Bill to restore US unemployment insurance likely to deadlock in Congress

A bipartisan attempt to restore unemployment insurance to more than two million out-of-work Americans appeared likely to fall victim to deadlock in Congress on Tuesday.

The Senate passed legislation on Monday night that would temporarily extend lapsed emergency assistance measures that were first introduced after the banking crash, in exchange for reforms designed to curb fraud and claims by the very rich.

But the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said on Tuesday that he would not allow a vote on the bill without additional measures to stimulate job growth.

The bill, which passed the Senate by 59-38 with the support of six Republicans, seeks to address earlier concerns raised by House leaders by including proposals to pay for the extension through a separate reform of employee pension obligations.

But on Tuesday, Boehner's spokesman Michael Steel told the Associated Press that the House leadership was only “willing to look at extending emergency unemployment insurance as long as it includes provisions to help create more private sector jobs", something he said Senate Democrats were refusing to do.

At a press conference on Tuesday morning led by House majority leader Eric Cantor, the issue was not even addressed, and Congress will shortly break for Easter.

Moderate Republicans in the Senate have not given up on hopes of passing some form of unemployment insurance, but concede privately that they face a constantly shifting set of concerns from colleagues in the House.

One staffer told the Guardian that senator Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican whose home state has some of the worst unemployment rates in the country after the collapse of its construction bubble, was now seeking a meeting with House leaders to attempt to meet their outstanding concerns.

But conservative Republicans and many Democrats are more pessimistic about the prospects of moving forward on an issue that highlights the deep divide between the parties on how to address growing economic inequality and insecurity.

Some Republican activists claim the Senate is trying to “bully” the House into following its lead on something that many members of the House of Representatives do not see as a pressing issue in their home districts.

The federal insurance program is aimed at long-term unemployed workers whose state assistance has expired but was itself left to lapse in December, after Congress failed to agree to extend it during broader budget negotiations.

Efforts to find a temporary solution to fund the program have foundered, despite continued high US unemployment rates.