Update: Another Senate cloture vote required?!?! House to delay UE vote until AFTER Healthcare?!?! Cloture passes Senate 85-2:next the ‘final’ Senate vote in 30 hours

Update 11/3: New UE thread here

Update: 11/3: OMG, ANOTHER cloture vote required BEFORE the final Senate vote?? WTH? THEN to the House? Could HARRY REID BE ANY MORE INCOMPETENT IF HE TRIED??? And now it will have to compete in the House against their dopey Healthcare bill!??! Oh Gawd help us.

They AMENDED the bill which means there must be a THIRD Cloture vote..

ProgressIllinois:

Last night, the Senate voted by an 85-2 margin for cloture on H.R. 3548. Most reporters (myself included) thought that motion limited debate for good, ensuring that a final vote on the bill could be held as early as tomorrow morning. But Republicans, who are bent on thwarting the measure, still have more one arrow in their quiver, according to Congress Daily’s Peter Cohn (subscription required):

Monday’s vote cut off debate on the substitute amendment from Majority Leader Reid and Finance Chairman Max Baucus adding the tax breaks to the underlying unemployment insurance bill. Another cloture vote, this time on the amended bill, could occur as late as 11:40 tonight unless Republicans yield back time or agree to vitiate cloture. Even if cloture is invoked, Republicans would have up to another 30 hours to debate, pushing final passage off until Thursday.

What’s worse, the House was ready to vote on the more generous Senate version as soon passed. But the delay means that the unemployment bill must now compete for floor space with health care legislation. It’s not yet clear when they will squeeze it in.

Update: It passes the second cloture vote in the Senate. Yay! Now after 30 hours they can hold the ‘final’ Senate vote, THEN it will go to House, who only has 1 vote, then it goes for Obama to sign.

ProgressIllinois update: Adam Doster on November 02, 2009 – 4:41pm

Moments ago, the Senate voted by an overwhelming majority for cloture on H.R. 3548, a federal unemployment benefit extension. While 85 lawmakers supported the procedural motion, only two Republicans — Missouri Sen. Kit Bond and South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — voted against it. (The latter, who Rep. Peter Roskam has called “grounded” and “wise,” represents a state with an unemployment rate of 11.6 percent)….

Update: Why the housing tax credit extension is a waste of money and should not be included in the UE extension bill or considered a ‘stimulus’ courtesy of WSJ opinion piece:

• The house subsidy has little value as economic stimulus.

(…) The current $8,000 payment to house buyers was proposed as more than a simple perk. The law that created it is titled the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Proponents cited the spillover effect of house purchases on the rest of the economy.

Putting aside the matter of whether stimulus spending helps (until item No. 3), the most useful stimulus spending does one or both of these two things well: It begets more spending then it provides, or it leaves behind something useful.

Food stamps create $1.73 in economic activity for every $1 we spend, reckons Moody’s Economy.com. That makes sense. The poor spend just about everything that falls into their hands, and the money they spend at food markets leads grocers to spend with suppliers, and suppliers to spend with farmers, and so on.

A dollar spent on unemployment benefits creates an estimated $1.63 in economic activity and one spent on infrastructure, $1.59. The result of these things? Bellies are filled, the jobless are given a lift and roads and power grids are upgraded (and, of course, a bit is wasted along the way).

Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution, a think tank, estimates that only about 15% of house buyers who’ve received $8,000 payments to date wouldn’t have bought houses without the payments. The good news is that suggests the payments have played only a minor role in house prices reversing, and so we might not get much more of a run-up in prices from extending the plan. The bad news is that we’re wasting money. A dollar spent on the housing credit creates an estimated 90 cents of economic activity. That’s not a multiplier effect. It’s a divisor effect….

Update 2:30pm AZ time:  ProgressIllinois has the schedule:

At about 4 p.m. CST today, the Senate will take its second cloture vote on H.R. 3548, which would provide an extra 14 weeks of unemployment assistance (and 20 weeks for those in states with unemployment rates above 8.5 percent) to workers who have already exhausted their benefits. Should 60 senators approve the final language, Democrats will have to wait an additional 30 hours before a final vote can be called. That means the upper chamber could approve a final version late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. Reid expects them to do so:

After weeks of delays because of a fight with Republicans over amendments, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said he expects the Senate this week to approve an extra 14 weeks of unemployment aid for those who have exhausted their benefits. People out of work in states where the unemployment rate is more than 8.5 percent would get up to 20 weeks.

“We have a million people – one million people – who are eligible for this,” Mr. Reid said.

Two amendments will also be considered, including an extension of the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers that is scheduled to expire at the end of the month. We’ll be updating this post later in the day with the roll call, as well as any other updates from the Senate floor…

Oh good Gawd these people are completely incompetent!! HOW LONG do Americans have to wait for these yahoos to get their acts together?

SubprimeBlogger:

Many Americans currently on unemployment are very interested to know if the unemployment benefits extension, H.R. 3548, will pass this week.  Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that there will be another cloture vote on Monday to determine the final language of the bill.  If the extension bill passes cloture vote rules state that Senate Democrats must wait at least 30 hours before a concluding tally.

With this being the case, it could mean that it will be late Tuesday or early Wednesday before the bill can be approved. At this point the bill would then go to the House and would have to be approved in full by the House.   Several Democratic leaders are getting impatient with the GOP leadership.  Due to these disagreements, it is likely that the bill will not include any of the additional amendments suggested by the GOP.  Some of these suggestions included the speeding up of the expiration of the TARP funds…

Reminder: the bens are NOT retroactive, so folks who are getting nothing WILL get an extension, but they WILL NOT get payments for the weeks they were OFF UE. GET A MOVE ON CONGRESS!

TheHill:

…But the additional weeks are already running out—according to estimates from NELP, up to 600,000 Americans will have exhausted benefits provided by the Recovery Act by October’s end. And about 1.3 million workers will exhaust their unemployment benefits by the end of this year.

These benefits are not retroactive. While workers who ran out of benefits will be eligible if Congress passes an extension, they will never be able to recoup the benefits they lost in the interim, pushing them closer to poverty. Every day of delay in getting the bill to the president’s desk translates into benefits the unemployed will never be able to access….