margins with a handful of Democrats supporting the Republicans. But it is never correct to say that "never" has reconciliation been used by Republicans on legislation that faced virtually unanimous opposition by the Democrats.

Conservative Unemployment Roadblock Will Cost States Millions

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:17:03 -0800

The latest bit of obstruction being staged by a Senate conservative, done in the name of limiting federal spending, is going to end up costing cash-strapped states millions of dollars as well as potentially causing millions of workers to lose their unemployment benefits.

Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., earlier today continued his blockage of an extension of federal unemployment insurance benefits that are due to expire this weekend. Meanwhile, the Senate has adjourned until Monday, with no votes scheduled until Tuesday.

That means that states will now start cutting off payments to people receiving federally funded extended unemployment benefits, paid to people who have exhausted their standard 26 weeks of unemployment benefits. A total of about 5 million people depend on those benefits today. They won't all be cut off at once, but several hundred thousand stand to lose benefits effective this weekend, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies—the trade group for state unemployment offices—and that number will grow each week that Bunning and his conservative allies in the Senate succeed in blocking action on a benefit extension.

Unemployed people will also lose a $25-a-week add-on to their unemployment checks that was authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus bill.

The human cost is obvious: People who have been searching for work unsuccessfully for six months or more are suddenly going to lose their only means of income. And that's going to be a lot of people in a state like Bunning's Kentucky, where the unemployment rate is 10.7 percent, compared to 9.7 percent nationally. Nationally, 6.3 million people have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But there are significant costs to cash-strapped states, which are going to have to start sending out notices Monday to many of the people who will lose eligibility under these programs. The National Association of State Workforce Agencies doesn't have a solid estimate on those administrative costs, but "it's certainly millions," said spokesman Ben Fendler, and "the magnitude of the problem will increase significantly if the programs are not reenacted immediately," because new people will lose their eligibility for extended benefits at the rate of 150,000 a week.

There is an ignominious bit of history here, according to Judy Conti at the National Employment Law Project:

For the first time since the enactment of the unemployment insurance system during the Great Depression, there will be no federal extensions when the unemployment rate was above 8 percent. This is a catastrophe and tragedy of epic proportion. While a debate and discussion about the deficit may be an appropriate exercise for the Senate, it should not be done at the expense of 1.2 million unemployed workers, especially when, as Mr. Bunning admitted on the floor, he knows he will lose the debate and he knows that these benefits are likely to be extended sooner rather than later. His misguided and cruel stunt on the floor last night will end up having NO impact at all on the federal deficit, whereas it may push unemployed workers all over the country over a financial ledge from which they cannot recover. And the cost to state governments, which will have to expend considerable overtime taking down their programs, and even more to put them back in place, will be staggering at a time when they can least afford it. So Mr. Bunning accomplished nothing for the federal deficit, but certainly added to the deficit of his own state’s coffers as well as its unemployed workers.

Bunning's complaint is that the $10 billion cost of the benefit extension should be paid out of federal stimulus funds. Bunning and other Senate conservatives opposed the Recovery Act from the very beginning, so they are looking for any opening to shut it down. To do so would be self-defeating; every Recovery Act dollar Congress appropriated last year that is not already being drained away in tax relief needs to be deployed in job-creating projects. The more money spent on job creation, the less of a problem unemployment insurance becomes. Plus, that would never fly in the House, where progressives and members of the Congressional Black Caucus are bristling at the Senate-passed $15 billion tax and spending package, arguing it is not a "jobs bill" as the Senate leadership is characterizing it. The House has already passed a far more robust, $154 billion bill.

The real shame is that in the face of what is certainly an emergency for people who are about to lose their ability to pay their housing bill or buy groceries, the Senate leadership decided to adjourn for the weekend rather than force a showdown on this issue. David Waldman at Daily Kos was justifiably furious:

A one-man filibuster is the kind a concerted effort to "make them filibuster" is most likely to break. But instead, no one's even trying anymore. ... the Senate appears to have adjourned for the weekend. Bunning has won for the day, and [Sen. Richard] Durbin's threat [to force regular votes on a motion to break the filibuster] has shockingly failed to materialize at all. The extent of Bunning's punishment: he missed prime time TeeVee last night.

TAKE ACTION
TrueMajority has launched an email campaign to press the Senate to act on an unemployment insurance extension. Use this link to participate in the TrueMajority campaign.

What a way to reinforce the narrative that Washington can't get anything done and is tone deaf to the needs of working people. But let's not lose sight of the fundamental issue: Senate conservatives would rather see Bunning grandstand over federal spending, even if that grandstanding results in more taxpayer spending and more human suffering, than casting a simple vote in favor of a measure even Bunning says he does not oppose.

It's obstruction for the sake of obstruction, and the rage that will build among unemployed people whose lifelines will begin to be cut this weekend should be directed first at Bunning and the Party of No.

Kyl Does The Despicable: Holds Unemployment Benefits Hostage For Estate Tax Cut

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:45:33 -0800

McJoan at DailyKos says it best: "How despicable can these guys get?"

This is how despicable: Starting Monday, 1.1 million people will lose their unemployment benefits because right-wing Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., thinks its more important to give tax breaks to millionaires than to ensure that nearly broke people won't get thrown out of their homes or go hungry.

In Kyl's own words, in the context of Senate action on an extension of unemployment insurance benefits (h/t to Pat Garofolo at the Wonk Room): "I will insist on an agreement on how to proceed [on the estate tax], if we’re going to have unanimous consent on how to proceed with any of these subsequent bills.”

Conservatives have dragged us down this low road before. Last year, they tried to eliminate the estate tax—a tax that affects only about 5,800 estates, those in excess of $3.5 million for single people or $7 million for couples—for estates worth less than $10 million and lowers it from 45 percent to 35 percent to those above $10 million. Ten Democrats, in fact, had joined Republicans in supporting an estate-tax-cut amendment to the 2010 budget resolution. (This 2008 fact sheet has background on the estate tax and other tax issues.)

The Campaign for America's Future joined with other organizations in demanding that the vote be reversed, and it was.

It is, of course, hypocritical for Kyl to feign concern about the federal debt on the one hand and push a move that will cost the federal government $300 billion over the next 10 years—at a time when even deficit hawk extraordinaire David M. Walker partners with the Economic Policy Institute's Lawrence Mishel with the message that the top short-term priority for the federal government must be job creation, not reducing the deficit. Of course, cutting the estate tax, unlike other tax cuts for investment or hiring, does not create one single job.

But, most importantly, are conservatives that sold out to the wealthy that they are prepared to see unemployed person evicted from their homes because they can't make a rent or mortgage payment—so that the children of the wealthy live more luxuriously?

This can be blocked. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon indicated that he will work to get the unemployment extension moved through the Senate, even if it means holding the Senate in session through the weekend.

Tell Sen. Kyl and the senator in your state that holding up unemployment benefit hostage to an estate-tax cut crosses the line. Kyl's office numbers are: (202) 224-4521, (602) 840-1891, and (520) 575-8633. You can e-mail his office using this form.

Kyl's not the only obstructionist on this issue. Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., is also blocking the unemployment insurance extension, arguing—according to correspondence I've received from a Hill activist working on the issue—that funding for the extension should come from unspent stimulus funds—funds expressly appropriated to pay salaries, not unemployment checks. Never mind that 14,000 people in Kentucky stand to lose their benefits as a result of Bunning's grandstanding. The phone number for Bunning's office is (202) 224-4343, and you can e-mail his office using this form.

Open Thread: Watch And React To The President's Health Care Summit

Isaiah J. Poole — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:04:34 -0800

President Obama's health care summit is being broadcast here live, courtesy of the White House. Use the "Discuss" link below to add your comments, or comment on Twitter using the #ourfuture hashtag. Also be sure to check out our health care fact check. Bill Scher's Twitter coverage is below.