Unemployment Benefits Extension

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, another day has passed in the Senate and another opportunity has been wasted to extend unemployment insurance benefits across America. Let's make the record clear. The Democrats have asked the Republicans to move to this item of business and to pass the extension of unemployment insurance benefits to the hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. They have refused time and time again. They have had a long series of reasons, none of them valid from my point of view. Many of them think they want to argue a lot of other issues. They want to argue the issue of immigration. They want to argue issues totally unrelated to unemployment. They don't seem to understand there are real people out there calling my office every day--and most Senators--explaining they are out of work and desperate.

Let me read an e-mail I received recently from one of my constituents in Gurnee, IL:

Dear Sir: I have worked my entire life from the age of 12 to 56 years old. I have never seen it this bad. Even during the Reagan recession, you could find something. All the emergency unemployment has expired. All everyone can talk about is health care. I realize it's important but I refuse to believe no one notices when we run out of help. When AIG and the banks needed money, the Congress was pretty quick to respond, and generous. So much so that the TARP fund still has more than enough money to do the job. But when it comes to the common man, we get help one piece at a time. Unemployment compensation is not welfare. We are working people. We are not invisible. But by the attention we get, that's how I feel. I know you're a busy man, but if you can, please say something about helping the unemployed. Emergency funding expired 2 weeks ago. We need help yesterday.

A lot of letters come into our office this way, e-mails. People are desperate. Last Friday, when I was in Chicago, I sat down with a group of about 20 unemployed people and let them tell their stories--invited the press in to let them hear the stories. Many people have a mistaken notion of who the unemployed are. Some Republicans argue they are folks who are not trying hard enough to find a job. Some argue that life on unemployment is so nice they don't even try to find other work. I wish a few of those Republican Senators would go home to their States and meet with the unemployed people whose benefits they are denying with this procedural obstacle. They could sit down and learn, as I did, that some of these folks have been working for more than a year to find a job. Republicans might acknowledge there are six people looking for every job out there. They might acknowledge that many of these people have lost their health care and health protection insurance during the period of their unemployment. They might hear some stories of families struggling to get by who have very little money and are exhausting what little savings they have left.

That is the reality of unemployment. Yet when we turn to the Republicans and say: Can we do the ordinary thing we do around here on a bipartisan basis and extend unemployment benefits in what is the worst recession we have faced since America's Great Depression, they say no. No, we don't want to get to that now. Maybe later. We have some other ideas.

For the people who are suffering under unemployment, that is not good enough. Republicans are ignoring the obvious. There are people all across America who are struggling to find work without success.

For example, 400,000 American families have run out of their unemployment insurance benefits already, including 20,000 in my State who lost benefits at the end of September. Another 200,000 families across the country could lose their lifeline to unemployment benefits this month if Republicans continue to stall and stop us from extending unemployment insurance.

What are the Republicans waiting for? Mr. President, 1.3 million Americans will lose this temporary assistance by the end of the year if Congress does not pass this simple extension of benefits, and 50,000 of those families are in my home State. The unemployment check certainly doesn't replace the wages people have lost, but it may give them enough to get by.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Recovery Act's unemployment insurance provisions have kept 800,000 Americans out of poverty so far this year. So if Republicans want to see unemployed people fall into the ranks of poverty, I can tell you what it means. It means that what is available to them is even less. What they will lose will be disastrous for them and their families. They will be the people you will find at the food banks, the soup lines. They will be similar to the one in my hometown heading out for township assistance which is, I am afraid, the bottom of the barrel for most people when you have run out of ideas on how to put some food on the table. That is what is going to happen if we don't extend unemployment insurance benefits.

Never in the history of the Nation's unemployment insurance program have more workers been unemployed for such a long period. Half of all jobless workers can't find a job within 6 months after they started receiving unemployment benefits. That is the highest percentage of prolonged unemployment in the history of the unemployment program. When we come to the floor and ask Republicans to join us in a bipartisan way to extend the safety net to unemployed people and they say no, they have to understand they are causing hardship and suffering for some of the people who are the least fortunate around us today.

The Democratic bill Republicans continue to block, even today, for unemployment insurance benefit extension would extend insurance for an additional 14 weeks for jobless workers in all 50 States, red States, blue States, purple States, Democratic States, Republican States, North, South, East and West, without any preference.

If there are unemployed people, they would get the benefit. There is an additional 6 weeks of insurance for jobless workers in States with unemployment above 8.5 percent, which, unfortunately, today includes my State.

It is time to act. Are we going to finish this week with the Republicans stopping us from extending unemployment benefits? And if we do, how would we explain this to this man who wrote me and asked me about whether I know that unemployment compensation is not welfare, it is a fund that workers pay into while they are working. As he said:

We are working people. We are not invisible, but by the attention we get that is how I feel.

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