2:46 p.m. | Updated After joining with her fellow Republicans to block a bill that would have extended unemployment insurance, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine urged Democrats on Friday to put forward a separate bill to help people who have exhausted their jobless benefits.
The legislation blocked by Republicans on Thursday includes both the $35.5 billion extension in unemployment insurance and a broad array of tax changes and other safety net spending. Republican leaders said they were opposed to some tax increases in the bill and also do not want the measure to add to the deficit. In response to Republican demands, Democrats have covered the cost of all of the $112 billion package except for the unemployment benefits.
In a letter to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, Ms. Snowe said that a separate bill would disentangle the unemployment benefits from the larger fight.
“Separating the unemployment insurance provisions of the extenders bill and passing it as emergency legislation acknowledges the urgency of helping those who continue to look for work,” Ms. Snowe wrote. “Unemployment checks inject money directly into the economy, invariably assisting in the economic recovery we all agree must be accelerated.”
The letter to Mr. Reid suggests that Ms. Snowe wants to be clear about her desire to assist the unemployed, despite her helping the Republican leadership block the bill. Mr. Reid, visibly frustrated on Thursday, said he would move on to other legislative business next week because he sees little hope in winning Republican support for the bill.
Ms. Snowe in her letter sought to demonstrate her concern about Americans who remain out of work. “The hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans who are losing jobless benefits every week deserve our immediate attention, so I am writing today to urge you to bring a free-standing extension of unemployment insurance benefits to the Senate floor for a vote early next week,” she wrote. “As of today, more than 1.2 million people out of work for longer than six months are ineligible for the next tier of extended benefits, which were originally provided by the economic stimulus bill to fight the recession.”
Democrats, however, have said they made numerous concessions and substantially altered the bill, cutting its size by more than $100 billion, in a bid for Republican support.
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, offered on Thursday to agree to a one-month extension of jobless benefits using unspent money from last year’s economic stimulus program. Democrats rejected that proposal.
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said that Ms. Snowe and her fellow Republicans were to blame for the stalled effort to extend unemployment benefits. “The fact is she sent the letter to the wrong person in the wrong party,” Mr. Manley said. “It was the Republicans who killed this urgently needed extension yesterday afternoon and nothing in this letter changes that fact.”
John Gentzel, a spokesman for Ms. Snowe, said that Democrats were holding the unemployment benefits hostage in their effort to pass a larger piece of legislation, and that they had not heeded Ms. Snowe’s advice weeks ago to deal with the jobless aid in a separate measure.
The gridlock over the jobs and tax bill is evidence of how the tense politics of a mid-term election year are beginning to slow the gears on Capitol Hill.
The House on Thursday approved a short-term fix to avoid a steep cut in Medicare payments to doctors, because the Senate could not come to terms on a longer solution. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called the six-month fix “inadequate” but the House approved it anyway out of fear that the Senate simply could not pass anything better.