House won’t extendSFlbjobless benefits

By JESSE J. HOLLAND

The bill would have extended the unemployment benefit check for 13 weeks.

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday narrowly defeated a Democratic attempt to give unemployed Americans an extra three months of jobless benefits after the White House threatened to veto the bill. But Democratic leaders said they will immediately bring the bill back for a second vote today.

The bill would have extended the average $300-a-week unemployment benefit check by 13 weeks for all Americans. Job seekers in high unemployment states such as Alaska, California, Michigan and Rhode Island would have been able to get an extra 13 weeks on top of that.

House Democratic leaders brought up the bill under a procedure that required a two-thirds vote for approval. The final vote was 279-144, just three votes shy of the margin needed for passage and to overcome a presidential veto.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said today’s vote will only need a majority for passage. “We’re not going to let this sink,” Hoyer told reporters after the vote.

In the Senate, Democrats planned to add the measure to a must-pass war spending bill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., will keep all options open, but he “continues to believe the best way to pass this extension is by including it in the supplemental appropriations bill,” spokesman Jim Manley said.

Majority Democrats said the legislation was needed because of the tough economy and rising unemployment rates. But the White House said emergency steps such as extending unemployment benefits have historically been taken only when the unemployment rate jumps considerably higher than the 5.5 percent reported for May.

The Bush administration also complained that the bill gives extended benefits to all states regardless of their unemployment rates. For example, South Dakota and Wyoming reported unemployment rates of 2.6 percent.

“It is fiscally irresponsible to provide extra benefits in states with low unemployment rates,” the White House statement said.

“We ought to target that money to those areas where we have high unemployment and people need our help,” said House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio.

White House officials said they could support a bill that only offers the 13-week extension to high-unemployment states. But Democrats argued that people should not have to wait for things to get worse before the federal government helps them.

Republicans said the Democratic bill also deletes a provision that requires people to work 20 weeks before getting unemployment benefits. “It is not too much to expect someone to have worked for at least five months to collect up to a total of 12 months of unemployment benefits,” Weller said.

Congress has extended the benefits before during periods that turned out to be recessions: twice in the 1970s, again in the early 1980s and 1990s, and most recently from March 2002 through December 2003.