Provision of a 5-Month Extension of the Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation Act of 2002 (cont.)

PROVISION OF A 5-MONTH EXTENSION OF THE TEMPORARY EXTENDED UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION ACT OF 2002 (cont.)

Mr. SANTORUM. Mr. President, I respond to the comments by the Senator from South Dakota by saying the Senator from Oklahoma laid out clearly why a vote and adoption of such an amendment would be devastating. It would be devastating for the million people we want to cover with the unanimous consent request we have proposed. The House will not accept it. I am not too sure, even if we did pass it here and send it over to the House, the House would not accept it. We will be in conference and the opportunity for us to pass an unemployment extension by Thursday will be lost. I think it is important for us to pass a bill which, I remind everybody in the Chamber, passed when the Senator from South Dakota was the majority leader and the Senator from Montana was the head of the Finance Committee. They passed this unemployment extension.

All we are saying is, let's continue the unemployment extension that you proposed and you passed in the last session of Congress. All of a sudden your handiwork is no longer sufficient today. I don't know what happened between what you did then and what we did today. I don't know what possibly changed the dynamic that would now cause what we are proposing to be insufficient, when what you did was sufficient.

The fact is, this is exactly what you passed under your leadership and what we should do today. We should stop playing politics out of the box with this very important issue to over 1 million people in this country and get the job done.