Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) “are pushing Majority Leader Harry Reid on Friday to pass a bill that would extend unemployment and COBRA health benefits, which are set to expire Feb. 28,” POLITICO reports.
Wyden and Merkley “wrote a letter to Reid a week after the majority leader introduced a scaled-back jobs bill, which stripped provisions from a Senate Finance Committee jobs bill that would extend COBRA benefits and give laid-off workers three additional months of unemployment insurance.”
Although the Oregon senators asked Reid to make the consideration of these issues "one of the first orders of business when the Senate returns from the Presidents Day recess," they did not specify whether they wanted the COBRA and unemployment benefits initiatives to be attached as amendments onto the pending Reid jobs bill.
(credit image – flickr)
Congress in Your Pocket
These two guys are right but Reid has dropped his support of the American citizens who will run out of benefits in less than 2 weeks. As slow as Washington is about emergency issues such as this it is very unlikely anything will be accomplished this month. I sure hope I am wrong about that but we’ll see tomorrow when they come back to work….if you want to call it that. Reid should NEVER have changed the original bill. He did it just to schmooze some Republicans. Come on Reid….buck up and do it the right way. The Republicans aren’t paying your salary….we are.