Reid: Senate GOP to blame for five-week unemployment insurance delay

Senate Democrats on Tuesday again accused their Republican colleagues of proposing irrelevant amendments to their chamber's unemployment insurance bill in order to stall the proposal's progress.

Their frustration, expressed at a party press conference this afternoon, was a clear attempt to rebuff Senate Republicans' criticism yesterday that Democrats, in fact, were the cause of the five-week delay on a jobless benefits extension, a version of which passed the House in September.

"Remember, in years past, when we came to issues like this, there would be an agreement: OK, we can have relevant amendments," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) said of the unemployment insurance debate.

"They won't agree to that," he added. "They want census amendments. They want ACORN -- I think we voted on that five times. They want that again."

The latest round in the Senate's battle over unemployment insurance began Monday, after Senate GOPers accused Democrats of stalling their own extension by prohibiting debate on revisions Republicans thought were essential.

Senate Republicans are currently pushing for three changes -- none of which involve ACORN, according to Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's (Ky.) office. One would fund the extension with unspent stimulus funds, rather than through an extension of the unemployment surtax, and the other two changes concern changes to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Six other provisions, including an amendment that dealt with the E-Verify program and a proposed rule about ACORN funding, have since been dropped, according to the Republican leader's office.

"We could have passed this unemployment insurance bill last Thursday," McConnell explained during his own press availability on Tuesday. "I offered a consent agreement which would have given us a handful of amendments upon which we were prepared to take short time agreements, but the majority leader didn't want to have to vote on more amendments.

"So my view is, he doesn't get to pick our amendments," McConnell said of Reid's leadership. "What we were offering was totally reasonable. And he didn't want to have the votes."

Reid, however, seemed to suggest on Tuesday that Republicans were aware their amendments were mostly unrelated -- and that the party was using those proposed revisions only to stall a vote on the inevitable.

"They are only trying to delay and stall things," Reid explained. "We have done more legislating on voting on nongermane, nonrelevant amendments this Congress I think than any time in the history that I've been around. And we've done it because the Republicans said that's what they wanted, and I wanted to be fair."