John Boehner didn't think pension smoothing was an acceptable pay-for for jobless aid. Highway funding was another story.
If there was any hope that House Republicans would ever allow a vote on extending the emergency unemployment aid that lapsed at the end of 2013, it faded even further when the House passed its short-term, lousy bill to prevent the Highway Trust Fund from lapsing. What does highway funding have to do with jobless aid? Well, there are only so many kinds of revenue House Republicans will ever consider using to pay for necessary programs. Closing corporate tax loopholes sure isn't among them, but "pension smoothing" is, and now that pay-for, which Democrats had proposed using for an unemployment extension, has been used on highways.
Democrats had been trying to attach unemployment aid to bills that were likely to pass:
First, [Sens. Jack] Reed and [Dean] Heller tried to attach their unemployment bill onto a bipartisan piece of legislation to reform job training, only to be rebuffed by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who didn't want to muck up the process by adding on extraneous amendments.
Now Reed is aiming to slide unemployment insurance in alongside President Barack Obama's request for additional funds to bolster border security, but Reid has insisted that the House needs to act first to extend unemployment insurance.
But that likely doesn't matter since that bill—along with [Rep. Dan] Kildee's companion bill in the house—relied upon pension smoothing to offset costs. "I wish we hadn't shown them the pay-for," Kildee says. "It is frustrating." The congressman said that he would go back to the drawing board and search for a new source of revenue to pair with the insurance extension, but he didn't sound hopeful that the Republican leadership would allow a vote on the bill, even though he and other Democrats believe there would be enough stray Republicans who would vote in favor of helping the unemployed.
Pension smoothing is a
bad way to pay for anything, to be clear. However, Democrats are desperate to find a way to govern, to do important things like provide aid for people who've been jobless for six months or more in an economy without enough jobs to go around. Republicans, meanwhile, are trying their best to break the government, which means Republicans can afford to hold out for bad solutions while Democrats are more likely to give in to bad solutions to achieve good ends.
Republicans have now used pension smoothing to pay for highways, something that should have been a bipartisan no-brainer even for today's extremist Republicans. The highway funding provided is short-term and inadequate, meaning we'll revisit this issue in less than a year, and now unemployed people are left twisting in an even fiercer wind than before.