Renewal of long-term jobless benefits fails by one vote in Senate

The Senate remained gridlocked Thursday over the effort to renew emergency unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless, including more than 1.7 million Americans without work who lost their benefits as the federal program expired in late December.

In a largely party-line vote, Democrats came a single vote shy of the 60-vote hurdle to break a filibuster by Republicans, who complained that the latest proposal did not have a proper offsetting spending cut to lessen the impact on the federal deficit.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/02/06/senate-hits-another-dead-end-on-unemployment-benefits/