Senate Republicans refused to consider a year-long extension unless the cost is fully paid for. A particularly incensed Sen. Scott Brown delivered a “fiery speech” on the Senate floor last night, lambasting Democrats “for what he considers to be unwarranted diversions.” “We spent seven days on food safety!” Brown scoffed and reassured unemployed workers that “I have complete and total sympathy and understanding” and that “more than anybody here, I want to help.”

However, when Democrats offered him that opportunity, he single-handedly slapped away the chance. Trying to beat the clock, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) introduced a proposal Monday to extend benefits through 2011 at a cost of $56 billion without offsets. But when Democrats tried to pass the proposal yesterday, Brown blocked the effort, complaining that he’d “just found out” about it:

I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century. Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us. There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for college. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand. ....

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

Republicans Use Senate Backlog They Created To Extort Tax Cuts For The Super-Rich Similarly, it’s been more than two months since the Senate has held a single judicial confirmation vote, even though 34 nominees have already cleared the Judiciary Committee, 26 of them unanimously. Indeed, President Obama’s judges have been confirmed slower than any president’s in recent memory — and at less than half the rate of President Bush’s nominees. On the legislative side, the picture is just as bleak. Nearly 400 bills which passed the House of Representatives — many of them unanimously — have yet to even receive a vote in the Senate. [...]
Indeed, at 30 hours per nominee, it would take more than two entire presidential terms to fill all the Senate-confirmed jobs a new president must fill, and that’s assuming that the Senate gets nothing else done during this entire nine year period: